@leo_x - At the time, I did come across the cep2_custom.hak as a solution but for some reason it wouldn't have worked in that specific setup. It might not have been added to the module, originally- I can't recall. Thanks for the suggestions- I had some company over last night so I didn't get to do more snooping but those are good leads- thanks!
@kalbaern - For lack of a better way to put it, the example I'm talking about is one where, as I describe above, the PW isn't really being maintained well but people are still playing it.
@leo_x & kalbaern - Lemme put it this way, there are some PW's out there that have literally been handed from person to person to the point where the person running it isn't a DM or a modder or anything like that, they're just a player who convinced the last PW maintainer to pass the module to them when the last crew was shutting off the lights. So not only can there be an "absent landlord" syndrome thing going on where the actual maintainer isn't logging in much but there's also, sometimes, a "hands-off" approach where the person running the PW doesn't necessarily understand much about actually maintaining or upgrading their server and is hesitant to. I tend to enjoy playing/cruising around on weird little out of the way servers and I run into situations like that (or similar) pretty frequently. Just to put it in persepctive: On places like this, something as simple as adding text to a blank merchant shingle which customizes it for that merchant on that PW is, like, a big deal.
@meaglyn - Valid concern but in the case that I'm thinking of, I don't doubt that most of the people were playing only that server. It's not uncommon for people to pick a PW and just sort of roost there, exclusively. And, yeah, the content was way too specific to make any sense in CEP, even though CEP tries to cater to a broad base of players. This was well beyond even that. I've never produced any CC that wasn't available to everyone in the community (this is just how I roll), so if I ever thought it was something that more than a single server would get enjoyment out of, I would certainly upload or release it in some fashion.
@kalbaern - I hear ya, but I'm mostly trying to keep it something super simple that doesn't require any thought. Or, really, anything that requries less thought that a player opening up a specific CEP hak (or haks) and dragging in overwriting content. Now that I think of it, I think the old ERF tool that the CEP updater was based on might do the kind of merging that I'm thinking of. I'm going to check on that next, I think. Basically the user would have three files: The tool, a bat file which calls the tool with some command line parameters and the hak of material to be merged into CEP.
Random Idea: This might also be useful when testing out new CEP content. Many years ago, there used to be designated CEP beta test servers which were part of the First Order of Role-Players' Guild. They'd get a full new set of haks to play with. It might be easier to just say "Okay, here's content that's under consideration for being adding to CEP. It'll change your haks, obviously, but if you want to test out the content you can inject it into your current CEP installation and see how it plays." That sort of thing.
