I want to preface this by saying I have genuine respect for the contributors and maintainers who put time into this game for free. This isn’t a “devs bad” post. But I’ve been watching CM’s development cycle long enough to notice a pattern
It goes like this:
Contributor picks up ambitious project, new mechanic, rework, overhaul
PR gets opened, looks promising, community gets excited
Testmerge happens, feedback rolls in, some good, some bad
PR gets pulled for “further work”
Testmerge again a few months later
Gets pulled again
Sits in PR purgatory for 6-12 months
Contributor moves on to a new project
PR closed due to inactivity or contributor request
Repeat forever
The graveyard of PRs that went through multiple testmerges, generated discussion, and then just quietly died is enormous. And the frustrating part isn’t that projects fail, that’s normal in open source development. The frustrating part is the cycle of hope. The community gives feedback, argues about balance, and then it just evaporates.
Eh having been a longtime tg player who has kept up with the dev scene and has observed projects of similar size and ambition get developed and go through, it definitely makes me think the development bureaucracy here has some problems which should be addressed and solved
I mean I think it has a lot to do with the scale of CM’s projects, they’re usually much bigger in scope (the large ones that is). Also compare how many pull requests CM actually gets compared to TG, there’s 137 right now, it was at 180+ a few days ago. I could be wrong but CM maintainers have a lot more on their plate.
the bulk of our code standards/style is copypasted from tg’s. the only real difference is that we have specific approval requirements from sprite maintainers and map maintainers. sprite approval is necessary as we have a unique artstyle that is pretty uniform across most of our sprites - tg often suffers from codersprites and a mishmash of artstyles. mapping approval is also quite important with how small mapping changes can completely change the balance of a groundmap
Well I can see the frustration from players as new things stuck in dev cycle for months or years, but I can also see the hesitation from devs as small changes can make big difference. And since we have people that can’t tolerate any minuet nerf to their current playstyle (sweat lo-) just let the pr be in tm for enough changes can be made to suit the mass.
Only thing iffy I see are sometimes pr can be merged without any real test made. But just my 2 cents.
THE SUNSET PR DIED??! Cmonn dudeee I was there for the rounds it was test merged and I didn’t even get to see it work since something broke. I was genuinely hyped for that one and assumed it was just backlogged. That’s fucking heartbreaking
In reality though it was Xeno-cope that let it die.
Although I think it still has a good chance of being able to be approved still, I think in reality it just wasn’t merged and whoever made the PR forgot to keep it up to date, let it die from going stale.
See it was revived here, but as far as I can tell nothing was said about it not being approved. So I really don’t know the actual reasons it was closed.
It should 100% be revived, it was a pure soul PR - added a lot to atmosphere and visuals.
EDIT:
Actually it seems it was brought back one more time, but there appeared to be potential performance issues, and it was left to go stale, shame really, but yeah it was never “Denied” for balance reasons it seems.
This makes me wonder, how does CM manage to get things approved and integrated permanently then? Things in 2026 have surely changed somewhat, more sprites and more stuff from what I can see.
Small things get merged all the time, big projects like maps and such can take months before they’re approved and ready. Just depends on how the maintainers are feeling to be honest, it’s all up to them. They have to approve the various aspects of the PR - mapping, code, sprites ect.
The merge part is easy enough once it’s been fully approved.
it literally needs a significant rewrite to be more performant, honestly probably even to the ground up and just cherry picking the existing code
in its base form, the sunset PR handles the visuals clientside (for all intents and purposes, to the user its client side, but its slightly inaccurate) and was never really handled server side, which can (potentially, although very very likely to bug) cause mismatches to actual sunsets
For any big project to make it to completion it needs to basically race against burnout due to the extremely developer hostile environment of contributing for this game.
Let’s take something like multiz for example
You spend a ton of time writing a very complex system for multiz, with a strong logical backing on why it should be added that’s been brainstormed with other devs, it’s not perfect but it generally works.
You testmerge it to try it out, everyone hates it and says it sucks and they hate it, etc
They say that about everything so you keep working on it, but eventually the hate just ruins the fun of working on it no matter how much you know that they say that about everything, you have to take a break or move to something else and the game is left with a mostly finished feature that continues to gather bad impressions because of hiccups here and there.
By the time other contributors move to try and start adding polish prs every time a multiz map rolls ooc is loudly chanting about how much they hate it. Now anyone else who tries to fix it gets demoralized and doesn’t wanna help clean it up.
There might be an instinct to say “oh but people only hate on bad PRs that shouldn’t be added” but once you’re actually in the position of a coder you learn it’s actually pretty universal, there is almost no difference in the harassment you get from a good and successful pr that improves the game in a big way and a flop. You mostly have to just go it by vibes and try to refine it as good as you can before the negative sentiment ruins it for you and you give up.
the PR feedback form is less prone to useless hate mobbing because people can’t form crowds there and they’re given a place to actually think about why they had a bad experience with a PR and explain how they think that could be fixed.
The hostile environment basically self selects for people who are stubborn enough to not care about people shittalking them and the thing they worked hard on because they are so certain in their own vision, which then leads to people feeling that their feedback doesn’t get listened to because there’s no point, etc.
there’s a pred copypasta to the same effect;
"dont app for pred unless you’re arrogant as fuck, incredibly good and/or don’t get too invested in video games because you will get chewed up and spit out while playing predator
if youre not good you’ll die every round you play, if you’re not one who can detach themselves from the game you’ll start melting down over the fact you died, and if you’re not arrogant you won’t have the highly useful skill of mental gymnastics to blame the marines for taking OP pred killer loadouts or xenos for using cheap tactics instead of your own lack of skill
you’ll lose interest in the role real fast or resort to being a total shitlord that everybody will hate, because the only way for you to enjoy the role is by being a scumlord who tips the scales way too much in your favor or by refusing to fight anybody who’s been playing for more than a week "
People who are more able to balance intaking feedback without entirely shutting it out either burn out and quit or have long hiatuses’ between activity while they fight burnout and go do other things.
I only really do stuff in PvE, so I’m pretty much safe from any harassment because anything that would be upstream merged isn’t going to be all that controversial. Though I won’t lie I did kinda hope the enbies PR would cause somebody to chud out because I always find people yelling about “the damn woke liberal left forcing gay shit into mah video games” really funny.
