In your personal opinion was shifting the game to be open source and letting everyone be able to contribute be a good idea?
Personally I see both the good and bad it can do, you need to look no deeper than the recent sprite changes to see how an open codebase can very quickly begin to degrade and chip away at the soul and vision of a game over the course of years.
But I also see the great things that can come from allowing loving fans to make changes to a game they hold near and dear to them. Not to mention actually being able to make a true and lasting change (Until a Benodev gets scared of OT CAS and closes your PR) is an amazing feeling.
But what do you guys personally think of the situation?
I never understood why you respond to people the way you do, to clear things up what im saying is that I can see why someone might look around at the minor changes that happen everyday and see a slow chip of CMs “Soul”. Personally I believe that no change in gameplay or sprite can ruin CMs soul but rather the loss of the community is what will kill it.
Let’s be clear here for the sake of discussion on what you mean by soul.
That has has multiple implications attached towards it and I can promise you there is no universal understanding of what that meaning actually covers. But also more importantly most of the time that is governed off peoples personal preferences and since those vary between the individuals it’s not really something people could realistically factor in.
As for open source? For a project of this scale that is backed by volunteers yeah it was probably the best way to go. CM does at least have some focus on it’s vision that’s enforced by it’s hierarchy so it has some form of oversight.
Ultimately the vision of the game changes with whose at the helm. The example you cited isn’t really good either because again here whose at the helm is very dependent on who controls the vision and in that regard us being open source or not isn’t really relevant.
you cant tell me u enjoy playing lv522 bro. or shivas. hijack took years to finish lol and it feels super gamey and exhausting to play (marines on their last legs forced to defend 2 or 3 hardpoints that r going to inevitably fall and if youre lucky the CIC staff and MTs get to “survive the round” after being almost completely removed from it) pods crashing is pretty cool though. project ares is cool i guess i dont really know what it does beyond serving as a more interactive ares
id rather fight in ukraine than play a 3 hour round if chances claim
this is like when michelle obama fucked up school lunches for schools across america. “uhm. atleast you still get food. even if its more expensive and less nutritious and disgusting”
One benefit outshines all of the rest: There are no longer obscure hidden mechanics added for most likely nefarious reasons. Aiming head to get more damage on Xeno, turning off IFF on smartgun to do more damage to xenos etc.
Sure, new maps are bad, but they would happen open source, or not. Big Red and LV are good, because they are fairly simple and straight foward. But even then shit like ICE happened, which is way worse map than basically any single other added later. That is because the current desing philosophy (enforced by devs, not random contributors) is to make super big complicated maps that suck.
The rest that was added is overall fun. Like the only problem I have is directional lightning which was added in the past (I think before going open source), then removed becaue it sucked and now it is added back again in a bit less cancerous form.
Overall, open source, or not it is still up to devs to decide if your stuff gets in, or not. If dev likes whatever you did and adds that, then it means they would make it and add it later in closed source.
I still remember when I bitched about slugs being useless, being told to code change myself, because devs are bussy and whatever, so I did and then dev immediately made his own slug PR very simillar to me and closed mine.
If CM is so “awfully” open-source that stuff “ruins” its spirit, then try to add combat loaders. Will this change that “ruins” the spirit of CM go trough even if you code it super good?
Really good way of explaining it, and yes looking back the example i gave was quite poor as Ihatethisengine has just told me that the sprites were added by spritainers which is something that i did not know.
Once again to anyone entering the thread I do not dislike the fact we went open source I just wanted to open the door for discussion on the topic and see what the CM community thinks as in the past on other server’s discords I had seen debates on it.
The pros massively outweigh any cons. It’s not even a debate, going open source was the right move regarding the longevity and health of the server/community.
Whether it’s open or closed source is not going to change anything about the quality of PR’s; it’s the same people ultimately making any decisions.
Open source doesn’t mean any submission someone makes is automatically accepted, it just means the code can be reviewed by anyone and anyone can submit their own code.
Open Source is always king - the issue is admin/mod/staff shadowmerges that get no PR warnings and they just say “WHY DON’T YOU SLAVE YOURSELF TO WATCHING GITHUB”. Immediate full-merge is literal cancer and I hope it kills the servers before my own cancer.
