Out of curiosity, where does your code derive from? That is, did it come from the goons' branch (which branched off from an earlier version of OpenSS13 or my version, I forget which; I think they had to recreate some of my bugfixes), or some version of OpenSS13, or...? I was just looking at the last public version of the goons' code and noticed that for some odd reason my comments in the source code (which are in OpenSS13's source) were missing, and the version of the plasma tank explosion with the (not unoptimized) circular rather than square explosion shape wasn't in their version either (which was where most of the comments were). I didn't make very many comments in it, apparently. Note: My BYOND name is Trafalgar, which is what I signed my comments with in the source. On sourceforge I'm shadowlord13, but for some reason there seems to only be two people left in the openss13 project, not that anyone is actually developing it anymore. Well, if you check
http://openss13.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/openss13/trunk/ you can see files which were last changed by me. Hmm. Apparently everyone else stopped working on openss13 about 2 months after I did, and the incomplete remote-control drones that I was making at the time are in the trunk. I wonder where 1.0 went - I guess they unified the branches. (Well, there was a config variable to turn them off, but I didn't think they would put broken things that were never going to be finished in 1.0...)
Personally I'm not particularly pleased with the closed-source attitude everyone seems to have acquired in the 2 years I've been avoiding SS13, especially considering that every improvement I made to the source myself was open-source, intended to be used by anyone and shared. I added the AI, the multitools and airlock hacking, fixed a ridiculous number of bugs to make the game better, and all of this was merged into OpenSS13 so anyone could use it. This was good. Making changes and keeping them private and secret so nobody can look at them, fix bugs, or make their own modifications if they have other ideas and want to build on it? Not good. I could have kept the AI private for just one or two servers, kept all my bugfixes private, kept the airlock hacking private, etc, and nobody would have any of it today.
You have diseases. That's cool, in theory. One of my ideas was to have diseases, but your diseases can be a bit extreme. Knocking out new arrivals within 2 minutes after they join the game by having the game give them a fatal disease, and making them unable to play for the rest of the round (because resurrection is off, and even if you resurrected you'd just get reinfected by dead bodies), well, that's not exactly fun when you actually want to play the game. You know what might be fun? Logging on and being given a weak disease, with the research staff working to have to find a cure and make a vaccine for the rest of the crew. Now when I log on and get a fatal disease and die 2 minutes later, I want to look at the code for it, and tweak it to make it give weaker diseases to new arrivals, or see if you have vaccines and cures, how to make them, and what protects from diseases. If you're missing vaccines or cures, I might then want to see about coding that and submitting it to you, if I'm feeling like it (then again DM code is horrific...). But your code isn't open-source, so I can't do any of that. So instead I get a fatal disease, die 2 minutes after joining, get irritated, log off, and play something else instead.
It must have been even worse for the guy who had the fatal disease first slapped on him. He didn't even make it out of the entry shuttle before dying. I at least made it to customs with a gasmask and oxygen tank on before being infected - after someone took them away from my character and put them back in the shuttle, and then dragged the dead body out into customs
. That guy obviously suffered from a case of insufficient paranoia.