Wow. That was a much bigger reply than I expected.
Sigh. Here comes a two-person "staircase" flame war.
Not at all. I said exactly what I wanted to say already, and I meant what I said. I have no need or desire to escalate it.
While we're being bluntly honest here, I find it very annoying that, when you updated Mongoose Mod, you broke some stuff that worked in earlier versions of Mongoose. Third party map scripts, such as stock Perfect World and Totestra, used to work in your mod, but now are broken. This is what we professional software developers call a regression and it's considered bad coding to introduce them.
In order to expand my water system in particular, this was unavoidable. I suppose I MIGHT have been able to keep the vanilla names in place and just add to them, but not having a full set of perfectly-matching name entries is not something my Asperger's-slash-OCD brain can handle.
I also renamed a few vanilla things like TERRAIN_SNOW to TERRAIN_ICE, and FEATURE_ICE to FEATURE_SEA_ICE, that were done for my own personal sanity, but in retrospect I will admit those have caused a lot of problems, heh.
Those may not be the ONLY things I did that broke vanilla mapscripts - I'm going from memory here. But regardless, even if a vanilla mapscript DOES "work" in MM, it's not going to work WELL without being specifically modified to support all the custom content. So while it may be a regression, it's not one that bothers me much. (Although "regression" sounds a bit overly formal in this context in my opinion; I tend to think of it more as a math term.)
I am not without credentials myself, btw. They are, of course, meaningless next to yours, since I've almost never been paid for anything I've done in my entire life, much to my eternal torment and dismay. But for what little it's worth, I have a Bachelor's in Computer Science from MIT, and I've been doing miscellaneous programming projects for over 15 years.
Good! I'm glad you find it annoying, since that is a highly appropriate reaction lol. I find it a bit annoying myself. Couple of points, though:
1) MongooseMod was developed so I could play it. I have no interest in playing any other form of Civ; MM is my sole focus. I have a (very) low opinion of the quality of the pure-vanilla Civ4 game, so anything that is made for it, like PM, is done solely as a courtesy to the community, and out of a feeling of obligation to support the masses and other mod-makers, from my point of view.
2) As you know, I am ALSO not being paid for anything I do on here.
Therefore, my priorities are not changed from their natural states.
3) I've been on this site, AND actively contributing content in a large variety of significant ways, since 2006. I feel I've earned the right to disappear for months at a time if I want or need to.
4) Just because I haven't updated Vanilla PM for several years, doesn't automatically mean I'm NEVER going to get around to it.
That's a subjective impression, and I beg to differ. Indeed, I'm really surprised you could not sort through my changes; they are pretty simple and straightforward.
Maybe it's just an issue with the source material; PW2 itself was also a mess, if I remember correctly. But to the extent my memory is accurate from 3 months ago, I stand by my assessment 100%. I specifically remember thinking to myself at the time: "I seriously cannot believe he got this to work at all."
It may also be worth noting that, back when I was in college, I was around a large number of people who favored UNIX and LINUX, and even a few who were off-the-deep-end-obsessed with those damned things. I never understood the appeal. Not one bit.
My goal with Totestra was to not greatly change PerfectWorld2; indeed, it can make the exact same maps PerfectWorld2 generates with a given seed.
Now that you mention it, I do remember that specific statement from your Totestra thread.
I have attached a UNIX diff file comparing PerfectWorld2 2.06 to the final release of Totestra. It can also be viewed here:
I'm fine with WinMerge, but thanks.
Believe me, I diff'd the HELL out of it back when I was trying for several days to get it to work in MongooseMod. In the future when I try again, I'm planning to take a different approach, which is to diff it against PW2, then manually copy things into PM's "PW2 Mode" code one at a time. I'm not looking forward to it.
One last thing: I don't like it when things get tense like this, but I have a need to defend myself when attacked.
I wouldn't call it an attack. I was specifically responding to a statement you made in your Totestra thread. I was paraphrasing from memory because I'm REALLY busy right now.
You do not owe the original poster anything, and are under no obligation to make Totestra work with the current version of Perfect Mongoose, so don't stress over it.
That's not actually true. If I want MongooseMod to be the best mod it can be, then I have to add full support for popular mapscripts like yours.
Finally, I do appreciate you making Mongoose Mod and Perfect Mongoose available for free. That was a lot of work you did, without getting paid a single cent for your labor. While MM is not my cup of tea (it's a good mod, but I prefer total conversions over "kitchen sink" mods which cover all of history), it's a very good mod and it's obvious you have worked very hard making it.
Thanks. I do appreciate being appreciated.