Might I ask the both of you if I've ever been so aggressively against you simply doing what YOU do for the mod? In fact, I kinda feel I've been fairly supportive of both of your individual projects so its kinda a slap across the face that you speak out like this.
If you have a problem with what I'm doing,
tell me. I've made changes to things that people didn't like; I reworked Rosetta Stone, I removed the complete road-building of Via Appia and Golden Spike, and I moved the Pocket Monsters stuff off to a modmod where it never comes into play unless you want it.
Furthermore, our stuff is easy to undo; I do mostly XML and a little Python that's only called when a building asks for it. You're working at the heart of the game; the stakes are a lot higher.
Everything about the Combat Mod will be optional and some bugs are natural along the way. Yes, some further testing should've been and in the future will be done before committing what seem to be fairly innocent and non-game impacting changes as they could have some unexpected side-effects. And yes, that will be done.
"Optional"? I have a hard time believing that your code will actually turn itself off if asked and won't act as a snake in the grass. I think it comes down to trust, and I think you've burned too much of it. Are you willing to flat-out
sacrifice something if there's enough complaints against it? I mean not just making it an option, but removing it completely?
But I'd appreciate it if you could restrain some negativity towards my efforts there. For one thing, I'm not even entirely sure why you feel so against it at all since it won't have any impact on your games as I'm sure you won't have anything to do with it once its done. The SVN glitches are exactly why we have an SVN. You can easily back up from a problem... that's what its for. Its doing its job.
But we want to play too. I don't like having to wait when the SVN breaks for the problem to be ferreted out and fixed.
Might I also remind that there has been little to no dll modifications made by ANY programmer here that has been implemented without some bugs to solve? I'm surprised you aren't raising the same fuss regarding viewports. But you aren't because it moves us towards what YOU want to see here. Try to keep in mind you're not invested with the only opinions that matter.
Part of the problem for me is that you started too big. My perception is that you kind of burst onto the scene here and said you were going to rewrite the whole combat system from scratch. That's going to raise some hackles.
Also, I don't think you are concerned at all about the ripple effects of what you're proposing. I feel that, to some extent, every change that a modder makes is going to have effects elsewhere. We had to
double the cultural thresholds because of how many +

buildings we have. We're still working with civics to get gold right because of all the +

buildings. When someone makes as radical a change to the game rules as you are proposing, it has to have an effect on
everything that happens from that point on, and I don't want to feel forced to take that into account.
I've had a few issues with viewports, but viewports aren't nearly as fundamental to the game as what you're trying to do. I don't have to completely readjust my thinking in order to work with viewports. Viewports are, from what I can tell, the only way to get the Civ4 game engine to do some of the things we want to do.
To some extent, it's not just you. I'm starting to get very tired of sweeping proposals to rewrite the rules in the name of some nebulous "realism" that may or may not actually play well as a game. I'm not happy with the current implementation of crime; I feel the growth/decay/diffusion system works for a city simulator that can go through hundreds of iterations, but not for a turn-based game where it's really difficult to feel that the actions you are taking are
meaningful when the numbers swing so wildly.