(September 11th, 2023, 17:07)drake178 Wrote: A few reasons. First and foremost, v1.31X is a pet project, nothing official. The primary - and very selfish - reason I'm sharing it at all is because doing so creates a potential for gaining a few extra sets of eyes to spot any flaws in my code. There should be no reason for someone to play it over the Community Patch. But, of course, I think (and our conversation more or less proves) that this is not actually true, which brings us to the second reason.
I'm an optimist. At some point in the (hopefully not overly distant) future, the only difference between v1.31X and the Community Patch will amount to a bunch of default settings. Every fix I write, and every improvement I make, has to manifest in the Community Patch. So long as, if and when I fire up the game to play, I launch v1.31X - or v1.31, Insecticide, or v1.51 for that matter - instead of the CP, my "work" here remains unfinished. Which also coincides with yet another point: I have no intention of splitting the community even further by creating yet another separate branch of "improved MoM". On the contrary, if anything, I want to converge at least two, but possibly more, of those branches.
And last, but not least, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with a version number that would accurately reflect what I'm doing. Unfortunately, the previous patch-makers have inadvertently painted me into a corner with their numbering. If I were to put v1.31X into the Community Patcher, no one would ever even see it (circling back to reason number 1). After all, it's a downgrade from v1.40n, isn't it? At the same time, I wouldn't want to publish it as a "patch" to vanilla v1.31 either. I'm neither Simtex, nor Microprose. Others have made that mistake already, so I don't have to.
I will be more than willing to follow into 1.60 or CP, so long as the default 1.31 mechanics (with fixed bugs) can still be used as an option. Purists, like me, will always be hard to be persuaded into newer versions by others simply because they love the state of the last 1.31, even with all its flaws and exploits. That's what their memory or childhood knows and loves. Providing them with 1.31 option in CP will convince them to finally transition and ease them to finally try CP rules out. Forcing them to use a new rule simply won't work. That's why half of us don't transition to Caster of Magic despite it being better by a significant margin. That's also why Panzer Corps had version rule option and how everyone playing that game finally transitioned to the new rule.