[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
There is the "special explosion" flag in FRED, as well as "special hitcount" which allows the change of a ship's hitcount to something outside the table entry (if I remember correctly).  These are two instances of a ship's table entry being overridden within the context of a single mission.  I myself am not overly concerned about adding the speed override feature, but this bypass came to mind when reading this thread.

Right.  The problem lies in the amount of change necessary.  The special explosion feature was extremely simple for the original coders to implement -- they only had to change one function.  The hitpoints feature was much harder for me to implement -- I had to extend the functionality of several functions in several different files, adding exceptions everywhere.

The speed override feature would require the same kind of exceptions all over the place.  When the codebase is as buggy as it is, and it's a small matter to handle the feature with existing code, it's simply not worth it.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Goober5000
Discussion is okay, just keep it thoughtful and polite.  Look at karajorma and IceFire for some shining examples of non-coders having excellent discussions with coders.

That's the nicest thing anyone's said about me all week

The fact is however that I'm not a non-coder. It's just that I program in Java not C++ so I do have a basic understanding the technical side of what you guys say

[Goober5000]

That does help. But what's best is the maturity level, openness, and politeness you bring to it, which I would encourage people to take note of.

Sesquipedalian is another person with whom I've had some excellent SCP interactions, but he hasn't been here much lately.

[karajorma]

The simple fact is that I realise all you guys are doing this as a hobby. Since you aren't being paid it's obvious that you'll improve the parts of FS2 that you want to.

Whenever I suggest something it's my job to explain that the benifits of the change I'm suggesting are worth the time you'll have to spend to code them in.
 If asking for a large change I realise that it should benifit the community in general a lot (like HT&L, persistant variables, spec mapping etc)
 If I were to ask for something that was only of use to MindGames or TMA I would probably offer to FRED a mission or make a mod for one of the campaigns the relevant coder was working on so that in an indirect fashion I'm not stealing dev time away from one of his other hobbies.

A lot of the ideas suggested on this forum are good ones that would improve one or two campaigns but the problem is that the coders don't have time for that. Things they do have to improve FS2_open for everyone or be directly connected to the project they are working on themselves. That doesn't mean we shouldn't suggest those idea, just that we shouldn't complain if a coder says they are too difficult or too time consuming to be worth doing now.

Goober since you said some nice things about me it's only fair I return the favour and say that I've been meaning post for a while. I personally feel that you don't get the recognition around here from the non-coding forumites you deserve.
 Not to take anything away from Bob, Kazan and Phreak who get most of the attention but I am primarily a FREDder and as such it's improvements to FRED that I look for. Between the extra SEXP's and the (woefully underused) persistant variables alone you've probably made my job easier than the rest of the SCP put together and I thought it was worth saying thank you for that.

[Goober5000]

Well thank you very much for those sentiments, and you're welcome. Graphical enhancements and hardware rendering are definitely cool, but I think that gameplay is just as important and should be worked on just as much as the other features.