Okay, we just got done fixing Statera for new build. I suggested Stuart find a mass text editor to make a mass change of "Firing" to "Fired" and adding "anim_tree" before .json after animtree. No, he did it by hand. That much is his fault, but still caused by Uber changing a naming convention that is relatively unimportant WHAT it says specifically. Was the wording messing with the actual function somehow? I doubt it... ...But that isn't my problem. My problem is my job. Stuart made mass changes, but Statera remained unpatched, crashing on game startup. Being methodical, I removed EVERY unit from the unit.json. Game launches, no suprise. Added just commanders. Game crashes. Stuart must have messed up then, I thought to myself. I owe him an apology. We checked anim trees and firing. They were flawless. He used jsonlint or something to compare stable changes to old statera files. We found a very obscure change. MY PROBLEM, THIS OBSCURE *** CHANGE: Uber decided it makes no sense that imperial/tank base used delta/aeson .papa's, yet raptor/quad used base/base... So, to align the naming convention, they changed raptor_base.json to use the raptor_nemicus.papa, and quad_base.json to use quad_osiris.papa. WHICH DOESN'T MAKE SENSE ANYWAY, WHY WOULDN'T THE OTHER TWO JUST USE BASE LIKE THEY DID? So, my request is ultimately, UBER, DON'T INTENTIONALLY CHANGE OBSCURE THINGS, THEN TAKE PLEASURE AT OUR DIFFICULTY PATCHING TRYING TO HUNT DOWN OBSCURE CHANGES, PLEASE OH PLEASE REFRAIN FROM MASS CHANGES TO NAMING CONVENTION, OR OBSCURE CHANGES TO VERY SMALL NAMING CONVENTION! IT TAKES FOREVER TO FIND WHAT OBSCURE LITTLE THING YOU DID!!!!
I think they should be free to make any of the changes that need to be made. What you are asking for is likely to cause them to make small compromises or as they go ahead with their work. Eventually we will have something that is both inconsistent and full or buggy outdated code. Modding is hard. Modding an early access game is hard and tedious because we need to keep fixing our code that worked perfectly the day before. I'm still a huge fan of modding but this is the reason I have cut back on doing it except for the really necessary things like System Sharing or the really easy mods like lobby renamer.
With something as heavily shadowy as a balance mod, you should diff the old patch unit files with the new to see what's changed. I've introduced some painful bugs with outdated mods that could have been fixed like this (and I haven't followed my own advice in diffing to find issues, will do that now ).
If you have mass naming changes that you need to fix, i would recommend sublime text. Well hell for anything i would recommend sublime text its one of the best editors out there.
