Quote Originally Posted by teh lag View Post
You're being too stubborn. I think we could benefit a lot more than you're making it out to be from lifted limits on tagspace, slots, scripts, and all that. As much as we've added, we've also had to cut an assload of things because of them; no they're not NECESSARY, but they're the little things that are nice to have. Stuff like...

-The A10 Hangar cutscene.
-The Maw Legendary cutscene.
-Vehicle damage debris.
-Marine corpses/allies in C40.
-Scorpion in B40 (just the other day we were talking about how to cut down its size to fit it in).
-Fancy boarding anims.
-Weapons in all the levels; I don't believe that you can honestly say it wouldn't be nice to not have to worry about cutting weapons out so the map will work.

More times than I can count you and I have talked about ways to shave a few more tags or a little more space off of... just about every level. I don't like making those cuts and I'm sure you don't either. I just don't see wider distribution and ease of access as a good enough reason to pass up not having to deal with this.

Not to mention all the tag finessing I've had to do on our last few additions (for example, the wraiths using a single coll and anim tag) so we won't have to worry about these problems happening to them. Our tagset will only grow from now until release and we're going to have to cut out more and more stuff to get it to fit in. Not to mention that mapsize is getting to be its own problem. It's going to get worse as we finish our content and the "extra" stuff like skins for previously untextured things get added in.

I'd rather leave people in the dark (which isn't even permanent, given that all they need to do is update the game and place a .dll in their folder) than lower the quality of our mod for something that can be worked around.
Most of those little things are things we can't put back regardless, such as the hanger bay cutscene. The legendary cutscene we could put back, but it's pointless and the other games have retconned. The vehicle debris is hardly something anyone misses, and if we were to add it back in with no limits we might as well make all new banged up pieces of debris. For C40, we don't even have room anywhere to add marine help (by room I mean areas of BSP that would be good for those fights, although I suppose we could just keep adding more and more bsps.) The scorpion, hog, and sparrow, I got all into b40, even though now it's really packed to the lid, there's nothing else we need to add. We can easily do more fancy baording moves, we already discussed removing the passenger seat anims for the cyborg, since there's no co-op, and marines won't stay on the side of the tanks (which never made sense anyway, who sits on a metal monster that's going to be having everything shot on it) and we can simply remove those marine anims. It would be nice to not worry about having to cut weapons, but that's hardly an issue. If it weren't for having the limitations, we wouldn't have the introduction of weapons and vehicles planned out like we do now, compared to spv1 and how it was before when we just smothered the player with every little thing we could.

I don't find the cutting and tag shaving to be hurting the mod at all, I actually find half the fun in working on it finding ways around these challenges. You know as well as I that the only reason this project is finally coming to a close is because of these limits, and if we did use OS, would we ever be able to say that we're happy with the mod and that there's nothing we can do to make it better? One thing we've always done well is found a way to make the next thing we add better than the last, and with unlimited space, we both know that we're never going to stop. We're all ready to move onto the next thing, but that's never going to happen if we use OS.