Community Coder Conveniences

[Mordent]

I wonder if there's a way to split a repo into two parts, one containing all the secret stuff and can only be seen by admins, the other containing basic systems etc. so that we could minimise conflicts. Even if there is, it's probably a hell of a lot of work.

There totally is. One branch with "core" stuff, another branch which is "core + secret". Expose only the core branch. Community developers push to core, actual coders push to either (depending on whether it's a secret or not).

Things get a bit trickier with how BYOND works, though. For example: maps; because of the way those files are generated you can't just merge changes together easily, so any time a coder changes a "secret" part of a map it would take it out of sync with the "core" map, meaning that changes to one would need to be manually done to the other.

Essentially, it's way more work for the actual coders.

We're at the point now where we've deviated from the released code in quite a few key areas (esp. materials), and plenty of map changes. This makes building on top of the existing codebase gradually harder and harder, and become less and less worth it for the coders to do. We're still where content changes or additions can come in, but new systems become less-and-less viable to introduce.

Spriting will almost always always be useful and appreciated by community developers and actual coders alike.