Well I indeed have little knowledge of what happened to Lua in the recent years and things might have settled down quite a bit. The text allignment issue simply was the thing that (at least for me) was most memorable as it came out of the blue and many felt like treaded on their feet. It also sort of fits into the discussion as this was quite a "top-down-decision" and so it at first sight sounds strange that for many years now nobody managed to step forward and introduce the "definite way" of how to tell which engine version the game needs and how to hand over this information to the lobby which then can fire up the right executable...smoth wrote:Athmos you exagerate the severity of the changes made to springs lua Interfaces.The tex alignment issue was more about standards than actual broken stuff
In the end the Lua example also is only part of the problem - pretty much any area of the engine did and probably to this day does undergo changes. What right now prevents my old MA version from starting probably is the switch to a Lua based system for placing / choosing the starting unit and setting the general game settings. Another example as far as I understand is the pathfinder. While not being a showstopper it seems you really have to throw in a few tweaks in order to prevent annoying unit behaviour...
But oh well - I actually don't want to turn this into an extensive "What did change and what had to be adapted to in the past?" discussion. In the end I see it this way: It's totally fine to break certain things in a new version by the means of improving the engine. It's just a bad idea to force these changes on everyone and everything. As I said before: Developing a system that asks for the engine version to use and a lobby handling multiple engine versions installed on the system is no rocket science and actually should be a piece of cake in comparison with messing around with the pathfinder or working on a new map format. As those advanced types of issues are being worked on there definitely is quite some skill in the ranks of the developers - unfortunately it doesn't seem to get the priority it (in my opinion) should have. The need for "eternal patching" simply is one of the most unlovely things you can force a potential developer to...