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... continued from a different forum and topic...

I finally looked at TSSE in some detail and realized that a lot of the conceptual design seems to have transferred from that scriptset to Distro sooooo I was wondering why you didn't just add 96 support to TSSE and use that as a completed Distro. Seems that would have been easier. Then if you wanted to release changes to it they would be in the form of service packs.

The advantages are pretty clear. Since you, Austin, scripted TSSE you'd already be intimately familiar with it. It certainly appears to be better organized than previous Distros. SO that would be a plus. Then ofcourse the biggest advantage is that it's a complete scriptset (well, all except for some missing CONST definitions ).

Just a thought.

You hit the nail on the head mate.

Austin is most familiar with it. And, it is much more well designed than past distros. Therefore, that is why so much has been "ported" to distro from his previous work.

Why not use it as a whole for the Distro? Cuz it's not Distro. Distro is meant, and designed, to be a certain way. Which, TSSE's scriptbase is not. Therefore, Austin has been building it from the ground up and designing it the way Distro is to be done. And he has done one hell of a job in my opinion.

Now, watch Austin post something saying the opposite of what I said

Well ofcourse he will. Isn't that one of the job descriptions of a development team, to argue with each other?

Oh and yes I agree with you about his work on the Distro. He is doing a terrific job. Not only in the new scripting but in porting items from TSSE to Distro as they come up. I just thought it would have been easier as a whole to take his work already completed and use it.

One of my two "complaints" about the new Distro is it is so different from the past ones that it makes it hard for us "old dogs" to learn the new tricks. Let's face it the Distro has remained fairly constant in its geography for what, 4 versions of POL? So all us old timers are more familiar with it than we are with our own bathrooms. Besides you know how much humans hate change. So it's more of a lack of desire to relearn ways to do things than anything on my part. Besides I just need something to complain about once in a while or I get bored. Besides I was feeling a bit overwhelmed what with the all new stuff added to the 96 core and having to learn the new way the Distro worked. My poor brain can only take in so much before I burn out a circuit or two.

The other was that we didn't have a Distro for 96. That was mostly because I was hoping to take the easy way out and grab that rather than convert my scripts to 96. Using TSSE as the Distro would have answered this one atleast. Besides I hate to see someone, like Austin, re-invent the wheel once he's done it already. Guess I'm just lazy at heart.

Oh and lest I be misread here, I am not complaining (that's for Austin *grins*)!

I only mention the above as a way of explaining my thought process behind the original post.

No code was reused from TSSE though. A lot of -ideas- were kept.
The distro was going to use the brain AI anyway. The poison watcher was an idea... carried over, but timed scripts is a completely different animal, a more evolved idea on it.

Most stuff is like that. The ideas were carried over, but not the code. They are most certainly not compatible.

Get a file comparing program like Ultra Compare (from the makers of Ultra Edit) and youll see how different the code is and how much more evolved the ideas are. The distro is pretty much written from scratch.

Examples
Distro vs TSSE
TimedScripts vs PoisonWatcher
Brain 5 vs Brain 4
Object Oriented gumps vs. Old global array gumps
Spawn System vs SpawnRegion (spawn region was in the older distros and I got lazy there and just reused it)
etc.