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Comment by kwolff | Hacker News Reader

It's cool and all, SS13 is a very fun game, but at this point the game itself is simply too big and the community is too small for it to get a proper remake.

Anyone who frequently plays it will be disappointed by SS14 in the lack of features that the TG-Station fork of SS13 provides. TG-Station has been in development for a very long time. Replicating that work would require a sizable team of dedicated developers, and it'd still take years.

This will unfortunately peter out like every other SS13 remake. Old players and devs won't move, and if some of them do they have too many options to pick from. The prospect of many new players is unlikely, with the exception of the occasional highlight of the game by a popular youtube creator.

Don't get me wrong, the game is great, and I'd love a proper port that doesn't rely on Internet Explorer, but it's extremely unlikely to happen.

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Hey, one of SS14's game admins/contributors here. We've been hearing this for 4 years and it hasn't happened yet, so I don't see what exactly you're getting at when we're moving through development faster than ever and adding new stuff constantly. Also, we're not a remake of /tg/station and I have not a clue where you get that impression, we like functionality and spritework from many codebases, and have put our own spin on many things as well.

We've[0] been at it for 4 years. As Moony already said, development has been faster than ever recently. We've gotten decently consistent player counts now over the past month, and just a few days ago a Twitch streamer Bikeman streamed SS14 to 1,500 viewers (peak)[1].

We may only have 15% of the content of an SS13 codebase but I like to think that we have enough merits like a less laggy engine to make up for that.

I can say confidently that we have definitely broken the curse and short of a suspicious series of bus accidents across the EU, US and AU, nothing can stop us now.

[0]: (current "iteration", SS14's code dates back to 2011 at LEAST). [1]: https://twitter.com/BikeMan/status/1455385097671254018

PJB is going to be the Lennart Poettering of BYOND soon enough.

4 years is a long time.

Man's on a mission.

Disclaimer: Contributor to SS14. Added cigs and refactored some stuff.

Gonna heavy disagree with it.

The thing is porting big games takes time. And SS13 isn't even like a single game. It's several dueling codebases.

Not to mention SS14 is more ambitious than that: make your own engine, plus add pixel movement, grid rotation, etc.

And SS14 is at a playable alpha. And I mean actual alpha, not Blizzard polish alpha.

Like people discovered you can grab and throw the station - alpha. And there is a man with a suitcase full of talking brains , because brains have a communication component.

We have enough people for playtests weekly.

> Old players and devs won't move

That's pretty strange to claim, when we had influx of coders from other codebases. Granted not all will like the new code base, but some do.

Please consider using tar.gz for the Linux download as ZIP does not store the file permissions and thus the game won't start. The SS14.Launcher should probably be an executable, which itself is a shell script trying to start bin/SS14.Launcher . The shell script can be started without it being marked as an executable but it will fail when it tries to execute bin/SS14.Launcher. I also had to set the execute bit on bin/loader/SS14.Launcher as otherwise the game would throw an exception after trying to connect to a server.

System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception (13): Permission denied at System.Diagnostics.Process.ForkAndExecProcess(String filename, String[] argv, String[] envp, String cwd, Boolean redirectStdin, Boolean redirectStdout, Boolean redirectStderr, Boolean setCredentials, UInt32 userId, UInt32 groupId, UInt32[] groups, Int32& stdinFd, Int32& stdoutFd, Int32& stderrFd, Boolean usesTerminal, Boolean throwOnNoExec)

This is a problem with your choice of unzip (Midnight Commander according to the issue) tool, nobody else seems to have this issue. Maybe report an issue to them instead?

Right, as it turns out it was because Midnight Commander doesn't handle the non-standard extension Info-ZIP uses to store the file attributes.

Whether others have this issue, you don't know. And they don't know, which is not surprising given the rude tone they (or you) reacted to my report. Also, I was actually using a pretty popular app to quickly unpack the archive, so it's more like SS14's problem than MC's. Simply because they are bigger and more wide spread. (Not saying that it wouldn't be nice if they improved their ZIP file handling.)

Anyway, tar.gz is without any doubt the most obvious and safest bet if you are targeting unix systems.

> Like people discovered you can grab and throw the station - alpha. And there is a man with a suitcase full of talking brains , because brains have a communication component.

This feels like a classic SS13 bug, business as usual, really.

I think they got the station throwing a bit wrong, I actually had to modify the game slightly to remove a sanity check in hands code to pull it off. Was very funny though.

Maybe, but brains talking one was from playtest. Really old one.

Also a contributor, given how my PRs are handled, i don't expect SS14 to have feature parity with SS13 anytime till 2100.

The development cycle for SS13 works entirely off of random contributors throwing up PRs simply because they want to. Hundreds of contributors, thousands of PRs, and tens of thousands of comments and feedback on those PRs is what keeps the game constantly moving and updating on a multiple-times-per-day basis. Normally I would agree with you that this kind of development could never be matched, but SS14 seems to be taking the same approach of being very accepting to any developer who wishes to contribute even slightly. I think that that's the sort of approach that will make it work out in the long run.

The first real programming project I worked on that wasn't just a greenfield toy was maintaining a MUD. In the MUD community you tend to have 2-3 devs per MUD which is usually about 5% of the DAU. The code is insanely old and crusty but people maintain it because they want to keep it alive. You ain't seen crusty until you've seen Diku.

Things happen because people care - a lot of people care passionately about SS13 and, while it may take quite some time (and while SS14 may not be it) I'm pretty sure there will be a SS13 remake eventually.

/tg/station will have our own fork of ss14 soon enough.

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