Alright. I've stayed out of this up until this point, in the hopes that Chaos' requests would be met to his satisfaction, and Cantus could really get back to doing business here. As that hasn't happened, I'd like to give my perspective. I will try to keep it brief, not only for your sake, but for mine. (Going to be late to work, but wanted to get this posted first =P)
The goal here, like it or not, is to emulate Live as much as we can. When feasible/necessary, the people who write and commit code for us add rules so that things can be easily customized. I'm not emphasizing the word 'easily' because the rules make things simple. I'm doing it to point out that even without rules, you can change anything in this code that you like, it's just takes more skill.
However, and I speak as someone who knows next to nothing about C and the actual server code, I know that I feel a bit guilty most of the times that I ask a request of someone more capable of working with the code, because anything that they agree to do for my sake is time that they would've spent elsewhere, fixing something else that's broken in the current state of the server. It'd be a bit selfish if they spent all of their time fixing the things I want fixed. Most of the time that things get fixed, it's because the people doing the fixing were motivated to go and do it themselves.
I have a great respect for everyone here including you, Chaos, so please don't take this as too harsh of a critique. However, running custom server myself, I understand that only so many concessions can be made to make everything tweakable that I'd like to tweak. If I really, truly had a problem with that, I would study up more than I have and learn to work with the actual server code. (And I probably should anyway, just to pitch in around here!)
Rules are nice when they're offered. They're almost always granted when requested. In cases where they would make the code cumbersome or require an extraordinary amount of extra work on the part of someone who just joined the project and made an excellent contribution within his first five posts, just let it go. Or open the source and dig it out yourself. Change it where you need to, compile, and go.
Again, I don't want this to start any sort of argument, and I hope you understand I'm saying this more for Cantus' sake than anyone else. This was a very solid submission, and I have the feeling he has other things he'd like to go check out as well, rather than having to re-tool this one over and over.
/end rant
Fantastic work, Cantus, and thank you again. I really hope that all your comments stick in the code when this gets submitted, because this was one of the first submissions since I've been here that I was able to even partly follow along and understand everything that was happening. I know Trevius has gotten a lot of knowledge just by opening the source up and learning as he goes, and I'm pretty sure that's the route I'll take when I finally give this a shot as well. Detailed comments like yours make that possible.
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