1- I really like the idea of self-destruct ships. Making the timer depend on the ship (high powered engines blow up faster when set to self-destruct) could help mitigate things for people who aren't into the idea. Potentially, putting two items in the engine room, one that is an incendiary and the other that's an actual explosive could work. I'd say limit the radius to include all the ship and its surrounding, but not all the map. Blowing up the whole map is a bit harsh.
Yeah I've said that already, limited radius, big ships only, disarm-able. But the feature is on hold - not sure if I like it myself. I mean it wouldn't be of any consequence to my own playing, as I never linger that long with a mission - unless hunting for That One Last Guy, but in such cases, the ship is long-secured. But it would put everyone on a timer, which is unfair to many playstyles, and would also imply the enemy is fanatical, which is not always the case.
2- Would it be possible to publish the mod by itself, instead of packaged with the Windows version of OpenXCom extended (maybe moving the OXCE download to a support link on the mod page)? I just finished compiling OXCE for Linux with added features (manufacturing profit, for one thing), so the Windows executable is useless. Whenever you update, we'll have to redownload OXCE for little to no gain even if using the old version of OXCE could be fine.
Just to check, is the entirety of xPiratez contained in the user folder of your Windows installation or did you change stuff in other places?
You forget about OXCom distribution (as in, folder structure, resources, rulesets). Without the correct exact Nightly, both the OXCE executable AND the mod are useless
This also means, if your compiled build is based on a wrong nightly, the mod will fail. That's what the package contains, beside the mod itself. But yeah, the mod is fully contained within the User directory.
Also come on, it's just a couple of megabytes, few seconds even on a slowish 8 MBit connection I have
User-end compiling is good, but I'd rather have a bigger download than half the players having no clue why the mod doesn't work/works like crap (due to possible triple incompatibility mod <> OXCE <> OXCom Nightly
The player saves few seconds on download, and loses maybe an hour looking for / compiling the right version of everything... That'd make me a thief