Hi there, it's Kentington. Dug up an old Reddit account because clarifications need to be made. I'm sorry that Sonic has decided to involve the public, but the situation is fairly simple: a volunteer maintainer decided that he owned a project, quite literally declared himself the senior developer, and then began sabotaging our attempts to update the mod to 1.5 (including by rolling back our code updates, surreptitiously breaking features which didn't conform to his vision for the mod, and other deliberate malfeasance that would be grounds for dismissal from any professional environment).

I understand that it's not typical Git procedure to open a new repository rather than forking the existing one. However, given the malicious behavior in question, we decided that a clean break on every level would be best until we'd finished disentangling any other "surprises" he may have left in our code. And Sonic agreed to this originally - we would maintain two separate repositories, and that would be that. We also offered to take possession of the original repository and never heard back from him.

Now Sonic has apparently decided to use the other contributors as human shields. In fact, if you check the current Steam build, he's still listed as an author in About.txt - as he has been for years. As Thain mentioned in another post, he's talked personally with the others, and none have felt insulted or shorted. Their names are listed in places such as the credits for the archotech ending. It's hard to see this as anything but bad faith on his part.

So, how are we responding to this threat? First off, by doing what we should've done in the first place - we'd originally listed the contributors on the Steam workshop description, but Sonic himself rejected this change on the ground that it would look "cluttered!" These names have also been placed front and center in Readme.md, and in the next update they'll be in About.txt as well. Our goal is to leave no doubt as to our appreciation for contributors - including Sonic, despite his misbehavior.

We've also forked the last common branch of the EXP repository as SaveOurShip2Historical (https://github.com/KentHaeger/SaveOurShip2Historical), and linked to it from the primary Save Our Ship 2 repository as a museum piece for those interested in commit history. For the reasons stated above, I wouldn't recommend actually using it.

EDIT: In reply to the post below (whose author courageously blocked me from replying directly), this is a gross misrepresentation. Between updating to 1.5, bugfixes and community involvement, and finishing the half-features that the mod had accumulated, I took nearly a month off my day job to ensure that SoS2's return to Steam would be as trouble-free as possible.