Ethics and responsible modding

It has come to my attention that Cities XXL raises a lot of flags showing that the base code comes from an online game ... with a server supplying the virtual ground for the played cities. In its' current form Cities XXL is played OFFLINE in a solo mode; still there is a lot of code in there ... like what one would want to keep a client and server in touch with each other ... but which creates a lot of unnecassary overhead, with redundancy communications between the local file system and the game, for playing in an offline solo mode.

Which gives the grounds for a moral dilema ... should a responsible modder even attempt to 'clean up' the code to make the game more stable (and thereby enhance gameplay) for playing in an offline environment? or might a responsible modder, taking into account that at some future time this game may be 'upgraded' so that it can again be played in a client-server environment, should said modder leave the old redundancies alone and make mods that conform to playing in both a client-server and an offline environment?

Should I even mention how much log info is being generated by mods ... that is great from a debugging and development point of view ... but maybe not so good for stability when it comes to actually playing the game? IMO, a single line in a log file indicating that a mod has been succesfully loaded into the game is ok; however generating a line in an ERROR log file every time a mod performs a function falls more in line with pet peeves! Maybe having conditioned logging that the actual player can toggle on or off (as desired) might be considered to be reasonable; however having log entries flagged as "errors" whenever code is doing what it was meant to do, at least in my opinion, is totally unreasonable and definitely irresponsible. Might I suggest that any responsible modder might want to remove the debug/development type logging from "mod code" before uploading a mod to a mod sharing location?

Enough from me, for now? ... back to assembling bits and bytes into nibbles and words.

 

@bobqwerty - how so?

In addition to all the trace-type info going into the log file ...
... it seems like everytime I do something in the game - the game is saving -something- to the hard-drive (presumably whenever or whereever the client-server functions typically would be communicating with each other). A lot of this should only be happening on entering or on exiting the game (especially when playing locally -offline- in solo mode)?!