Oh, and speaking of my mod addiction, we really ought to form a group called "Moddoholics Anonymous" or something, because I know I need help
In all of my years of SubSimming I can't remember ever seeing some detail added by some tireless modder somewhere that I thought "that's just silly" about. Quite to the contrary. I would always check it out and then, after looking at it for a few minutes, decide that my life simply wouldn't be complete without it, that the rest of my existence would be utterly meaningless if I didn't add it to my mod soup and that the mere thought of going through life knowing that somebody, somewhere was using this mod and enjoying it while I wasn't would be completely intolerable to me.
So I'd download it, enable it and, oh yes, restart for the umpteenth time. As a matter of fact, of all of the career "ends" I've had in all of those years, only about 2% of them were due to Tommy actually killing me and my crew. The rest were due to mod restarts. The modders were actually more dangerous to my career than the enemy in the sim
Do I regret a single one of those reloads? No, I do not. I am in complete awe of all of the little (and not so little) things that get added all the time, and even more in awe of the people who make it happen. It's to the point where you have to be careful about mentioning what you'd like to see because you just
know that out there, somewhere, is a helpful modder who'll happily spend the next three weeks making your wish appear
At one point I was talking to a new SubSimmer about what made SH5 so awesome compared to the earlier versions and one of the many things I mentioned was the water splashing around inside the sub when you had flooding damage. I was almost about to mention that it would be really cool if the water also had pieces of paper and Bernard's stuffed teddy bear floating around in it when I realized that if I typed that out and published, some great guy somewhere would go without sleep for a month if necessary to make it happen. And now that I've said it anyway, I must apologize to that guy in advance for depriving him of his rest so that we may all have Bernard's Drowned Teddy™ appear in our game.
But I'm seriously off topic here, so I'll stop. Just wanted to say thank you once again!
