Hiding the mouse cursor does makes sense in a lot of situations I agree, but it's very much a preference thing, and I don't see a good reason to change the original behavour. Some people (i.e. me) don't like cursors disappearing in windowed mode when you move the cursor over the screen, but most importantly, it makes the editor much less pleasant to use (since you're relying on the 30fps editor cursor box).
I'd be happy to support, say, a setting that allowed you to disable the mouse cursor, or even a 15 second time-out which makes the cursor disappear if not moved (and reappear once moved), but just having it off by default feels wrong to me.
Yikes. Somebody brought this to my attention, I didn't even remember that I'd written it. "Spa" or "Spastic" is kind of a south park esque slang term that used to be pretty common in Ireland, which I used without even thinking about it. It's definitely not something I would say anymore, 10 years on, and it's something I shouldn't have said at the time either. I'm sorry :(
(somebody on twitter was asking me about how much cleaning up of the source code I did before launching this. I think this commit kinda answers that)
Both projects can distribute the game's original assets, provided they compile with the makeandplay define set, and do not distribute the original levels.
Terry Cavanagh