Modding discussion

Hey everyone,

Today I've less positive but a very important topic to cover. I'll try to keep it to the point.

Modding in EU/US

In the run of the project, we've had no one in this region stealing other people's work. Most modders release their work public without fear of the mod being stolen and sold. Modders properly attribute credits, respect the license and are often willing to help to get new people started.

Modding in China

While oddba has come a long way, they see an increase of "chinese businessmen" stealing other people's work. For example, @MIRAKI pours hours into making gun skins that have pushed the modding scene to the next level, but is rewarded with having his work stolen, sold and sometimes people even try to disown his hard work. MIRAKI is but one of many of victims. @Small_ Miao recently released his offshoot of SPT-AKI (MKI) which adds protection to the mods, preventing easy alteration made by these "chinese businessmen". It's very basic, but it's functional.

Rewriting the mods loader

Small Maio and I had a chat, both had various ideas how we could improve the protection without hurting the current modding climate in EU/US.

For starters, I'll soon work on separation of the modloader from the server. Instead, the modloader will be a standalone project. This way people can implement a closed-source variant of it, allowing the people in China to protect their mods. The open-source version written by the SPT-AKI developers will be the default shipped modloader. The closed-source variant is optinal and primarely targeted for oddba, where modders have to zip-up their bundles with password protection, and javascript source will be obfuscated and compiled to bytecode to prevent reverse-engineering of these mods and the modloader itself.

I have interests in making a simple modfile format to make mods easier to drop and use inside of the server.

Regarding the mod websites

Oddba allows release of closed-source mods. The official mods website (mods.sp-tarkov.com) does not permit closed-source and/or obfuscated mods.

Conclusion

While the EU/US region has no issues to keep modding open-source, this is sadly a different case in China. Allowing mods to be closed-source is the only way for mod makers there to keep doing what they love without fear of having their mod stolen. We keep the open-source only policy so people have the ability to learn from other people's mods and keep the open-source nature of the project intact. I hope that modders that will use the closed-source modloader write documentation and tutorials for how they do their work, as everyone benefits from having the knowledge out there.