Closed sourced mods

I am not sure why this is even being discussed, the effort involved in adding this "feature" is significant while the benefit is nonexistent. I would go so far to say that closed source modding is a bane to modding communities everywhere.

 

The only reason you gave is that other people are able to host your mod. What's wrong with more people being able to play the mod you've created. They won't get credits for your mod as long as you've released it publicly.

You should learn and teach everyone how to mod, check their code and report bugs, it's not a competition.

PS. I don't think I accused you of stealing code, but it's nice to know you did.

 

Claim it's theirs - Report it, ezpz solution
Draw players away from the trus erver - How is this a problem, you need direct control of said people? You gain nothing by it other than potential stats you might have on your server or something of that nature
Copy - This is a good way for people to learn, I personally learn this way the most when looking at new things, copying bits and fucking with them til I understand, it's a very typical way for people to learn they call it 'frankencoding' often.
Optional to the modder - Name one modder who's for it but you.

Better yet, how about actually petition it, I'm not saying you're wrong that it's not bad as an option but once again what I would like to know and what is probably the most important is that even if this is an important thing to have. Will the devs time coding this be worthwhile for the so far ONE person who will use it compared to doing other things he could in that time. Given how hard it would be compared to other things, and as others said, even what was proposed earlier can still be gotten, you just make it harder, but it can still be done.

In the time they could do what you want, if they could just make another gamemode, or fix some bugs like mines breaking in your stuff, any one of those would probably take less time and benefit infinitely more people than your idea.

So
A)Your idea is for the most part pointless for almost everyone, in some aspects it is negative for the community
B)If it even has merit, there are many many ideas better than yours or bug fixes to implement that should probably be done first, or more balance to be done all of which would benefit the majority of the community as opposed to your idea which benefits... you.

 

Well if someone does steal your work and you notice it, I'd totally delete it. It wouldn't be the first time. There was even a guy trying to monetize with stolen work so that was also an instant take down + insta-permaban.

This was discussed in testing before and something about the end result it being too difficult to do or something because the clients HAVE to download it or something. I unno, Arcrave or Verra probably have a better memory about this than me.

If you really do think you are going to have a problem with someone stealing your code, couldn't you just obfuscate it? I'm pretty sure most people aren't really going to bother reverse engineer it just for to "steal" your mod. The people who don't know how to code and are trying to learn would be the most likely to "steal" it and they probably wouldn't even know what obfuscating means. The people who do know how to code could probably figure out how it works even if the mod was closed source since they've both played the game and have modded before.

 

First of all, I'd like to assert that the idea of "properly" closed source modding is incredibly petty and counterproductive.

That said, considering how often the ability to clutch desperately onto your content and prevent anyone from hosting or sharing it has been requested, it's fair to say these threads aren't going to go away.


The only solution to this that we're going to offer is making "server only" scripts not sync to the client. This means you can keep your gamemode scripts "hidden" on your server and orchestrating the mod. We will not provide any option not already provided for server-locking specific client-required content, because we would be wasting our time obfuscating or otherwise reversibly "locking" your content.

MM has this option for server only content on his list already. I'm not sure what his progress has been, but I think it should be done through January.

You can obfuscate and copy protect your own content already. If all you want to do is prevent some other host from joining your server and then copying the mod folder into his own server and running it, you can spread checks for information required by your server around your scripts, making them crash or otherwise break content unpredictably if hosted on any server but your own.

This offers the same level of security we'd be able to provide by storing scripts only in memory (possible to make a simple tool to dump all scripts to files -> makes your files "safe" until someone dedicated to steal it comes along), encrypting scripts (they'd need to be decrypted for the client to be able to compile and run time, so again a tool could be developed to dump them) - however manually copy protecting your stuff means there's no "set of steps" someone can take to pinch your mod, so it can't be automated.


I'd like to end reiterating how petty it is to want to furiously prevent anyone from hosting your content. Offer a better service than your competitors.

 

Modders should license their work as appropriate (inside the mod files is the least likely to "go missing"). Anything uploaded to the forums without an explicit license is pretty hard to get annoyed about someone re-using. Copying from in game it's a reasonably clear issue of ethics but not something we can do much about. As said above, you can get around anything we do with enough patience because the game needs it in raw form to be able to run it!

Worst comes to worst it's trivial enough to provide copy protection with #define SERVER_ONLY mods that will not be uploaded to clients (-> cant be stolen) + make other scripts depend on that, or crude things like detecting the server name/ip and freezing the server ("while(true) {}") if it's wrong. Aphelion has done some nastier things with copy protection but I dont think you need to go so far as to change their server password, haha.

In general, modders would do better to be less possessive of their code, and less worried about low quality 3rd party servers. They die out in days to weeks and it's an issue of ego if someone hosting your freely distributed content hurts your feelings.
I've seen most mod code, it's nothing to write home about :^)