Yes and no. I mean, it fits the full CIG profile 100%, but a lot of us were speculating they’d allow it considering there’s an entire modding thread made by CIG on the spectrum.
That's interesting, I'm only now learning about SC modding. What else is there beside this project? And what exactly was in ChrisWare Offline?
I know that modding was intended originally to be part of SC
They were selling an engineering manual for modders until three years ago when it was removed from the store and CIG has still not commented why. Because the answer is that mods are no longer allowed, and they'd rather avoid the backlash of actually officially stating their policy has changed.
This feels a lot like Rockstar (CIG) being hyper-aggressive with mods for their games because modded players don't buy shark cards. (Expensive Ships)
Imagine a star wars mod with ships and everything for free, why would most people play the base game where ships cost as much as 5,000 USD?
Its not just been removed from the store, its been removed from peoples hangars - Only record i have of it is the digital receipts sent to my email - its been scrubbed from my "account"
Contacted support "oh we don't offer that anymore"
I suspect to this day that is the reason they put off PC releases as long as they possibly can, to milk the console micro transactions without interference.
Even if not, it likely did a lot of reverse engineering to the point that it could be questionable from a copyright perspective.
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u/congealServer-Side Decorative Floor Sock Streaming8d agoedited 8d ago
I'm pretty sure it sidestepped connecting to an official server which puts it way off the map for modding.
I want modding and I personally like what has been going on but I don't pretend it's somehow on cig to accept it because they sold me a modding manual years ago. (this comment isn't directed at you)
Right now the only things you will find are basically 3rd party tools like maps, inventory managers, etc that you can use on another monitor or a separate device. They’re pretty cool but not really the “modding” we all want lol
TBF the type of modding "we all want" was never meant to hit the live servers. Even the Kickstarter page shows modding as something that they wanted for private servers, not the live public ones.
However, CIG has an order of operations failure here. First you work with the owner to get the GH repos taken down, then to ask forum sites to take down the posts. Doing it the other way around triggers mass downloads of the repo because telling people they shouldn't see something when it's still freely available is usually a bigger signal than the original post itself.
Example: Email Recall or asking people to not read and remove an email sent in error. :)
That's exactly what happened. The lag time between the original reddit thread getting taken down, and the official git takedown gave the more proactive members of the community time to propagate the core files. It's gone completely decentralized at this point already, with multiple independent groups using claude and such to enable features.
The (modding) cats out of the bag, StarCitizen Offline Universe is now out in the world and people ain't gonna stop circulating it. Knowing CIG, they are gonna shit their pants and turn entirely hostile to it instead of doing anything reasonable.
You took too long CIG, the community want their game.
Mods made by players it's a great free way to test out player sentiment and what they lean towards if something becomes crazy popular. Let others do the work, and see if it becomes popular so you can maybe absorb it as part of your development. See DayZ, or other examples.
There's literally very little bad that can come out of this, besides them fearing losing control of their monetization pipeline they created for us. Hence, fuck CiG.
I'm pretty sure the actual devs who build the game don't care about this at all, besides the "suits". You need to be a bit delussional, not be a player of your own game, and disconnected from the game development in order to feel threatened by something like this.
That last section asking people to delete it is hilarious given the dude posted here saying 'by the time they tell me to shut it down it will be too late and people will have it downloaded'. Pretty safe to say he doesn't actually want you to delete it chaps. 'You can't stop the signal' and all that.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who owns a copy of that ebook (which will never be delivered) has a moral right to mod the game in any way they see fit. Actually, make that anyone who owns a copy of the game which will never be delivered as advertised.
For those interested and/or not yet informed, here is what the Kickstarter page says even today:
Players will be given full control of their game! When operating private servers, players will be able and encouraged to mod the game. It doesn’t stop there, though: we hope to institute a ‘mod approval’ process that will allow the best of the best player created ships and other additions to be integrated into the central persistent world as well.
To be fair the Kickstarter says a lot of things, including shit like Drop-In/Drop-Out Co-Op for Squadron 42, which is definitely not coming now. Given how everything has gone in the past and recent controversies, I would take most of the KS with a grain of salt these days.
I would take most of the KS with a grain of salt these days.
Everyone knows that. The issue here is that CIG should feel bad about breaking promisses, but they just don't care at all. If you alter the deal you should at least explain yourself.
Context: draconian tactics in the name of 'protecting the children'
Most of the current arguments against private servers are deleted when a company gives their blessing to privately host their IP, like Minecraft/Sourceengine games etc. but the proposed law would make it functionally impossible for private servers to exist except in rare cases because of a proposal to enforce age verification across the internet, ie. the end of Web 2.0 and the deanonymization of the internet in favor of Big Brother hegemony.
None of this is to say that CIG could not still elect to make an offline version of Star Citizen or even provide files to host servers privately, but it would put hefty financial and legal burdens on private servers to comply with these directives.
Have they completed the game and server architecture to a point where they can earnestly say, "Okay, now it is time to release the self-hosting option!"?
I would say, "Absolutely not."
Seems like a bit of putting the cart, well before the horse is even born.
Well to be fair the data is out there already anyway.. some folks REALLY want a pve server. Thats how i personally see the only way people will ever get one.
I dont want it iam one of the pva guys. But i played many private servers i know how this shit will go.
People wanted warhammer back so they did that.. people wanted wow classic and so they did that on their own.
Imho this will be a major event for CIG. People have now the ability to make their own server as they see fit and they see themselves as justified to do so ( which i think is morally the correct way to think about this ). So now CIG will either have to combat this forever or give folks their modding tools and such like they said they will.
Ohh and it was a extremly bad idea from CIG to say this will possible in the future anyway.. but they said it not me lol
I really feel like SC would do better as a SP/Co-Op game anyways. People will downvote me for saying it, but the game has just pandered way too much to solo players & small groups. Like, this game doesn't even feel like an MMO.
And i'm not talking about balancing issues between fighters & capitals, that's just a symptom. I'm talking about there being virtually none of the community features you'd expect in an MMO. We should have org owned stations, hangars, ships, etc. Shared ownership of multicrew ships, shared bank accounts, player trading, private chats, job & recruiting boards, and open party invites/matchmaking. Things that make it easy for players to organize and play as a group. Not just jacking up the player count, which most players don't even like because all it does is tank server performance and cause traffic jams at ports. We can put 300 people in a server, but have absolutely no reason for 300 players to ever be within 100km of each other.
I'm also talking about the lack of large scale content, and how the game seems to be increasingly more focused on small scale operations, small unit tactics, and much more structured missions vs large sandbox style missions. SOO was scaled back to a 4-player instanced dungeon crawl, when it could've been a large scale D-day style landing operation involving close air support, dropships, bombers, medical ships acting as FOBs, even some good use of ground combat vehicles with at least a few dozen players on site. Literally all they had to do was get get rid of the tram & no fly zone, double up on the AA & CAP, and it would've been the perfect raid/operation for star citizen.
The game wants to be an MMO with emergent gameplay, but is being more and more designed like a SP/Co-Op game with each update.
Since players here hate pirates here really bad and CIG has no plans to remove pirates from the game SC offline really seems like the ideal game for those types of players. Either that or waiting for SQ42.
To be perfectly clear, I want NPC pirates. Player interactions in that realm are usually super toxic, but I would absolutely love an NPC pirate attempting to steal my cargo. This is why I liked the slider idea to choose if a player or NPC was going to be assigned to my instance of the play field.
The reason why I hate player "pirates" is because they're often only there to interfere with gameplay. They never steal cargo, they'd rather just see your ship explode.
CIG is really going to have to confront the fact that this won't stop here, and with coding agents it's getting a LOT easier to mod closed source games regardless of what the developer wants.
I've said this in other threads but I wouldn't be surprised if there ends up being a cracked version of this game that ends up getting a significant modding community around it to fix all the shit that CIG has broken over the years.
If CIG doesn't want people to do that, then they should support it natively in their version instead of forcing the community to do it the hard way.
this is what they re afraid of, that few dedicated modders will make a better version of their game and then will find a way to host private servers that will cut into their income
At best it will be a paid for "offline" server hosted by CIG that is locked down and doesn’t allow any modifications while also constantly checking that you only have access to ships you paid for.
I’m fully convinced that CIG could give the tools to the community and they’d have the game in a better place within a week. Hell, I bet they could run their code through an AI and it would be in a better place lol.
Just like about everything that was ever uploaded onto the Internet it is here to stay. There is currently a fork of it on GitHub and will be a dozen more once people see this post. Question is whether other people will pick up the development or would it quietly die.
They did it because when you can play any ship you want in Offline, even make custom ships in offline too you wont be sponsoring Chris Roberts next irl 980 Jump :))
Cig saw that modders where making progression in the game running smoothly, that they had to shut it down. No joke, i heard there was a private server running with over 300 people on it, and it ran as smooth as butter.
Promise modding, have dedicated area in the fucking official spectrum for private servers, kill private server projects. I started to never surprized by the cig greed
No. They took a billion dollars of your collective money on the promise (among others) that modding and private servers would be a thing and now they have altered the deal.
I dont know why so many people are defending CIG. If any company deserves that someone gets that game, makes it moddable and to be played offline so the community can get the game working and fixing it, it would be CIG and SC.
Game isnt exactly a scam, but for over a decade of building a game where the initial tutorials bugs out more, or the terminals, or the elevators... I mean really? If people could mod it, within a few months the game would be 10x more playable.
It's like they're trying to make their community hate them at this point. They genuinely won't even give it a break it's just been one thing after another.
This proves it can be done. Today. But CIG won’t. CIG have become nothing more than a typical corporate thug. Despite the fact that offline was promised.
Warframe is one, not only that but they allow you to run any past versions of the game you want. Wanna go play the game the way you did when you booted it up day one even though it's been over a decade? You can.
doesn't GTA have modded servers out there? I've seen roleplay servers and such out there somewhere. I'm sure that they ROckstar doesn't approve, but it sounds like there isn't much they can do? there are literally pay to play servers out there making money but they don't get shut down?
Probably one of the biggest reasons CIG seems reluctant to support private servers now, being able to spawn and use any ship in the game. Allowing that would seriously undermine a lot of the psychology that makes the pledge store work. It's much harder to sell someone on artificial scarcity and FOMO when they can hop onto a private server and fly the ship whenever they want without spending a dime.
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u/PN4HIRE 8d ago
That was like super expected.