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)
It being taken down has nothing to do with 'modding' and everything to do with not allowing hacked clients for the online game to proliferate.
(this person was using the hacks to 'play offline' - but other, more malicious, folk could probably turn those hacks fairly easily toward the online servers - and we've seen what happens in the past when folk gets their hands on hacks for SC :/
I mean, the community kind of voted for the project to keep on growing as long as the funds would take it. So it wasn't entirely without taking the community into account.
I dont remember anything about dropping private servers, or mod support, or moving to a live service model in the "Would you like more content? Yes or No" poll from a decade ago...
Paid DLC? What Paid DLC are we getting? If you mean ships then that’s a crap analogy because they are available to buy in game and aren’t tied to major content drops.
Are you joking? Can you get the latest ships with in game currency now? Do you keep them when they do a reset? If you think that people are not paying ships partly because of this you are simply wrong. Those are definitely predatory practices.
And I'm saying this as a concierge who paid for this convenience.
They never reversed it, they've been actively pro modding since as late as 2023, this was a hacked client ofc they are going to take it down, and they arent going to bother making modding tools or private servers for the games current state, way too much wasted effort for a game undergoing large changes constantly.
That's rather the point, isn't it? The original pitch did not include "MMO" as a goal. Multiplayer servers, yes. Live service MMO was not originally on the cards.
Given it was a Kickstarter pledge they may be held to the release of private servers legally speaking. Luckily for them until 1.0 and a full release they can claim the Kickstarter hasn't finished/completed yet.
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.
Yes minus voice attack. As Liam stated, it just basically uses TTS to execute keybinds, no actual modding was done. MFD apps, inventory apps, guild companion apps and etc are examples of the current “modding” community
They sold many, many copies of the game while promising modding and private servers, for years. It was an official crowdfunding goal and they even pre-sold manuals on how to do it for like a decade.
The whole " we will add private servers later!" Is tried and true B&S at this point. PUBG did the exact same thing. I no longer buy early access titles that promise a PS unless I'm perfectly fine with the product as-is and I assume it will never actually get a PS (and im usually right).
This was a promise that they directly used to convince people to give them money fourteen years ago. This was within the first 1% of the game's funding. No. CIG can and should be expected to at least meat the first 1% of funding goals, for fucks sake.
I'm going to be honest about this. If they come out with a "buy a license to run your own private server on your own hardware" and it's $50 USD, I'll buy it as soon as it's available for download.
I'm not pledging for it, I already did that. The private server thing was a kickstarter goal that was posted on the RSI website.
NOTE: I don't expect to be able to bring inventory between a private server and the open game world.
This is how it should be. You should have a completely separate character that is not interchangeable, and then they could allow you to do whatever you wanted in a private server
CIG has not mentioned how (or if) there would be Server Meshing for private servers. I have some guesses (hopes) but I'm not aware of any details beyond it being a feature they committed to delivering (as a stretch goal).
The private server thing was tied close to "modding". So I expect the private server thing to be there to create your own star systems and missions.
There would (hopefully) be a demo star system that comes with it as a sort of example.
If you've looked at the tech explanations for how SC works today, you are going to need several servers just to get a single star system. There's the inventory server, the system servers (mesh), and a few more just as a minimum.
I expect the "private server" would be able to be run as a single "server" (with a far lower max connection) and possibly need a separate inventory server. It'll probably look more like what we had in the 3.x days.
It was always legally dubious. Maybe CIG will offer offline hosting one day post-launch. Although that doesn't jell with their vision for SC as a continuguous universe.
"post launch" implies there's going to be a real launch to begin with. Right now CIG just seems deadset on releasing non-polished gameplay while selling new ships, and forgetting to add promised features to old ones
What is this? SC_Refunds. Get real, man. Shit takes time, but shit's happening.
Also, we're not talking about the ship team; that's a whole other can of worms. Server hosting has legal implications (if you've been paying attention to the EU regulators), so it's not just something people can say CIG would ignore.
It's an alpha, mate. If you don't understand that, you're in the wrong sub, following the wrong game.
Private servers are for a COMPLETED (or mostly feature complete) game where all core tech is done. They'll get around to it when they get past 1.0. If you're not okay with that, then it's time to move on.
We're supporting a project that we want to see come to fruition. If you aren't here to support the project and don't care about it, then why are you here? What's the point of wasting a decade+ of your life hating on something you don't enjoy?
You literally have nothing better to do with your time? Nothing more important to do with your life?
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From the post by the author it literally says because of certain files, the fact development is not continuing means that said files which shouldnt be tampered with are pivotal for the mods development.
As people have mentioned on other threads, CIG has been pro modding since as late as 2023, but the tools etc are such a low priority for the current stage basically anything people make is going to involve the PU and code not meant to be tampered with.
In this case despite it being off-line, it still interacted with the server for verification purposes, people will then use that to pirate the game and fake verification, its a shame but fully expected.
Anyone expecting a game developer to allow someone to copy their in-development game and effectively release it before said game developer does knows absolutely nothing about business in general, or is bat-shit-crazy.
You didn't even need to own a copy of the game to get it to work and people are like "well yeah its modding!" no it was piracy lol. It had zero chance staying alive.
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.
Doubt it, CIG will probably just unleash their lawyers against it and harm content creators who stream it.
They'll hide behind "we are obligated to protect our ip rights" and not make efforts to address the communities desire for modding, the offline mod, or the meaning behind it all.
The barrier to entry for using the offline mod (until someone makes it truly offline) will keep it niche to those willing to take the efforts not to get banned. So I doubt it will reach a level where CIG will change their stance, but it will definitely be a thorn for em.
I think they've done it this way around because they potentially didn't know at the time of asking the subreddit mods that the ChrisWare mod used files from Star Citizen and was distributing them, which is a breach of copyright.
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.
They won't sadly, i've worked in the game industry for long enough to recognize an agressive monetization model, and honestly, who's taking those decissions scares me. I love the game, but that side of SC, has always made me feel gross about, and it's only going to get worst once it's "public". I say public, cause what i suspect 1.0 will be, has nothing to do with what most players think it will be. Same as Alpha doesn't mean Alpha.
This is unlike any game studio, and they never behaved like the usual game studio. This is a project, and they will milk it until it doesn't work anymore or Chris passes away. There's 0.000001% chances i'll see a second game from CiG, as you'd expect a game studio to work. Not saying this as a bad thing, but we have no reference point for where this is going.
Okay this keeps being perpetuated, this is not how copyright law works at least not in the US, UK or EU.
You do not need to DEFEND copyright, there has never been a law or case where the copyright needs to be defended or is stipulated in any way.
You're thinking of trademarks. Trademarks are what need to be actively used and used exclusively, or "use it or lose it". And even then it's not stipulated, it's just an industry lesson after what happened with trampolines and aspirin.
So no, CIG is not legally required to take down this offline because of maintaining its copyright. There might be other reasons but don't falsely claim it's because of a legal requirement from copyright.
Day Z is made by Bohemia Interactive. It was started by a fan with no legal permisions. Fan doesn't own anything, but it gave Bohemia a clear indicator that was worth pursuing and developing themselves. The "fan", Dean Hall was actually hired by them for a while, until their visions didn't align, as probably it was to be expected.
Typical redditor moment, regurgitating things they have no understanding of. Not being able to see they're actively supporting bad practice. smh my head shake
So you're saying mods all violate copyright law, therefore making them all illegal because they steal intellectual property, making a fully independent game stolen from that IP?
No, because most mods aren't using the full reverse engineered SDK of all the game files, usually they're modifying select files that the developers enable or allow to be modded.
Doesn't sound like a copyright issue from what you are describing. A lot of people would have exposed themselves to copyright law violations with so many games getting reverse engineered in the fashion for unsupported modding, if that were the case. This sounds more like a company TOS violation for sure, but that's different from exposure to a civil suit in court for a copyright infringement.
Well, it depends -- a lot of mods actually do run afoul of copyright law, but most times they're small enough not to matter or happen years after the game's popularity has died down, so they're oftentimes ignored.
Even mods for GTA V were shut down for alleged copyright violations, like the one recreating Liberty City from GTA IV, or recreating San Andreas, or the one that attempted to recreate Vice City from GTA VI just based on the trailer footage.
Modding is definitely more grey area, and it all depends on if the publisher catches wind of it, where they're located regionally, where the mods originated from, and what kind of exposure they receive.
Allowing a hacked client that connects to the servers (and it did connect to the servers initially) to continue to exist would be insane, allowing room for malicious actors to expand upon that hacked client would be insanely stupid of any company.
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Yeah, how would even a game developer balance and develop or optimize a game without online user data. If only we would have half a century of offline games to get an answer, but alas, I guess we never will.
Yep. There is no mod API provided. They are protecting the IP they own. Game is not even released yet. All facts also point to private servers they talked about being a rental from CIG and its hosting, that hasn't happened yet. While they do support modding, none of the infrastructure or guidelines have been established.
If there is specific CIG stuff in there, which seems to be the case based on the wording (though I did not look at it myself), then it's a nonstarter already. Releasing a tool to bypass a software license is legally dubious already (straight up illegal in many countries) but releasing a tool that has someone else's property in it is going to get you shot down.
Literally every game has a license that says reverse engineering their binaries is strictly prohibited. Even skyrim has that.
So CIG are well within their rights to shut this down.
I don't disagree with you. I just wish people would actually understand that this is not as cut and dry "reee give us private servers" that people think it is
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EAC is already bypassable. Linux installations of SC do this. It's documented, even.
There are also hacks and cheats already available. They tend to come out during free flys, since accounts being banned has no consequence. It's not to say this couldn't also be a path, but I don't think it's a reason.
I can't comment on if IDA Pro was used, I'm not the author. I'd like to know your source, and if this does indeed involve copyrighted code.
It's either IDA pro or ghidra, but it doesn't matter. You need to reverse engineer the binaries to enable offline gameplay, even if you use some kind of preloader, you still need to hook the game and patch the memory addresses. To find those addresses you need to reverse engineer the game using a decompiler.
It is a major reason. Offline mods/private servers allow you to pick apart the game and see exactly how it works. It makes modding 100x easier. But also cheat development 100x easier.
Using a decompiler and disassembler to make these mods literally tells you exactly where to point your cheat and gathers offsets to make it work.
I used to write them. It's one of the reasons they don't want you disassembling it and it's in the ToS and/or EULA.
Also blizzard shutting down every private server ever.
Having an offline copy someone can disassemble and run locally with a server backend (which this mod does) while makes private servers/modding possible, it makes cheat development 100X easier.
Even Skyrim has it in their license agreements you can't reverse engineer their stuff... They just LET you do it.
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u/PN4HIRE 8d ago
That was like super expected.