Other paid vehicle mods?

it all started with that damn horse armour....

 

That's just straight up wrong. Paid mods are a privilege? ...what?

It's pretty simple: If someone puts work into something, and they deem that effort to be worth monetary compensation, then that is their right... it's the basis for capitalism that most of the world works on. If that same person decides that they wish to release their work for free, then they have donated their time and effort.

Anyone in the "they weren't asked to create the mod" camp fails to understand how markets work. Nobody asked [insert store] to sell [insert product], they did so because they believed there was a market for it, that people would want it. When people buy the product, they justify that decision to stock it in the first place. When Lucas made the Picnic, he did so because he guessed there was a market for it, and based on the number of people who purchased it, and the amount of bitching from those who didn't, he was 100% correct. No-one here would be complaining if they didn't want this content. I'm not complaining about paid mesh-slaps because I don't want real cars in my game, and by extension, am not interested in those mods full-stop.

 

Scam exposed

LOL these mods get exposed. And not surprisingly

ETK800/Pessima(2nd gen)meshslap

Stolen Arcanox Core

 

Again, only one guy said that. It's their choice in the end, who there is forcing a new normal ? It's not because people agree with paid mods that they want to only make those. I, for example, will probably never make paid mods because i don't put enough time and skill into it.

 

Consumerism encourages dissatisfaction.

 

I'm not sure what this proves, aside from that bad mesh-slaps contain content from official vehicles?

If your standpoint is that people shouldn't be charging for low quality, stolen content that breaches license agreements and insults the hard work of the original content creators... then yeah, obviously that's unacceptable.

...But this whole debate resurfaced because Lucas released a ground-up vehicle as paid content. He didn't rip a model from some other game, he didn't steal the jbeam from an official vehicle, he built it from scratch. For that reason alone, it's not the same argument as demanding payment for a mesh-slap.
--- Post updated ---

...for large corporations that make money first and a product second, sure... I guess, but for an individual making a vehicle for a driving game, it's a shoot and a miss.

If you're against capitalism then fine, in fact in many ways I agree with that sentiment. The problem with your stance is that the issue doesn't start with content creators like Lucas, it starts with the paradigm that you need to earn money to survive. Ask yourself why someone might feel the need to seek compensation for their work. Would they do so if they themselves didn't have their own living costs? Now ask yourself whether the problem is the fact that those living costs are way too high for what they should be, then ask yourself who's responsible for that (hint: it's not Lucas). If you want to bring an end to consumerism, you're aiming too low.

 

I have elaborated on why I said this, yet you still remove the context. Desperate argumentation technique.

I guess you're gonna ignore the other agenda and only cherry pick things I've said. There is a movement of people who have pledged to illegally re-upload paid mods to third party websites.

By the way. Here you can see the definition of "new normal" you're accusing me of forcing.
https://www.beamng.com/threads/cherrier-picnic-92-03-paid.84800/page-46#post-1449209
It seems to be you who are contrarian to the established rules. And it seems to be you who are pushing for a change.

On the claims of me trying to destroy the beamNG modding community, I will point out that I am actively providing support to new modders in the MFD discord group.

 

This is my opinion but I don't really like Paid mods I know there are some people that take modding very serious. But The way I see it this is more of a Hobby than a Job and it can be a Job. But why pay more when you already paid for the Base game. If your going to charge for mods why not just work as a dev for the game. that's an exaggeration. but I don't see I a reason to charge for mods.

 

You don't like being ignored I guess, OK I understand.

Nah, I was just having fun just like you.

Leakers exist long before the introduction of BeamNG, there's no new movement or agenda of promoting leakage. However, there were little paid mods since the beginning of BeamNG until May 2022 and most if not all quality mods were free. In terms of a specific mod itself, a €2~€5 quality mod is OK. However, in terms of sociology, the praises and likes in said mod's discussion thread has encouraged other modder consider making their mod paid, which contributes an ever accelerating change towards a higher paid mod % in Beam modding.

Unlike the engine sound samples, paid mods are not 3rd party licensed content. There is a license agreement between the sound developers and the game developers. Mods on the other hand, are in no way affiliated with BeamNG devs. One of the Beam Team even point out a Disclaimer "We also cannot guarantee the safety of these transactions or the quality of paid mods that authors are selling.".

Why does anyone do that where it causes more harm than good?

1. Encryption does not prevent leakage. Triple A games get leaked most if not all the time.
2. Encrypted mods harm the game player as it prevents people from studying the inner working of said mods, which in turn, hampers the technological development of BeamNG modding. Encrypted modder can also make their key features a "trade secret" further increasing their price tag, increasing the average cost of playing said game and decreasing the overall mods quality due to the hampered mod development research in other modders.
3. Encrypted mods harm other mod developers, since encrypted modder can study the inner working of other mod and it's not possible on the other way round since players can't open the file in the File Explorer, which in turn, creates a power asymmetry If there were encryption in the Ibishu 300BX, other modder would never know the inner workings of moving oil pressure gauge.
4. Encrypted mods harm the game developer. Although the Wiki has material for modders, it's outdated and with insufficient data. Most modder learned how to make mods by studying the inner working of BeamNG official contents. I don't think it's appropriate to open the official jbeam/lua, make some edit, then encrypt your edit file so even the game developers can't access it. Even scratch made modders have to learn the file structure of official vehicles to learn how to make their mods.
5. Encryption in mod does not protect intellectual property. If someone used stolen content of other mods in their mod, other players can and will know it by comparing the file content between mods. It'll be very difficult, if not impossible, to spot stolen content on encrypted mods as you can't open it via Windows File Explorer or 7-Zip. If the Improved Lamborghini Gallardo mod were encrypted, I would never know the Updated Shiftlogic was implemented without my awareness before my permission.
6. Encryption in mod harms the game's gaming social community as it promotes distrust, scheming and monopoly.
7. Encryption in mod paves the way of further harming the user's right by making the use of malware in said content stealthier. As shown (and this)

 

AAA game developers can absorb lost earnings through piracy, an individual can't.

Not sure how that hampers the technological development of BeamNG modding, bit of a reach. Modders should be getting their information from the official documentation, studying the official vehicles, or seeking help from the community. Even if you could see the inner workings, doesn't necessarily give you license to use it, unless it's open source (in which case it wouldn't be encrypted anyway).

We're not arguing for encryption of official vehicles, they're included in the game we all paid for. The documentation definitely does need more content, so the community should be contributing to it.

If Updated Shiftlogic was encrypted, others wouldn't have been able to incorporate it into their own content anyway.

Then shop smart. It's pretty obvious where the dodgy content is. By making this point, you seem to imply that malware isn't distributed in mods already. There are processes that ensure the integrity of uploads (and downloads) to help prevent that from being a problem, which would be easier to implement if paid and free content were available in one easily accessible place. Even as things are, do you think that everyone scours the contents of every .zip they download? Many don't even run a basic scan on them. Some don't even care, because they're willing to accept the risk of making Mum's work laptop run even worse because they have to have the Aventador they saw on YouTube.

Content encryption isn't something I think we should be worried about anyway. In an ideal world people should be able to distribute their content freely (as in "freedom"), without the fear of having their intellectual property abused. Unfortunately we don't live in that world. I want to think that the main reason for piracy is lack of access to paid content, some users have complained about not being able to purchase the Picnic because the only places to buy it legitimately aren't available in their parts of the world. I think that can be solved with a little more work from the creators. When I see users actively campaigning against paid content though, I realise that a decent amount of piracy actually comes from people who think they are entitled to take what they want without paying for it, which is sad really.

 

This is not a counter-argument. Encryption does not prevent leakage regardless of AAA game developers or an individual.

Why seek help if you can self-study? Mod encryption will steepen the learning curve big time by making learning sources much scarce, regardless of the availability of documentation. Studying the inner working can inspire you on making your original creation. It's not a stolen content as long as you don't copy/paste other's data. Here's another example: the ACDII mod. This mod has both modder created content and BeamNG official content from esc.lua. I'm not allowed to copy this mod since the author hasn't replied to my DM. However, since the mod is not encrypted, I can read both the mod lua and the BeamNG's esc.lua to pinpoint which part is created by the modder and which part is ripped from the esc.lua. Thus I'm able to make my own active differential mod with only part of esc.lua used and with my original creation without using any original data from the ACDII mod.

Meshslappers can make a simple part or modify offiicial jbeam/lua very slightly then put an encryption, then make questionable advertisement to lure people into spending money on a mod that has 90% content created by Beam game devs.

This will create a positive feedback loop, accelerating towards a modding environment where everyone encrypts their mod. And most if not all people don't want to live in an atomized society. Also "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster."― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Encryption greatly(yes greatly) increase the difficulty in spotting malicious payload. You do know that these articles exposing malwares appear way after the release date of said mal-payload. Even a computer professional often fails to recognize these encrypted mal-loads.

Even if exe cannot be executed in BeamNG. It's still possible to deliver malicious content in mods. For example, an encrypted mod can be made to cause incompatibility in a deliberate manner, making another free mod NO TEXTURE without being NO TEXTUREd by said free mod. Since the player is unable to check the file in encrypted mods, said player will assume said free mod has conflict/outdated, this will manipulate the player to uninstall said free mod, only play said encrypted mod, and/or floods said free mod's discussion thread with confusing replies.

 

The most reliable sources to reference in order to learn are vanilla vehicles. Mods can have certain issues which results in misinformation for whoever is trying to learn. I would go as far as to also say that anyone who progress in modding mainly reference vanilla stuff. While those who pickup an old mod / mesh slap to work on tend to stagnate sooner in their modding careers.

The way to determine the quality of a jbeam is to hit control B in game to show the jbeam wireframe. You don't go into the jbeam reading 1000 lines of beams to determin if it's a mesh slap or not.
This would work both for encrypted mods or non encrypted mods.

So you're saying encryption does not help to prevent piracy, but somehow protect malware.
Let's not forget that the encryption key would have to come from the repository moderator. So it's not like you can pack whatever malware you want and send it off. Unless you consider malware a big problem currently on the repo? (encryption would rely on paid repo mods, read the bottom)

All of this is possible with unencrypted mods.
95% of beam players can't troubleshoot these problems by looking at jbeams or material jsons as it is. You simply look for whichever mod is causing problems by removing them one by one. You find the culprit and report it to the modder / remove it. This is the method people use with unencrypted mods. And it would be the method you use with encrypted mods.
Mods also wouldn't become outdated out of the blue. It would happen with a game update 100% of the time. Thus it's not as easy to fool people as you say.

Sounds contradictionary. I will however admit that I don't want to see encryption on everything. It should first and foremost only be allowed on paid mod projects.
Paid mod projects should also meet a standard of being perfectly scratch made, of high quality and reasonably priced. Some kind of beamNG orchestrated quality control wouldn't be a bad thing either. Assuming paid mods ever made it to the repo. But that would have to be a condition in order for encryption to work in the first place.

 

There's also the possibility of using a checksum to verify the integrity of files you download from trusted sources, so that you know that you're not downloading something that has had a nasty payload inserted.

 

the fuck

patron mods are just different i swear

 

Thanks for your hard work on this fantastic game!

 

BeamNG has very basic piracy detection. When it finds what its looking for then what it does is simple: send a message into the console resulting in a clear log message showing that the game was pirated and replacing the menu background with a pirate ship. It doesn't influence the actual vanilla game at all.
Global variable name and detection function name are really creative and the latter contains quite a wholesome comment directed at people who found the function, like I did by accident. Not going to say where though

 

and it can even be manually enabled even in legitibly purchased copies, yet i don't know if it was changed since it was a while ago

 

Wait is that actually a real thing? does anyone have a picture of that?

 

Yeah I want to see the BeamNG pirate ship. Is it jbeamed?