ingles98
commented
1 year ago Hello,
I noticed the primary SPT-AKI project declared that they have no intention of supporting offline multiplayer in their project. However, my friends and I would really like an offline experience free of cheaters where we can level up at our own pace separate from the wipe.
I noticed some code in your project which suggested to me that you might be working toward multiplayer support, such as in https://github.com/conan513/SPT-AKI-fork/blob/development/project/src/controllers/MatchController.js#L61 where you seem to have support for multiple groups of players and scavs.
Is it your goal to support multiplayer offline evenutally?
I'm a software engineer with with ~15 years of experience, not in video games, but in distributed systems and server development. I don't have a huge amount of free time but if you have a design that you're working toward for multiplayer coop then I might be interest to help contribute. Beyond my personal contributions I may be able to hire a contractor colleague to work on it (if they're interested -- I'll check with him if you're going this direction and want more tech bandwidth; I'd need clear project plans and specs though. He's independent but doesn't know this game, concepts, or codebase; while I have played it for years and would be able to recognize what the code is doing from game knowledge).
Given the server's ability to send commands to players, and from bots to the server and back, it seems like it shouldn't be a substantial effort to allow multiple players to connect and join a party -- but I'm very new to the codebases derived from EmuTarkov and have just been skimming over time.
I've sent an inquiry to the SPT-AKI project asking why they're opposed to offline support. They appear to be a Chinese led-project. Where I am in the USA, as far as I know, building an offline server based on reverse-engineering the Tarkov software would be entirely legal. Furthermore, for additional protection the project assets could be for a low cost assigned to an LLC, which would have essentially no assets with suing. If BSG wanted to send a cease-and-desist, I'm not sure they'd have a legal leg to stand on (from my brief research -- IANAL); if they did sue the LLC, I could supply a preliminary legal defense (but wouldn't want to fund a trial).
Additionally if you're reluctant to support multiplayer support we could separate the codebase with that support and assign its IP to one LLC, and the codebase without multiplayer to the other. If BSG decides to sue the LLC providing multiplayer support, and in a preliminary motion the judge indicates that BSG is likely to prevail, we could just fold the LLC. The LLC ensures that BSG can't sue individual developers working on the project.
(If you're going after multiplayer and are worried about a BSG lawsuit, then definitely form an LLC. It's relatively cheap to do and will protect all contributors personally from anything punitive that BSG tries to do.)
However in the US of A, to the best of my knowledge there would be nothing illegal about reverse engineering their software and building an open source client based on it. In the case of Blizzard vs. Alyson Reeves (owner of Scapegaming, which ran a private WOW server), (1) Blizzard alleged unfair competition because Scapegaming was depriving Blizzard of subscription revenue (2) Reeves didn't bother to show up in court so Blizzard won by default; so we can't learn much from that lawsuit.
If you want to / are planning to go down this path and are reluctant for legal reasons I'd be happy to consult with an IP lawyer on how to best protect the project. If you're based in the US, or the LLC that owns the IP is, then you have very strong protection; plus BSG would have to file its lawsuit here, which would be very expensive for them. They'd have to assert damages of some kind which seems implausible to me because as long as people playing offline are required to have purchased the game then BSG has already received their revenue and thus has not experienced any damages. Legally the project should be in a very strong position.
Software developer here, not as much overall experience, (4 years professionally, over 10 years hobbying).
I do have some experience in distributed systems, networking, netcode and reverse engineering. Would love to contribute on that so count me in if you ever start a project like that.
Rickeetz
Hello,
I noticed the primary SPT-AKI project declared that they have no intention of supporting offline multiplayer in their project. However, my friends and I would really like an offline experience free of cheaters where we can level up at our own pace separate from the wipe.
I noticed some code in your project which suggested to me that you might be working toward multiplayer support, such as in https://github.com/conan513/SPT-AKI-fork/blob/development/project/src/controllers/MatchController.js#L61 where you seem to have support for multiple groups of players and scavs.
Is it your goal to support multiplayer offline evenutally?
I'm a software engineer with with ~15 years of experience, not in video games, but in distributed systems and server development. I don't have a huge amount of free time but if you have a design that you're working toward for multiplayer coop then I might be interest to help contribute. Beyond my personal contributions I may be able to hire a contractor colleague to work on it (if they're interested -- I'll check with him if you're going this direction and want more tech bandwidth; I'd need clear project plans and specs though. He's independent but doesn't know this game, concepts, or codebase; while I have played it for years and would be able to recognize what the code is doing from game knowledge).
Given the server's ability to send commands to players, and from bots to the server and back, it seems like it shouldn't be a substantial effort to allow multiple players to connect and join a party -- but I'm very new to the codebases derived from EmuTarkov and have just been skimming over time.
I've sent an inquiry to the SPT-AKI project asking why they're opposed to offline support. They appear to be a Chinese led-project. Where I am in the USA, as far as I know, building an offline server based on reverse-engineering the Tarkov software would be entirely legal. Furthermore, for additional protection the project assets could be for a low cost assigned to an LLC, which would have essentially no assets with suing. If BSG wanted to send a cease-and-desist, I'm not sure they'd have a legal leg to stand on (from my brief research -- IANAL); if they did sue the LLC, I could supply a preliminary legal defense (but wouldn't want to fund a trial).
Additionally if you're reluctant to support multiplayer support we could separate the codebase with that support and assign its IP to one LLC, and the codebase without multiplayer to the other. If BSG decides to sue the LLC providing multiplayer support, and in a preliminary motion the judge indicates that BSG is likely to prevail, we could just fold the LLC. The LLC ensures that BSG can't sue individual developers working on the project.
(If you're going after multiplayer and are worried about a BSG lawsuit, then definitely form an LLC. It's relatively cheap to do and will protect all contributors personally from anything punitive that BSG tries to do.)
However in the US of A, to the best of my knowledge there would be nothing illegal about reverse engineering their software and building an open source client based on it. In the case of Blizzard vs. Alyson Reeves (owner of Scapegaming, which ran a private WOW server), (1) Blizzard alleged unfair competition because Scapegaming was depriving Blizzard of subscription revenue (2) Reeves didn't bother to show up in court so Blizzard won by default; so we can't learn much from that lawsuit.
If you want to / are planning to go down this path and are reluctant for legal reasons I'd be happy to consult with an IP lawyer on how to best protect the project. If you're based in the US, or the LLC that owns the IP is, then you have very strong protection; plus BSG would have to file its lawsuit here, which would be very expensive for them. They'd have to assert damages of some kind which seems implausible to me because as long as people playing offline are required to have purchased the game then BSG has already received their revenue and thus has not experienced any damages. Legally the project should be in a very strong position.