No Third Party Mods

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I see that, despite my repeated requests not to do so, the first third party mod has appeared on Reddit. The person posting the mod even acknowledged that I asked for no mods but he was going to mod it anyway. The forums mods have allowed it so I will be avoiding that forum in future.

The whole point of no mods is to avoid false bug reports and competing versions. Please DO NOT use third party mods and then give bug reports. I do not want to devote my limited free time chasing bugs caused by someone else, no matter how good or bad their intentions. If I realise someone is posting bugs on a modded version, I will ignore their posts thereafter.

As explained in my FAQ post on this subject, number of users is not my goal so if the situation becomes worse, I will restrict further versions of Aurora to people I know I can trust not to use mods. The other option is to un-comment the code that generates random crashes to desktop for a modded version. I don't really want to do either of those. It would be much simpler if people had the common courtesy to respect the wishes of someone providing their entertainment for free.

[TMaekler]

What could help you identify if someone uses a modded version is generating a checksum into the error messages. If a modified exe is used that can identify it. Don’t know though how much time you would need to invest into programming such a system.

[SpaceMarine]

I just want to say steve, that no matter what these ridiculous stupid individuals do, we all love this game and most of us (not all unfortunately) appreciate your hard work and respect it accordingly and what you say goes in regards to the game, I love writing AARs and playing the game and it would bring me a great deal of sadness if I was not able to anymore, I also want to comment on what action should be taken against such people who blatantly disregard your rights and wishes, first our community should stand as a bulwark against this and make it a subject not to be discussed or given any leeway, but from what you have said it seems that the owners of the forum do not care, as such the rest of the community should distance themselves from this forum as much as possible until they comply with your rules.

[ral02]

I just want to say steve, that no matter what these ridiculous stupid individuals do, we all love this game and most of us (not all unfortunately) appreciate your hard work and respect it accordingly and what you say goes in regards to the game, I love writing AARs and playing the game and it would bring me a great deal of sadness if I was not able to anymore, I also want to comment on what action should be taken against such people who blatantly disregard your rights and wishes, first our community should stand as a bulwark against this and make it a subject not to be discussed or given any leeway, but from what you have said it seems that the owners of the forum do not care, as such the rest of the community should distance themselves from this forum as much as possible until they comply with your rules.

This 1000%

[lentik]

I do normaly not writing much . . .  but i want to thank you Steve for your work . . .  and if it will be necessary to wait a little longer for the final game . . .  its not a problem for me.  Maybe you should just save your hard work and implement a system which stops executing the . exe after it was modified with the wrong hash key (something like this and mark any log with hash information).  (sry for my rusty english . . . ).

I can only repeat it . . .  thank you very much for that fantastic project and your time for the community!   

[Froggiest1982]

You should get the few of us staying with you and in this forum for 5 to 10 years to test the game for you. We will also save a lot of time with people reporting bugs when they simply don't understand how Aurora VB6 was working and not having either read or understood the change in the C#.

[EvadingHostileFleets]

I appreciate your hard work and I am long-time Aurora fan.
But.
Color scheme and resizable windows were issues consistently brought up by community during C# development, and this mod is a basic QOL change, which is arquably more important than say it quad quad bug fix.  So I cant blame people for trying to tweak this on their own to save their eyes or to enable playing on smaller resolutions when you leave these issues for unspecified future time to be addressed. 

[Kanareika1]

Okay, i understand your position.  But it's a simple QoL mod.  If you allow to change size of windows and background/text colors (or change colors by yourself) it should be enough.  As a newbie in C# programming i can say, that first thing (free sizing) can be made by literally two strings of code, so i don't understand your position here.

[space dwarf]

Even as someone who is generally big into modded games, I thoroughly respect your wishes for Aurora to remain unmodified this time and think it's really very rude of people to already be modding despite your repeatedly-stated polite requests otherwise. Yeah, it's nice to have better UI options, but it still seems pretty crass, especially for making a public release of a personal game tweak.

Here's hoping this doesnt result in any increase in overhead problems for you, Steve.

[King-Salomon]

Okay, i understand your position.  But it's a simple QoL mod.  If you allow to change size of windows and background/text colors (or change colors by yourself) it should be enough.  As a newbie in C# programming i can say, that first thing (free sizing) can be made by literally two strings of code, so i don't understand your position here.

I appreciate your hard work and I am long-time Aurora fan.
But.
Color scheme and resizable windows were issues consistently brought up by community during C# development, and this mod is a basic QOL change, which is arquably more important than say it quad quad bug fix.  So I cant blame people for trying to tweak this on their own to save their eyes or to enable playing on smaller resolutions when you leave these issues for unspecified future time to be addressed.

No, just no..

Steve doesn't want his game to be modified, that's it.. no reason at all to do it against his wish - this is NO commercial product, we all can be happy he shares his hobby with us...

there is NO excuse to ignore his wishes what so ever... especially not any "good intentions"...  "the way to hell is paved with good intentions"

anybody who is waiting for any feature (like smaller resolution, QOL etc) can just wait for a few months instead of just ignoring and breaking the law and Steve's wishes!

[stabliser]

I propose that any executable that detects any change from steves version should have every ship have leaky fuel tanks, eratic sensors and a loose primary buffer panel

[Froggiest1982]

I don't know if it's more sad people trying to defend something morally wrong or the simple fact that they assume they are right. The OWNER of the project not only KINDLY share it with you but also ALLOW us all to play for FREE.

Do you realize that if he really wants is game over? For everybody.

[Kanareika1]

anybody who is waiting for any feature (like smaller resolution, QOL etc) can just wait for a few months instead of just ignoring and breaking the law and Steve's wishes!

Okay, i understand Steve.   His project is great, i played it VB6 version on my old PC woth 1280x1024 CRT monitor.   BUT! I saw many wishes to change color cheme years ago, during development of C# version.   As we can see, some random guy from Reddit made it in a single week.   Idk about used protection, i think he spend most of time overriding it.   But making windows resizable is VERY simple! Just set:
this. FormBorderStyle = FormBorderStyle. Sizable; //He probably now using some kind of Fixed
and
this. AutoScroll = true;
on forms.   Thats all! It should take not more than half of a hour! And Community really asks about it! What month's are you talking about?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I appreciate your hard work and I am long-time Aurora fan.
But.
Color scheme and resizable windows were issues consistently brought up by community during C# development, and this mod is a basic QOL change, which is arquably more important than say it quad quad bug fix.  So I cant blame people for trying to tweak this on their own to save their eyes or to enable playing on smaller resolutions when you leave these issues for unspecified future time to be addressed.

Can you guarantee that this mod will not cause any bugs?

[MarcAFK]

It may be a simple fix, but arbitrary resizing an interface this complex would require an ungodly amount of testing and fixing of edge cases.
I know professional modders who would at least attempt to fix 99% of the issues themself and approach the dev knowing theu don't want their code messed with before making a single peep on a public forum like reddit.