Unturned's Open-Sourcing Problem

We have long dreamt of the possibilities derived from modifying the game code to create features that were nearly impossible prior. The Unturned community, with its passion and commitment to playing a game that is nearly a decade old, sees the open-sourcing of the project as the goal. The average player is completely wrong about the topic, and the reasons why should most definitely be addressed.

Arguably the strongest point against the thought of open-sourcing being impactful is the fact that Unturned already has a robust module system, public methods, and APIs provided by Smartly Dressed Games (SDG). If there are any roadblocks in creating some sort of functionality, Harmony patching and reflection allow for easy bypasses and changes to the original game code.

For those unaware, Harmony patching involves changing the code for current methods/functions within the game. Reflection is more so for accessing fields blocked by private access modifiers.

The practical ceiling for capability is by default very high with the game in its current state. Open-sourcing the project is not going to grant us new capabilities. Games such as Garry’s Mod or Rust currently have ecosystems built on top of controlled or curated APIs. These games do not provide source access or rather open-source licensing.

For the community, open-sourcing could cause fragmentation. If people are given a license to fork the game, there will be competition between the forks and their maintainers. Additionally, incompatible forks could pull servers and players away from the canonical game. Present day, the player counts are less than ideal. More factors that harm a centralized playerbase could kill the game.

Additionally, there is an assumption by SDG that there will be a deep interest in open-sourcing among the community. On paper, everyone speaks of the plans. However, the modding community is already skewed towards map makers, plugin developers, and server owners. We do not have a wide range of capable C# and Unity contributors. Those invested in creating a fork would have to be fairly competent and experienced in the .NET ecosystem. Only the few would be involved.

Pull requests would be another pandora’s box of problems. If and when Nelson does accept contributions to the main branch of the game, he will have to second-guess every commit. Depending on how many contributions he receives in a day, Nelson may not be able to keep up. Godot, a game engine, apparently has this problem themselves. In a PC Gamer article, it was described that Godot maintainers are now “forced to deliberate the trustworthiness and human authorship of an onslaught of LLM-generated contributions.” It is incredibly likely that inexperienced developers will submit contributions generated by language models. This poses a significant risk to the codebase if contributions are allowed.

It would be unfair to suggest that there are no valid points for the open-sourcing plan that SDG has. For instance, open-sourcing would ensure the long-term preservation of survival of the project. Nelson would also see a boost in positive opinions of him and his company. He has always been a near-solo developer. Players who can see the code may trust the project more and see SDG as a more transparent company.

In summary, the current state of Unturned is not a viable candidate for open-sourcing. This is my opinion, but it shares sentiment with both plugin developers and server owners. As Nelson begins to wind down active development, the consideration for open-sourcing should go up. Perhaps that is the signal we are receiving from SDG.