Newbie: Unauthorized Plugins

luxlunae · 10-23-14, 05:18 PM

The makers of one of my favorite addons have told me they have no interest in adding a couple of different kinds of capabilities to the addons that I would like. I'm just curious what the policy is on this in this development community? Is it ok if I keep my plugins to myself? Ok to share? No one will be willing to help me here, period? I don't want to go about this the wrong way.

It occurs to me that might sound sneaky, the specific functions I am considering is some kind of syncing of items in TSM groups and arkinventory special groups, as well as a change to the quicksend function to send one of each item in a tsm group COD, rather than a specific amount of only one item.

Phanx · 10-23-14, 07:18 PM

Originally Posted by luxlunae

I'm just curious what the policy is on this in this development community? Is it ok if I keep my plugins to myself? Ok to share? No one will be willing to help me here, period?

What it's "ok" to do mostly depends on which addons you're looking to moodify. If the addons are licensed under terms that allow you to make changes, like the GPL or BSD license, then you can do all of the above, or not, as you choose. You're never required to share code you write.

If the addons aren't licensed under terms that allow you to make changes, then you can* modify your personal copy, but you can't share your modified version -- but you could still write/publish a third-party plugin that added functions to the addon from the outside.

(* The actual legality of this may be questionable, but I view modifying your own copy of a program as basically the same thing as drawing naughty bits in your own copy of a picture book, and in practice, if you're not publishing it nobody will ever know anyway.)

As for whether anyone here will help, that depends mainly on what you want to do. Nobody here is going to write 10,000 lines of code for you, for example. Generally if you ask for help solving a specific problem, and have already made some effort to solve it yourself -- eg. "here is my code, I'm trying to do X, but it's doing Y instead" or "here is my code, I want X, Y, and Z to happen in that order, but it's doing X and then skipping to Z and never doing X and I can't figure out why" -- then you'll find most people are willing to help you.

However, if you just post something like "I want to do this big complicated thing!" with no code and have made no attempt to figure anything out yourself, you'll probably only get general suggestions about where to start or links to API functions that may be relevant.

luxlunae · 10-23-14, 08:22 PM

Sounds like what I"m interested in is "adds functionality from the outside" so that should be ok then.

After spending a few hours I think i'm going to start my addon without the "use a tsm group" functionality, just hard code in a few sets of items and use a /slash command. I'm sure I'll have specific questions when I get something working (or not) in the next few days. TY for the quick reply!