To be fair, I think some of the vendetta was warranted. Just an observer from the outside that joined late. From some of the posts that I came across, seems Yanfly changed over time as his stuff got “stolen” as he says. Honestly, I wish the community could have remained the same as it was in the MV era but it really became a business opportunity in the MZ era, which imo, has lead to the AI plugin boom in an effort to get around plugin market.
I guess now that I’ve gotten that out of me, I guess I can move on.
When I look back at my own vendetta, I don’t think any of it really was other than the RMW entanglement, but that doesn’t matter at all anymore. Then again, my views on the community (not everyone, but a good amount of folks) and obfuscation have changed quite a bit. Ultimately when a plugin is yours, you have every right to do whatever you want with it–obfuscate it, paywall it, delete it, etc.
Add that when obfuscated plugin doesn’t work, you’re not getting any help and you just wasted 10-50$. On contrary what is promised, you get no technical support. I had a plugin that worked just fine, I had some minor edits done to it. I lost it somehow, when downloaded again and you know what happened?
Obfuscation post sale. And no technical support even when contacted directly.
It was nothingburger. The person in question had like 3-10 itch download or something like that. Some low tier hobbyist.
And all Lunatic mods did was asked some time to investigate the claims. Nothing else. They got blasted for that. Removed from all social links and so on.
Yes I know. My DM was ignored even when I offered money for looking into it. To be fair, it wasn’t a VS mod, but one of their friends. But my point is what happens when using obfuscated mods.
Obfuscating after a sale was a really dirty move.
This becoming a trend hurts RPGM. This is what drove me away from MZ. I paid and donated for mods, hundreds of dollars or more, hired modders to do stuff, and apparently that wasn’t enough. Actually I was supporting Yanfly on Patreon for a while, and it wasn’t just 5-10$ bucks/month.
The thing that drove me away was professional, as it’s my living, I couldn’t rely on such mods to build complex games running together as I needed to tweak mods individually to fix compatibilty and functionalities.. Anyways, that was the point I started to build my own engine on another engine.
Maybe I’ll return to u2u for some minor hobby project. Some features look fun.
True, though if obfuscation does worsen performance, it is a concern for development. I understand why a plugin creator would do it though. I don’t really need to change the code anyway, no coding knowledge so I wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway.
But I do know my current project do suffer from bad performance in places. The question is, is my reliance on Visustella plugins the cause? I love MZ overall, but for whatever reason, it seems harder to run games made with it than games made on MV. In fact, when trying to stream the game for a friend on discord, the framerate dropped to near unplayable levels. But the problem was fixed by running the stream on my better computer. Is this normal?
You do have the right to do as you want but you need to make the customer aware in advance. Olivia’s plugins on MV were my first experience with obfuscation and will be my last as any plugin that doesn’t declare this, I’m seeking a refund. As the customer, I have a right to know whether I can view what I bought or not.
I actually still dislike obfuscated code to some extent, mainly because it’s a pain to modify. For example, if I want to change the UI from 2 columns to 4 columns, I can’t even find where to make the change.
Although the plugin does offer some customization features, they’re cumbersome to use (requiring repeated changes to the plugin configuration and restarting the game). Once, I spent an entire day just trying to adjust the layout. Of course, this is also thanks to MZ’s slow plugin configuration loading speed.
Not really, I parted my ways with RPGM peacefully as I completed my project successfully.
But I hated abuse I’ve seen throughout the years being just random lurker.
I’ll agree on the modification aspect. That was where my initial gripe with VS came from, actually. But more and more, I began to realize that plugin developers can and should protect their code from theft.
Honestly, it just kills the purpose of user/newb friendly RPGM. At that point just start codding functions yourself. Especially with the tools given today, it’s super easy.
Does it really protect anything. I don’t think it’s that hard to crack obfuscation. But it surely puts the limit on other modders who maybe just want to learn from your work, or make compatibility patches so their mods work fine with your huge library.
I guess if the plugin doesn’t work that is a major concern. If I pay for something, I expect it to work. Never had Visustella plugin fail on me though, though they sometimes conflict with plugins from other creators.
Its alot of trial and error to figure out if plugins from different creators works together or not. But I am willing to risk 5 dollars on an experiment. Its not that much money.
This is indeed an issue. I know some people copy plugins from other people’s games into their own game projects to avoid paying.
If possible, I hope there is a solution where “packaged plugins cannot be reused,” such as merging the plugin’s configuration with its JavaScript to generate a new obfuscated JavaScript file.