SCS Software

Always best to be sure than get sued.

cip wrote: ↑10 Jan 2020 08:01 congratulations to those who were against this idea! the community will no longer benefit on sounds on trains and shall wait an official SCS update if they will ever think about trains...

We do think about trains. I know I do.

@TruckerDog Hello! Have you seen my work on improving trains in ATS? Wouldn't it be nice if these trains had sounds that players from the cockpit could hear?

I have seen it and used it for ATS while I play at home! And yes it definitely would be great of the trains had sounds, @train Do not worry, with the arrival of the FMOD, you'll be able to work with this better. Lots of cool features coming with that as well... Can't tell more on this for now or how long it'll take for it to arrive. However, hopefully the wait won't be too long either.

@train - write me some general info about your mod and your planned work, please. We'll discuss it in private and see if we can come to some agreement benefitting everyone.

thank you Trucker Dog and thank you Carthoo for your messages, I am glad to read that I did not waste my time for nothing defending @train . wish you all a pleasant weekend!

@Carthoo Thank you very much for your attention to my question. I wrote you a private message

@TruckerDog Thanks a lot for the using My Mod! What could be a greater recognition for the modder, than the use of his work by the game developer!

Best Regards

Hi @cip I could have time to answer you properly until now. It will be short this time, I promise.

You are right that I didn't mod for SCS games, although I do understand the basic principles of how they work for the game (internally I mean, in terms of IT knowledge more than modder knowledge). I appreciate your corrections about some details, like the purpose of the Editor tool that I misunderstood from other conversations I read before. Anyways, that doesn't change significantly what I explained, something that leads us to that part you said:

cip wrote: ↑09 Jan 2020 16:45I am afraid you do not understand the idea that, we the modders do not care about the real copyright laws here, SCS is the only God we respect, if SCS says we cannot do this, we don't and they says yes, then well, we do

You are right that we both were looking the question from a different perspective. When I started answering I did it having in mind some of you were asking about "what are we allowed to do?" (on mods). And I strictly answered that (call it professional trend, As I live in 1 and 0 world, I use to took things too literally ). But what you describe me here is more "what are we able to do?". Self-explanatory example, I'm able to take my car, go to the highway and drive it at 180km/h... but I'm not allowed to do so and it could have legal consequences.

Now, SCS provides us some tools and information that makes us able things that we aren't allowed to do. Why they do so? Because one can do those mods for personal use thus causing no problem at all. Because this way there's abetter interest in their games. Because they even could find people interesting to be hired for their staff... There are lots of god reasons, more than I can imagine for sure. Why, then, they doesn't give us the kind of answer you or train were requesting? I suppose that because they can't give us one specific enough.

Even not unlimited, the possibilities of what we could do with mods are enormous. SCS can't check them all and give us a clear statement of what they allow and what not. It's too vast. If they start describing what they allow (so, in terms of copyright laws, they are giving specific permissions like I explained before); but they aren't precise enough; that could easily lead to legal leaks that could be profited by true pirates to loot and feast on SCS. They aren't going to spent lots of money in legal advice trying to cover all the possibilities in order to preserve the company from those potential dangers while they be (still more) open towards the modders.

What SCS can do (and is doing), is to be indulgent with practices they know that aren't legal and had not been specifically allowed by them; because they know they have a good relation with a big part of their community and that makes things easier and everybody has their benefit. SCS knows too they have to live with people that will abuse of that, like those who keep selling mods and lots of other nasty behaviors all over Internet. Not even the biggest companies can do so much to avoid those kind of vultures. But in general terms, the outcome if way more beneficial than harmful for everybody. So, they let us do and, at most, they remember us from time to time about some limits if they saw worrying trends; like the warnings about not including DLC content on a mod or the one related to Steam tradable content.

And then, from time to time, some cases on the edge of the knife appear like train's mod. And I'm glad to see that Carthoo is talking with him to look for a consensus solution that could satisfy both parts. But I doubt they will make any public and general statement because that would mean to open a door whose consequences can't be predicted neither controlled.

Regards

PS: kind of short...

Actually no it's still illegal, SCS are just declining to prosecute.

The correct word here is "unlawful". Copyright violation is a civil offense, except for repeated offenses, architectural works and royalties of music and movies, where a default royalty exists and it is automatically enforced by state.

@Kama in short, we are not allowed to make mods with paid DLC content in It, and if we do, we need to create a dependency to that DLC. therefore in order to use it, people need to own that DLC otherwise the mod shall not work. also we are not allowed to add in mods Steam inventory content (the one you gain while playing like loading screens, cabin accessories) and last we are not allowed to make mods that move content from ETS2 to ATS and vice versa.