about 1 year ago - Dynamoon - Direct link
Hi! To be clear, we have drawn inspiration from mods that added something interesting which had not been a part of our own plans, such as the transparent diving suit visors we just added in the most recent update. We have also in a some cases incorporated actual code written by our players when it has been submitted to the Barotrauma project on a volunteer basis – cases like these are covered in our end-user licence agreement which you can also find and read on our GitHub if you like. Times like these, we certainly give a tip of the hat to the creator, sometimes in the changelog, sometimes the game credits, sometimes in private.

Things like explorable locations, however, have been an integral part of our plans for the game since the beginning, not something we took from anyone else. Whatever inspiration we draw from player creations, we always develop the game towards our own design, and the chance that something of this magnitude, made by someone else, would fit our plans exactly is close to zero. We try to highlight cool community creations in our channels and stay aware of the bigger mods out there, but we do not implement mods into the game as-is.

With as many wonderful entries as there are on our Workshop, there will always be cases where someone has already built something that we had planned to implement in vanilla, and they just got there first. We think that's great! It shows us that our development plans will probably be met with enthusiasm when we are ready to release them. We also listen closely to player feedback and ideas and work to accommodate that in our work as much as we can. This, to us, is also a positive thing, because it will hopefully help us make Barotrauma into a game that our players enjoy.

The downside of a vastly modded early access project is that sometimes (and quite often) the work we do to develop the game futher ends up breaking or obviating existing mods. We're sorry about this, but there is no easy way around it: Barotrauma continues to be an in-development product. The most recent update introduced changes which we hope will be the last time we break mods, because once we come out of early access, we would like to make sure mods don't need to be updated as often to remain compatible. So hopefully the regular and understandably annoying mod breaking will soon be a thing of the past.

I hope this clears up our position a bit, and wish everyone a nice weekend!