Rally guide & some news about CM Workshop

Considering how helpful the previous guide video was, we’ve prepared another one, this time about the new rally mode. Hopefully it’ll be just as useful!

As for development, for the past couple of months we were focused on preparing a new online platform for exchanging content. At its core it’s a second version of that CUP service used for registering content updates, fully rewritten to be much more efficient, reliable, extendable and open-sourced. 

Now it can also host content, so files can be downloaded directly from the CUP platform, without messing around with sometimes unreliable cloud providers. Also, content can be marked as searchable, so that Content Manager could use those registries to look for missing content. There are some other improvements, such as invites, requests, the ability for modders to upload their icons to be shown next to their mods in the list and more, and even more interesting stuff will be coming soon, once we’ll get some more modders onto the platform uploading files directly and marking their content as searchable.

The idea is to prepare a background service scanning uploaded content and turning it into a neat gallery, acting as CM Workshop, as well as an online gallery. Done this way, the whole system is going to be modular, and thus much more flexible in case its requirements will change over time. Once that part is ready, all the other CM Workshop stuff, such as streaming data directly into CSP, unloading unused mods, loading simplified models for remote cars, could be added easily.

Another interesting consideration is the events that have transpired regarding broken encryption. The most typical reason for modders to encrypt their content is to ensure no one will be able to edit some small aspect of their content and claim it as their own. Generally speaking, the idea of keeping encryption unbroken is not really feasible in the long run if there is already a bit of client-side code doing the decryption. In lieu of encryption, the new CUP platform could instead act as an ultimate authorship registry, and in the future even try to detect stolen models automatically, providing a long-term, alternative solution for content protection. Although, I’ll still try to prepare a new encryption version for some exceptional cases, but it’s only a matter of time until it’ll be solved as well.

Further into the future, the new platform might be used for running MMO servers (loading some very simplified models for remote cars prepared ahead of time with this service, and then using custom rendering logic along with server-side alterations would allow us to massively increase the number and type of cars allowed on a given server), or maybe even to protect from piracy (assuming there is some way to integrate backend with something like Patreon or itch.io). Here is the rough outline of a roadmap we have prepared so far.

(Also, if you’re interested about what happened with the previous attempt of getting CM Workshop to work, sadly we felt like we needed to abandon that attempt. It became pretty overengineered while only being maybe one-third functional. Looking at its code now, it looks like a beautiful clockwork, but has too many intricacies to be confident enough in to rely on.)

So, if you’re working on mods and want to participate, please DM us and we’ll send you an invite link (might have to wait a bit though, as we’re unrolling the system and making sure things are working smoothly). But when doing so, please list prefixes you use for your mods, or folder names for your content, just to make sure we could prevent possible collisions. 🙏

Thank you so much for the amazing support! The next CSP build is coming soon, but up to now, our primary focus has been on CUP, as well as on upgrading other web services (“/s”, for example, experienced some issues recently, but should be a lot more reliable now, because it now uses a neat SQLite database instead of 2 million files scattered around the place).