It has been one month since we soft-launched our new home at uMod.org to the public, with the intention of replacing the forums at oxidemod.org. In the future, we will attempt to provide at least monthly or bi-monthly status reports to the community. With these announcements and status updates, we hope to answer any major questions and keep everyone in the community apprised of any important developments regarding the uMod project, site, and platform.
To get started, the overall status of the project is: So far, so good.
PLUGIN MIGRATION
The migration of existing plugins from oxidemod.org is around ~35% at the moment.
- Over 200 fully migrated plugins
- Roughly 200 partially migrated plugins
What is the difference between a fully migrated and a partially migrated plugin?
Tl;dr: Updating documentation from BBCode to Markdown.
The old OxideMod.org platform only supported BBCode for plugin documentation. As such, plugin developers only had a small subset of tags with which to format their documentation. Not only that, but if a plugin developer uses source control such as GitHub/GitLab, they would have to write their documentation twice (many didn't bother). Once in BBCode for OxideMod.org and once again in Markdown for GitHub/GitLab.
Markdown is the standard for documentation across open source projects, and most development-related sites generally. Though it will be a substantial process updating the documentation for hundreds of plugins, we decided it would be better to have these plugins available for download (even if the documentation is improperly formatted). You may see many plugins that appear to have unformatted code in them. Rest assured, we are periodically going through each and every plugin and updating their documentation to conform to the new and more robust standard.
There are an additional 400-600 plugins that were imported from OxideMod awaiting approval. We are attempting to prioritize the more popular plugins first before we go through the entire catalog. If you are a plugin developer wondering about the status of your plugins, feel free to ask us.
Please do NOT resubmit your plugin if it was already published on the old site. We already have it, we just need to run some automated tests, update the documentation, and assign it to you. If your plugin is already published, but you do not have access to update it, feel free to claim it using the “Claim” button at the top of the plugin page and we'll review that claim.
SITE DEVELOPMENT
We have been very busy fixing bugs, optimizing, and adding new features. Many aspects are still incomplete, but here are a few we've completed:
- Imported the entire uMod.org (v1) and OxideMod.org plugin catalog
- Published ~400 plugins (documentation not completely formatted yet)
- Added a lot of documentation for uMod, with more on the way
- Improved the private messaging system (search, archiving, locking, leaving, pagination, etc.)
- Added the ability to search the forums
- Added support for extensions and depending on extensions
- Added the ability to @mention users in forum posts
- Switched to a better/prettier syntax highlighter
- Many other smaller fixes, optimizations
CORE DEVELOPMENT
- Renaming Oxide to uMod
We have started renaming the core components, such as Oxide.Core, Oxide.CSharp, etc. to reflect the new name of the project. Oxide.CSharp will also be merged into the core. We will not be accepting pull requests for the older repositories until the renaming process is complete. Existing pull requests will be manually pulled if relevant. - API and hook cleanup
There has been a lot of changes to what Oxide's core has provided over the past years, a lot of which are a bit dated and no longer follow the design of newer API we offer such as Covalence (the universal plugin API, temp name). With the rename to uMod, we'll be working through the code for each game we support along with the core to cleanup and standardize the offerings, which also includes hook naming. - Web request security
Many of the games that uMod supports use an older version of Mono. The SSL support in these older versions of Mono is, frankly, broken (relative to modern security standards). Shortly we will be adding a new third-party library to uMod distributions which will replace our reliance on legacy versions of System.Net and as such substantially improve the security of web requests made via plugins, extensions, and uMod itself.
This new library is not free to us and will likely cost at least $500-$1000 (best estimate at the moment). Wulf and myself will be splitting the cost of this new library; but if you are in a position to support uMod development, please consider donating via our Patreon page so we can afford important upgrades like this.
THE MARKETPLACE
Due to the rushed and admittedly premature release of the new uMod site, we've been focused largely on migrating, stablizing the site, and improving the free and open-source side of uMod. This effort has consumed most of the time and resources we have available, forcing us to delay our plans for an official uMod Marketplace. That said, this important feature is still planned and will be released as soon as possible.