Hi, I'm a new member here. I was poking around in the old mods area, and stumbled upon Alteisan Arsenal Labs, AAL for short, by numgun. From what I have gathered, at some point numgun left the forums and removed all the links to his mods. Later, the mods were "un-banned" (I don't even...??) and re-posted by the mods in this post.

With the release of B30 people can now release mods to Steam Workshop. I'm wondering if I would be allowed to re-release these mods as long as I give credit. The latest available version of AAL works perfectly fine with B30.

Current known bug list:
-Slayer doesn't work on Macs due to file pathing issues that shouldn't exist (was an issue even back when the mod was released)
-Reloading animation is broken; actors flail BG arm wildly until reloaded
-Placing an AAL Reactor (bunker module) does not actually place it because the reactor is a TerrainObject and not an Actor, so the game still thinks you need to place it after attempting to.
-Anti-gravity craft e.g. Harvester and Fighter don't do the anti-gravity thing and fall towards the ground (not sure about this one?)

Possible changes:
-Loadouts to make it compatible with metagame
-Separation of weapons from units. Auto-loadouts are nice, but I find that 150 for a pilot with a sniper rifle, energy sword, and two grenades is way too cheap.
-Maybe a faction file for UL2/VW.
(Oh, and even though that would be super crazy really-hard-to-do insanity, taking that hover tank and converting it from an ACrab to something with actual thrusters would be cool as heck)

Thinking of maybe moving this to the Mod Releases forum, at least after I have a real "update" done.

Currently I'm working on giving the weapons and actors proper pricing, which will probably take quite some time due to playtesting. Currently, the idea is that each actor's loadout would cost equal to what it used to, WITHOUT the actor. You aren't getting that actor for free anymore.

The Pilots and their weaponry have been priced as follows:
Orange Pilot (Jump Pack): 110
Dark Pilot (Jetpack): 115
Thermal Energy Rifle: 90
Thermal Impulse Rifle: 90
Thermal Energy Sword: 50
Thermal Impulse Grenade + Charge: 5

If anyone takes a serious look at the weapons themselves, let me know if the prices should be changed.

There's not really a precedent about the legality of numgun's claims to his mods. On paper he has very few rights to his mod, mostly to his sprites and if he made any sounds, but in practice most people consider a mod to be copyrightable as a unit.
My best counsel (speaking not as an official of DRL or the forum) is to release it but provide a really giant disclaimer that it is not your mod, you merely updated it to be B30 compatible, linking to numgun's original forum post and whatnot.

Thanks for the imformation. I just needed to be sure; putting a disclaimer and a link to the original forum post was already something that I was going to do. What I really want to know is whether or not it's allowed to release an unofficial update that might do bugfixes or separate the weapons from the actors so as to allow it for proper use in Unmapped Lands 2 or Void Wanderers.

I'm getting the hint that it's probably not allowed if I'm changing the mod in any way from how it used to work. Probably not, as there's no way for me to make an actual "continuation" mod with permission from the author.

EDIT:
Actually, now that I think of it, I could make it compatible with metagame and UL2/VW just by using loadout and faction files. Go ahead and close/delete this topic if you wish, I won't be making any additions/changes to the mod's functionality. I'm even going to get the older build of CC to find out whether the bugs used to exist back then/whether certain things really are acting as they were intended. MOREEDIT: where can i get a reliable B23/26? i'd like to see how it worked in older versions, but I don't know where to reliably get them.

And in case you were wondering why the whole time I was only talking about AAL, it's because that's both what I was using as an example and the first one I decided to look at.

It's not really a matter of what's allowed or not, we just don't have any sort of precedent so I can't give you a good solid answer one way or another. If you can add cross-compatibility with a minimum of changes I don't see why that'd be a problem, especially since nummy has pretty much abandoned the forums (and presumably the workshop).

You could ask him at reactorcoregames@gmail.com

I dunno about that, sounds really risky. Asking about mods that were abandoned 5 years ago suddenly being brought back to light? For all I know, the first thing he might remember is the copycat flamer wars that apparently went on, and could retaliate by saying "why do you even care??" or worse. Or he could remember that he once had plans to update some of them and support what I'm doing. Feel free to tell me if you honestly believe I should contact him about this; I'm scared to.

After actually trying a B23 demo, the bugs are still there, except the reactor placing one. In the old days, you could place as many brain units as you wanted apparently, so the game didn't care. Now, with only one brain unit, the brain isn't actually placed until the game has started, so that doesn't allow a TerrainObject-based brain. Can Lua code spawn TerrainObjects? That would be cool. Probably not though.

EDIT: One of Whitty's mods was a Block Bomb, which spawned a block of concrete, complete with texture. Gonna look at that and see if I could adapt that to the reactor shield system as well.

I don't know about you guys but it seems weird to play with someone's toys behind their back. Honestly there's nothing to be afraid of; he's a pretty decent guy and you're not asking for much at all.

If you can contact him through that email, do so, always a good thing to do. I don't know why he wouldn't grant permission to update compatibility with credits (unless he's still stuck on hating DRL for whatever reason he had before).

I know that the "AAL Experimental" mod (the one that includes the Ypsilon Cannon which has become legend in this community) no longer works at all. You think you could take a look at it too?