Modding Limits and Legal terms.

So... I already read many posts on Unity forum.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-modding-legal-questions.255624/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-do-i-create-a-modding-api-for-my-unity-game.1218339/
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.burst@1.5/manual/docs/ModdingSupport.html

And much others topics, but still have some question, so I am creating a topic to solve these questions.

* Did I need to limit my ModLoader?
I saw peoples limiting librarys like System.Reflection or System.IO when loading mods, should I limit it?

* Can I create my game like a "Mod"?
Games like Rimworld have a Base/Core mod, but I don't know if there is a difference to allow it. I read on one topic, that say you can't create a game that allow players to "create" a "new game".

* What's the correct way to license my game?
Self explained but, how can I do game to have copyrights, and less the amount of malicious mods that affect players?

 

Please add more context. I'm not sure what "ModLoader" is. Is that something Unity provides?

Similar with the next question: is it allowed to let players create a new game? You can let users do anything they want with your game if you give them the right to do so (and the tools). If you feel that it may not be allowed that indicates to me that you want to publish through a platform or use a service that may or may not allow that - what platform/service is that?

Whatever you want. By default, you own the copyright to all content you created yourself. You can choose to publish all artwork with a CC-BY license for example. Or put every mod scripts under MIT License.

That sentence doesn't make sense. My best guess is you want to have fewer malicious mods? If that is the case, you cannot do that with licensing alone. You need to actively monitor and possibly review what players create, and even then malicious actions will happen.

 

Sorry for not explaining. Well, I have a script that loads mods, it's called ModLoader. This is not provided by Unity, it loads an external DLL to modify the game, register the mod and update.

Thanks for answering my question about allowing players to mod however they want. I still haven't decided the platform to publish it. I'm planning the game before starting scripting and building.

Yes, I'm a little afraid of malicious mods, I know I can't stop someone for creating them. I had an idea and planning how to execute it.

Also how can I do things like this?

(This is a screenshot)


I would like to answer this way for further compression, I am newbie, so need some experience.

 

Honestly I'd recommend to publish a normal, unmoddable game first and gather experience with that. Or go with simple "modding" like allowing player to reskin their characters (e.g. by loading them from a .png file at runtime) or include a map editor.
Making a mod takes lots of effort. The probability that a game early in your career becomes popular enough that somebody will do that effort, is near zero.

What you are asking here unfortunately makes little sense (albeit part of the cause could well be a language barrier).

 

Its a very gray area and one I'm trying to find out more about as well, with regards to making a creative gui-based app in unity that does animation etc. When you start allowing users to configure things, it could be taken as far as to allow them a great deal of flexibility, freedom, openness,... and at some point they become able to use your game/mod-system etc to create stuff which is really quite different to the original. At some vague point it gets to where you've given so many freedoms that they could significantly break out of the mold of what consistutes "the game" and build other stuff which can be quite diverse. At what point does it step over the line? At what point is is not competing with Unity? It's all such a blurred spectrum it's pretty hard to know where to draw a line.

For example I want to be able to let users of my app configure the actual tools and add 'new ones'. Which means the ability to build/add custom gui components. Granted they have to use the built in functionality (which isn't by any means a 1:1 mapping of unity's functionalities), but at some point this flexibility is quite open ended and could be considered starting to step on Unity's toes.

Similarly Unity has been moving a lot into animation, film, realtime arnimations, and so on, so now if you want to use unity to make a creative animation app of some kind, something like adobe animate or similar, its now questionable whether that is allowing too many freedoms as to become competitive.

If you 'mod' a game and this entails keeping a large amount of the game's sort of structure, or the gameplay limitations, or some of its look-n-feel, or the control system etc, then maybe that's fine. But what if you allow the users to do some scripting? Or they can replace all the images and turn your earthly game environments into a space station? And what if you can configure so much stuff that you can practically make a whole different kind of game experience? At some point the game is turning into a kind of abstract "platform". So what's the difference between some sort of partially fixed functionality + configuration menus, versus somewhat more open lower-level functionality that allows for a wider diversity of "divergence" from the original design?

 

You don't even need to provide modding support for your Unity games these days. There are frameworks like BepInEx that can mod pretty much any Unity game. The first step is having a game people would even want to mod in the first place.

 

Honestly this is a good point, allowing people to create everything can be daunting, I'll do something like you said.

About the language barrier, I'm Brazilian and I can speak English, I'm not saying I know all the words or I can read all the sentences, but I can communicate very well with other people.

 

That's what I want, I like to make things moddable for people to do what they want, I don't mean like an engine you need to program the game. But as a game with an extensive mod API, I can imagine people turning my game into something spacey or aquatic, and I like to give modders that freedom. However, it looks like this could be very dangerous.