Hello from ijedi1234 (and a question about providing my own Kopernicus update)

[ijedi1234]

Hi, I'm ijedi1234. I've been playing KSP for a bit, but I only just managed to get to Minmus this week! Those orange tanks were more useful than I thought.

So, I have been playing with lots of mods in 1.2, and I found out that Kopernicus broke with 1.2.1. Fortunately, I do have knowledge about C# and Visual Studio, so I managed to compile my own personal version of Kopernicus. The file sizes of the various DLLs seems very different from the 1.2 versions and KSP has a few strange 5 second slowdowns during startup, but the Outer Planets Mod from 1.1.3 seems to be working properly at least. Although I have seen a lot about asking for updates, I haven't seen anything about someone giving out their own working update of a mod. Is it fine if I just zip the DLLs, put it on Google Docs, and provide the link in the Kopernicus thread?

[ijedi1234]

Hi, I'm ijedi1234. I've been playing KSP for a bit, but I only just managed to get to Minmus this week! Those orange tanks were more useful than I thought.

So, I have been playing with lots of mods in 1.2, and I found out that Kopernicus broke with 1.2.1. Fortunately, I do have knowledge about C# and Visual Studio, so I managed to compile my own personal version of Kopernicus. The file sizes of the various DLLs seems very different from the 1.2 versions and KSP has a few strange 5 second slowdowns during startup, but the Outer Planets Mod from 1.1.3 seems to be working properly at least. Although I have seen a lot about asking for updates, I haven't seen anything about someone giving out their own working update of a mod. Is it fine if I just zip the DLLs, put it on Google Docs, and provide the link in the Kopernicus thread?

[Snark]

Hello, and welcome to KSP! 

10 minutes ago, ijedi1234 said:

Although I have seen a lot about asking for updates, I haven't seen anything about someone giving out their own working update of a mod. Is it fine if I just zip the DLLs, put it on Google Docs, and provide the link in the Kopernicus thread?

I know you mean well and are just trying to help, but please, don't do that.  Detailed reasons why are in a spoiler section below, but the TL;DR is "because it's not only unnecessary, but will also make the mod author's life a living hell."

Spoiler

Kopernicus is not a "dead" mod.  The author actively works on it, and tries to keep it up to date.  The reason the mod is "broken" in 1.2.1 is that the author specifically put a lock in it for that very purpose, for lots of good reasons that for brevity's sake I won't go into here, but it boils down to "because if he didn't do that, his life would turn into a living hell."  He put that lock in place so that he'd have some breathing room to update the mod properly and make sure that it works, before opening the doors to the world.  He hasn't updated it yet because 1.2.1 has barely been out for 24 hours yet!  So please respect the mod author's choice and don't sabotage his efforts to keep his mod running smoothly.

On a more general note:  This is not just about Kopernicus, either.  True, it's fairly unusual for a mod to put an explicit, deliberate "version lock" in place, as Kopernicus does (because it has some unique circumstances that make it necessary), so much of what I say above is specific to Kopernicus.  However, also please don't do that with mods, in general.  If you tinker with a mod, and release it into the wild, it is outside of your control and can proliferate and get copied around.  And your mod is now not the "official" mod; it has your own fingerprints all over it, possibly bugs you introduced, who-knows-what.  That makes life a nightmare for the legitimate author of the mod, because the zillions of people using your altered copy don't know that it's a fake, and will show up on the author's doorstep with nonsensical bug reports that will waste the author's time and cause no end of aggravation.

Also:  There can be legal implications, depending on the mod.  Mods have licenses.  Some licenses may explicitly prohibit you from doing what you just described, so you're not actually legally allowed to.

Really, what it boils down to is this:  Mods are the product of mod authors.  The mod author has done you a great service by providing this mod, for free.  Please respect the mod author's service to us all by not distributing modified versions of the mod.  Let the mod author do the update.

Anyway, welcome to the forums, and happy flying!