Rocket, later RocketMod started at the end of December 2014.
Sven "fr34kyn01535" was initially helping "Kunii" with the kLoader. The kLoader was an experiment that was built on a loose Unturned 2 game hack framework. Technically it consisted of an patcher that would inject new MSIL instructions into the major Unturned game binaries to allow for loading an additonal payload. "Kunii" had no time to put alot of work into this project, so Sven decided to rewrite his attempts in order to launch this as a full fledged plugin loader. "Kunii" left the project in early 2015.
Sven had in mind a big community of plugin creators for Unturned 3 and built the cornerstones of such. Over the years he has created plugin repositories, forums, websites and kept adding new features to RocketMod and his own plugins. RocketMod quickly assimilated all other attempts to "full featured" Unturned 3 extensions by having an easy to understand clean plugin API. Even though we never had a proper documentation, we count over 500 plugins on community websites with a few million downloads. Nelson, the game developer of Unturned quickly liked the idea and supported Sven. Nelson rewrote Unturned 3 to automatically load RocketMod and stopped obfuscation to support plugin developers add new game mechanics themselves. Multiplayer servers quickly went to over 75% adoption rate of RocketMod.
In April 2018 the project had 4 contributors beside Sven, each of them only contributing a single commit. Simon "Freenex1911" and "Zamirathe" were the first plugin developers with a good portfolio of plugins, both were also very helpfull to people in the community forums and supported as moderator. In May, Enes "Trojaner" started commiting to the code, becoming a contributor later that year. He shared the vision of a modular game framework to be reused across different Unity games. We sat together designing the new architecture, introduced dependency injection and decoupled the core components. At one point the community stagnated. Due to the announcement of a new Unturned Game and decreasing interest in community participation we grew tired of adding new features.
We want to thank all contributors to RocketMod and its projects, all creators of plugins and the server hosters for the fun time we had with this project.
Notable contributors:
Eco implementation
Documentation
Special thanks
- Nelson for breaking RocketMod now and then
- Gray, MasterCreate66, Trivera for initial testing
- Zamirathe, Freenex1911, KlaasM for their support
Technically the RocketMod repository was Sven's property. He was the owner of all code in RocketMod.Core, all contributors signed a contract to give up their rights on their contribution. Sven did this to protect the community from early fragmentation and exploitation.
As of today, December 20 2019, Sven resigns as maintainer on all RocketMod repos, setting free all code under the MIT license. Enes will also lay down his work on RocketMod 5. He just finished the first implementation RocketMod 5. Seeing no future in Unturned 3, and having our community consisting of mostly members around that game he also resigns as maintainer.
Sven already started to tear infrastructure that rested on his shoulders. We hope that somebody in the community will continue our efforts. Sven is available for consulation but won't be afilliated in similar projects in the near future.
Go create your own RocketMod, find a new name, build a new team and make multiplayer gaming more enjoyable! Take our ideas and implementations and use them for good. Its all yours.
- Sven Mawby "fr34kyn01535" - Enes Sadık Özbek "Trojaner"
I've kept the Reddit sub at https://www.reddit.com/r/rocketmod/ open, feel free to participate there to talk about the future of RocketMod.