SPTarkov: History - JUSTEMUTARKOV 2019
After setting up a discord account and joining the mysterious server, both BALIST0N and I got greeted respectfully by TheMaoci and his friends. This is also the moment when BALIST0N and I spoke with each other in real time for the first time. With his good taste in music and a cheery attitude it didn't take long for us to become good friends. TheMaoci and I spend hours talking about random things like anime, programming, interests, etc.
It was quickly decided that my fork of EmuTarkov would be used for development of JET as mine was a bit ahead and was the cleanest. Porting over changes and fixes made by BALIST0N and TheMaoci, we quickly scrambled a release of JET (0.5.0) and published it 2019-04-24.
Much work was done in the meantime when 0.7.3 arrived, I made a working server-side HTTP backend to handle multiple clients and Apofis made a primitve raid server implementing EFT's netcode. Initial repairs and insurance code was written, some quests could be completed and more work was done for bot generation. The most impressive? Actual offline progression! Sadly reality kicked in and had to go back to actually doing things for university, went on a hiatus until 16 october that year.
Not soon after watching the last episode of "Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san", I changed my nickname from "No;Hurry" (short form of InNoHurry;ToCode, based on the anime InNoHurry;ToShout) to "Senko-san" and my profile picture from my handdrawn smug looking cat to the character of the anime; a caring and cheerful demigod blonde foxgirl in shrine maiden outfit.
When I returned, TheMaoci showed me around in a small discord community he created. The first 100 members were there already like Echo-chan, Ereshkigal (called Sorata-sempai back then), AssAssIn, Karma, Cheeki Breeki, Ivan, SergeyVampire, XkaOnslaught, Arkmah1123, Saaly, Ishige and RaiRaiTheRaichu. I still talk to most them from time to time.
It was surreal to see people praising, discussing and complaining about the work for the first time in real time. Sadly I didn't had time to introduce myself to everyone just yet; BALIST0N send me an urgent message. TheMaoci wrote such bad server code that it was in dire need of a rewrite.
So I sat down with BALIST0N and TheMaoci to prepare 0.8.0; a complete rewrite of the server. TheMaoci was more occupied with "other things" so it was mostly me with the help of BALIST0N doing the rewrite. EFT 0.12 was around the corner and everyone was excited for the new map (Reserve Base) and all the cool new equipment that came with it. The decision was made to pospone 0.8.0 so we can use 0.12.
A mistake.
It was an awful lot of pain to get it working since BSG did actually made substantial changes to the server-side. It took nearly 1 month to finalize the release. The famous phrase "0.12 when" became a thing and so SPTarkov memes were born. It's also around the time I started to get more involved with the community. TheMaoci made a new devblog channel for me in which I happily showed everyone what we've been up to. I got Ereshkigal, Shiro (RedRafa) and Frumorn to be my helpers and moderators.
The release of 0.8.0 was a huge success. The discord grew almost overnight from 3000 members to 8000. There were plenty of unimplemented ends, but the core functionality was rock solid. There was huge appriciation for the work done and the "helpme" channel became a cesspit of new rude users. Some things never change. The first mods were created here too; the shorty SR-25 (aka the SR-25 with a MPX-SD barrel and snow texture) being among my favorites.
It was after I started to spend more time with the community that I was beginning to notice TheMaoci being not the guy I thought he was. He made cheats for EFT to be used online, and I really do not like online cheaters. He sold harvested game data. And not long after me finding out he started to try and talk me into accepting obfuscation for the project, wanting to sell the project and he began publicly cheating in the discord. The discord broke in two; people who supported him and those who supported me. I had enough when I had a big fallout when he brought up the point of making it closed source again.
He was the only one who knew the client-side changes, I was the only one who maintained the whole server as BALIST0N went on a break starting January. In order to solve the dependency issue, I sweet talked TheMaoci into teaching me the BattlEye patching work and the offline raid save code. It worked. Then I sat down with Ereshkigal, Shiro, Frumorn and BALIST0N when he came back for creating the new community. With their support and guidance, the discord was set up and the announcement was made on 2020-02-24 in the devblog channel of JET.
"I am moving development to my own public repo and dev-oriented community, feel free to join! I still wish to collaborate with JET and contribute where I can."
For TheMaoci, this was betrayal and the breakup of a community. For me, this was my only chance at making this project survive.
The last version released was 0.8.5, EFT versions 0.11.7.3333 to 0.12.1.X.