SPTarkov: History - EMUTARKOV 2020
Within the same hour, 3000 people joined the discord. It was flooded far beyond the scope I intended for; a small development-focussed community. Many changes and mistakes were rapidly made. The biggest one was the creation and almost instant deletion of a russian-spoken channel, which promtly led the creation of the JRT (JustRussianTarkov) community.
When TheMaoci joined my discord and him trying to ceremonially handing over his community to him, he claimed he did just as much work as I did. That pissed me off on so many levels that I pulled up the commit log and gave him a reality check. It resulted in me getting doxxed (have your private information shared) by him.
Since there was so much going on, I made a small discord which I placed trusted members in; "Senko's Safe Haven". This server is where I would do most of the work without disturbance and functioned in the same model as the old Safe Haven server that TheMaoci made for JET. This was jokingly refered to in public as the VIP server.
Most of this period is a blur in my head. I felt a really strong responsability to carry on the project, combined with the global pandemic at the time, I made it a habbit to sleep less than 2 hours a day and drinking copius amounts of energy drink. It was often joked about that I never slept.
The biggest things I still remember was PoloYolo making all kind of insane Assembly-CSharp (game code) patches which were injected by hand for each version, prompting BASURO to make tools to simplify the comparing of C# dll files. Wanting something more maintainable, I designed the precursor to BepInEx mods: the module system.
Basically BattlEye scans all loaded dlls, preventing loading. But BattlEye depends on NLog, which has a build-in assembly loader (NLog Targets). By faking my dll to be an NLog Target, we could load custom code before BattleEye was able to detect it. I got most of the work done, stx09 taught me the missing pieces.
Another big thing was Craink coming from a chinese forum to help out to implement bundle loading; aka being able to import custom assets. This layed the ground work of what's still used today inside Aki.
Since I was so busy with making the project, Frumon and Shiro operated under AWX as head moderator. This is where I learned that free speech in an online an online community. Due to AWX's choices, it became acceptible to post the most vile videos I've seen in my life because of "free speech". When I saw it, AWX got kicked out and we started to clean up the discord. Eresh became part of the moderation team.
In the middle of June 2020, BSG was onto the project. It grew to roughtly 10000 users and simply became talked about too often in the public eye. First somewhat accepting the project, but later judged it to be a cheating platform. Technically, they were not wrong. Historically EmuTarkov indeed had been used that way. With false DMCA strikes from TheMaoci on the project source and with the discord receiving a warning from discord, as well as the community growing jaded and toxic, it was time to look for greener pastures.
Different platforms were evaluated, but in the end we settled with guilded. I send them an email explaining the situation and created the server on 2020-07-15.
The last version released was 0.12.5-R6, EFT versions 0.12.3 to 0.12.5.