Re: Download Zone Code Pre Gfx.ff Modern Warfare.rar
Latrina Cobbett
Hey everyone, I'm sad that it had to come to this, but it's finally time.
Due to an even higher volume of harassment and slander that I've been met with in the past few weeks, I am entirelyquitting modding.
Some people might've realized already that the Discord link is missing on the website, I am scheduling my Discordaccount for termination.
I have released new, final versions of every mod I still actively support, from NFS to Midtown Madness, just to makesure nothing is left unfinished or inconsistent.
It turns out the people who have been harassing me non-stop for the past 3 years were not stopped by me simply quittingGTA.
I have recently heard that they were trying to pin the GTA V leaks on me, and considering they're willing to go THISfar, even putting me into the crosshairs of Take-Two, and also considering people are believing it wholesale, I am notgoing to risk anything this serious. I quit.
Before that though, I'd like to make a final statement about everything that I've been put through over the years.Basically a warning about ever interacting with the GTA modding community.
If you haven't read my previous post about quitting GTA, go read it now. It'll put a lot of things into context.
For some additional context, we'll have to go WAY back. I've already said that these people are willing to use years-oldout of context screenshots to discredit and slander me, so we're going all the way back to 2020, when I was 16.
At that time, I was part of a GTA IV multiplayer community. We were basically the main group of people who still playedMP, organized events, etc. My Discord server was originally a place only for this community.
In fact, this is where both ZPatch and ZMenu initially came from! ZPatch being a fork of XLivelessAddon withcompatibility for Games for Windows - LIVE, to make features such as the intro skip work in multiplayer, and ZMenu beinga replacement for Simple Native Trainer for messing about in freemode, since patch 1.0.8.0 removed the separated lobbysystem between modders and non-modders but broke compatibility with Simple Native Trainer, so we had to find or createan alternative, which is where I stepped in and ZMenu was born.
It was a tight community, we took care of our own and self-moderated the Peer 2 Peer matches, so we could play in publiclobbies and not be bothered by the countless cheaters.
For context, it was remarkably easy to just go on Google and install a mod that allows you to crash the games of entirelobbies of players. We were trying to counter this in any way possible, and were mostly successful in doing so, althoughthere were some really sophisticated tools that could crash lobbies in a single frame after the player joined in.
I was one of the main people who helped with this anti-cheat effort, I created ways to auto-kick and auto-ban cheatingplayers if you're the host of a match, first based on player name, then based on XUID (the Xbox Live user ID), PCID (an Xbox Live generated unique ID, completely random) and IP.
All of this information is in plain view as the game's multiplayer is Peer 2 Peer, which makes this rather simple.If I recall correctly, a part of this still lives on in a similar community called GTRF, where they are using a specialscript to ban cheaters on an XUID blacklist if the community is hosting a game.
All of which were in the community Discord, in which we were updating each other's ban lists, and lists of people tolook out for. You don't even have to look elsewhere for context, most of it is right there in the screenshots, talking about people crashing lobbies and how we had to IP-ban them. To clarify even further, none of this was ever part of any version of any mod I've ever released, this was a strictly private moderation tool, just for the community.
The only thing I did wrong here was not clearing all the old logs earlier, as soon as my server became more than just a small GTA IV multiplayer community, which I do admit was a bad move, but it didn't occur to me until it was too late.
Some time passed, and GTA Connected came out. We were still the main group of people who still played multiplayer, andso we were giving advice to the developers on how to make it as good as possible.
One of the ideas was having advanced moderation tools, such as being able to see what mods/scripts each player hasinstalled. These were later added, which made things a lot easier in terms of moderating a GTA Connected server.
I also cooperated on my end, by adding specific support for GTA Connected into my trainer, allowing server admins to"limit" ZMenu on their servers to prevent cheating, making only the harmless features be available. (what I referred to as a "killswitch")
If the fact that server admins can check if you're cheating and see & ban your IP is something that bothers you, neverplay on any community server for any game. This is really basic stuff.
The last screenshot also debunks itself, as it can clearly be seen that I was talking about my own self-hosted GTA Connected server.
Another method we were using later on to weed out cheaters was finding out which players spawned which objects. I madean option in ZPatch to log vehicle/ped/object spawns into the GTA Connected console and tie them to players (still thereby the way! DebugPrintSpawns=1 and you won't have to wonder who spawned those disco balls on your head) to help tracedown any griefers and crashers.
To further elaborate on this console, only the spawn logs are printed by ZPatch. Any claims of my mods printing IPaddresses in this console are untrue, and you can likely still enable and view this console in the current version ofGTA Connected, and see the (fake, as the mod routes traffic through the server) IP addresses of players joining/leaving,without having any of my mods installed.
In fact, here's someone pointing this very thing out at the time, to the rumor spreader's face. (Memorize his name, itwill come up later!) Didn't stop him from using this to slander me all the way up to now, though.
I'm sure it doesn't need to be said on top of all this, but claims of my mods "leaking" your IP or any other personalinformation are blatantly false, and these previously out-of-context screenshots are the closest thing people can get toevidence for it. In fact, I have only recently even started looking into how network connectivity works in late 2023 forChaos Multiplayer, before which I had no idea how to do anything like that even if I wanted to.
Yet this non-existent drama from 2020 is still being perpetuated to smear me, some of these screenshots even beingpresent in the newest bit of slander.
But now that that's out of the way, we can fast-forward a bit. I quit the aforementioned GTA IV multiplayer communitydue to toxicity, (looking back, I can't believe I was okay with them in the first place, but hey, I was there fromroughly age 14 til 17, kids can be dumb) and moved on to singleplayer modding.
ZMenu and ZPatch were both in their heyday at this time, with tons of updates every week, major features being added andbugs being fixed. I also started branching out into other games such as FlatOut and NFS.
None of my mods supported the newest version of GTA IV though, as they removed multiplayer, which I still saw as themain reason for my mods' existence. (not to mention the instability and countless laughable issues with the newestversion, even moreso at the time)
Around the same time, I started seeing FusionFix get suspiciously similar features to ZPatch, fixes which I never sharedto anyone.
For example, the bike phonecall animation fix and vehicle reversing lights fix:
As you can clearly see, both mods patch the exact same code in almost the exact same way, and it was committed toFusionFix by one of the initial main spreaders of this rumor, who has self-admittedly reverse engineered and lookedthrough my mod's code (see the forum posts above), mere weeks apart from the initial accusations starting:
This did not stop the rumor mill though, and things got way worse over time.
In 2022-2023, roughly after I added pride flags to ZMenu, I started randomly seeing people in forum threads and Discordbringing up the same claims and screenshots, using them to tarnish my reputation:
One of these forum posts was incredibly vile, and tried to masquerade itself as a "no-rainbow" version of my trainer:
Which, if unzipped, was the latest version of my trainer with the pride flags intact, but a new readme added, containingsome deranged ramblings and an attempted dox of my real name:
(There is nothing remotely suspicious about this, I obfuscated the link to my Patreon so script kiddies couldn't hackthe mod to get rid of credits. You can even piece the text back together from the code screenshots, "This will open a browser window. Are you sure?")
This was also around the same time that the frequently linked video was created, containing all of the above out of contextscreenshots and deceptive code snippets, by UnitedMel. (I mean come on, it was uploaded by WagnerPrivateModdingCompany, it couldn't be any moreobvious)
This kept festering for months, but there was a breaking point, when I added support for loading shaders into IVTweaker, my GTA IV modloader.
I thought this was a completely innocent feature, since shader mods started becoming popular, and my modloader was meantto make almost all mods work without any game files having to be replaced.
I was wrong.
It immediately caused a massive uproar of people claiming I am somehow stealing fame from FusionFix for daring to makemy mod able to load shaders, and that I'm looking for clout:
During this and after it blew over, I always made myself clear: I was willing to talk, as long as it was on even ground.This led to a development.
Ash_735 messaged me on Discord, we had a friendly talk, and we tried to work something out. It was rather obvious thatthere was a lot going on in the background during that bit of drama, and I tried my best to clear it all up.
Afterwards, I came to a conclusion: I'll try to make peace, and work on a port of FusionFix to 1.0.7.0/1.0.8.0, and sending themZPatch features they can port back to the main branch.