Whitelisting

Whitelisting

Whitelisting is Offworld Industries’ official thumbs up for a mod that we see shows creativity, ambition, curiosity, innovation, and accomplishment. We’re looking for modifications that stand out by promoting teamwork, innovation, skill development, or are just downright pushing the envelope in what it means to have fun playing Squad — mods that really take everyone to new places without forgetting their roots!

Mods that are a good candidate for whitelisting should be engaging, innovative, and offer more than the base Squad experience — no matter if they’re building on it or changing it entirely. Whether your focus is on perfecting the AK-47 line of weaponry or creating a new drone racing league, we want to see what your imagination can dream up for the community.

Once a mod has met our criteria for selection, we’ll ensure that the mod developer keeps it ready for you to enjoy.

Whitelisting applications will then go through a full-scale whitelist playtest event, which will ensure that they are fully ready to go, as well as being the right fight for the legion of squaddies out there.

The Process

A note before we begin: We’d like to be as transparent as possible, and so, as with all things Squad, the process may have some growing pains. The steps below may be subject to change. We are currently accepting applications for kickass mods, which can be entered here: Mod Whitelisting Application

Phase 1

Before submitting a modification, evaluate and update to meet any remaining whitelisting requirements. (See below.) Test your modification to ensure quality, performance, and stability. Once it’s proven itself worthy, be sure to record any necessary documentation and make it available. (e.g., Special requirements, information players need to know to succeed.)

Phase 2

Apply for Whitelisting using the Whitelisting Application Form. Be sure to provide all the necessary information and test results!

Phase 3

Whitelist applications are reviewed and prioritized based on quality, popularity, and content. Whitelist applicants may be mentioned and featured in the monthly Wrench updates. Just one more chance for you to shine!

Phase 4

Offworld Industries selects mod(s) for a testing event and begins evaluating the modification for whitelisting. There will also be a popular vote happening, which will allow the community to vote one additional mod to the whitelisting playtest event. (Provided it meets the whitelisting criteria.)

Phase 5

The Quality Assurance team schedules the whitelisting playtest event to be run will be run in the main server browser near the top. These are done periodically, depending on the available capacity and the number of applications.

Whitelisting playtests will be announced in the announcement box on the left of the main menu.  Alternatively, if a mod is already doing regular full-scale custom server events, they can invite QA members over to one of them to evaluate it for whitelisting on a shorter term.

Phase 6

Based on the results of the playtest event, a mod will either be

  • Approved directly for whitelisting. No issues found.
  • Conditionally approved for whitelisting: Further fixes required are required, but further testing is NOT required
  • Turned down for whitelisting: it did not meet some or all of the criteria.

If a modification is turned down, it can be re-tested at a later stage, but it will have to queue up back in line with the other applicants.

The Criteria

Before your mod can apply for whitelisting, you need to make sure that it’s ready to deploy!

You will need to ensure it performs well, that it is stable, and that it functions as intended. This criterion will require some preliminary playtesting that you will be responsible for organizing. On top of that, you’ll need to ensure that your documentation is up to date.

Below is the complete list of criteria that you will need to check off before applying for whitelisting.

Quality

  • The modification is stable: no client crashes, no server crashes.
  • Performance in-game is comparable to large Squad maps. (Compare GPU/game timings during gameplay at high player count.)
  • No game-breaking, significantly gameplay-impacting, or severe graphical bugs.
  • Must cook for Linux and Windows servers

We have a wiki article for assistance on Map Optimizations that is recommended reading.

Content

  • No content that is sexual, racist, excessively graphic, politically sensitive, overly offensive, or illegal.
  • Modifications must adhere to the modding rules of the Steam Workshop.
  • It must be available to everyone. (No locked servers in the main server browser.)
  • Only SDK or original content used; no licensed content can be used without a license.

Documentation

  • Every mod requires a short name or abbreviation that can (and must) be added to server names hosting it. (E.g. A server hosting “Awesome Mod” might use [AM] Newbies Welcome Mod Server!)”
  • Full documentation for players, including at the very least a description and some screenshots.
  • Full documentation for admins:
    • Clear description of hosting requirements, such as player count limits.
    • Complete list of maps/layers.
    • Required server setup, commands.
    • Known issues and limitations

Communication & Ownership

  • There must be a point of contact for server admins and developers.
  • Clear channel of communication to hosting servers regarding mod updates.
  • Proactive attitude towards ensuring and maintaining the quality of the mod. Own it!

Updating

  • Updates need to be adequately tested before being released. After being whitelisted, the authors will remain fully responsible for this testing.  (Tip: A good practice would be to work with two different mod IDs for updates; one for the whitelisted “stable” mod and one cloned “dev” mod ID for in-progress stuff. That way, updates can be tested in the custom browser with your community on the “dev” mod for verification, and then pushed to the “live” mod when it’s verified to be functional and stable.)
  • There will be a specific date/time window during which whitelisted mods are allowed to push updates. (Absolutely critical bug fixes can be done outside of this window, but only in apparent cooperation with the server owners that host the mod). This limitation is to prevent version mismatches and ensures servers will not need to update or lose their players unnecessarily often. Our suggestion for this is Modding Monday, with specific update times being communicated clearly and well in advance to all licensed servers hosting your mod.
  • Following significant updates on Squad, whitelisting will be temporarily disabled to prevent issues with mods on whitelisted servers. After a brief re-verification of stability, they can be re-whitelisted again.

By making the mod more visible and having players use their content, we hope that this whitelisting process will reward everyone that has spent a significant amount of time making a great mod. Our hope is also that the full-scale playtest events, the announcements in the news box, and the community voting events will generate some extra exposure and community excitement for your mods. Players should experience your work!

Future Plans

  • Help modders optimize their content for whitelisting. To this end, documentation will be made available and expanded upon. We’d also like to formalize a point of contact for modding questions.
  • We will be working on a better system for mods that don’t require the full Linux installation files to be present on the client as part of the version check.
  • After our core in-game systems are stable and capacity allows for it, we intend to make some programmer time available to specifically fix issues that modders cannot fix on their own. (e.g., adding hooks, exposing variables, or fixing cleanup issues on map travel).
  • We will eventually be investigating what options there may be for (partial) uncoupling of mods from layers. (I.e., not requiring a mod to always load from a new or cloned layer.)
  • We may look into options for putting whitelisted modders under NDA to get them earlier versions of Squad SDK updates so that they can fix up their mods before an update.

Helpful Links

Squad Modding Hub Discord

Map Optimization

Squad Support

Squad Workshop

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