CUP/About

CUP v1

Originally, CUP (stands for Content Updates Panel) was conceived as a simple solution to allow modders to notify users about updates to their mods. Simply enter content ID (folder names), latest version and download URL, and Content Manager would notify users if their versions are older than available.

The whole thing was more of a temporary solution, and its backend was a mess of malfunctioning PHP scripts storing data in a bunch of slow and corruptable JSONs; because of that, it was invite-only, and even then it could not really keep up with the increasing number of users.

CUP v2

This, however, is a rewritten system, and now it can easily handle thousands of entries of all kinds. Its core is a lot more reliable and flexible, it has an original template implementation to ensure things remain safe, as well as a powerful plugins system allowing to add more and more functions without compromising the core components. And it already got a couple of new key features:

• Search registry: modders now can mark their content as searchable, and with it Content Manager users will be able to quickly install it if it is missing for an online server.
• Direct uploads: instead of relying on sometimes unreliable third-party cloud services such as Google Drive or Mega, CUPv2 can host files directly, providing the best download speeds thanks to Backblaze and Cloudflare.

But these two additions are only the beginning. In the near future, both of them will allow us to automatically scan directly uploaded files, analyze their contents and automatically generate a nice fully integrated mods gallery for both web and Content Manager, essentially turning CUPv2 into CM Workshop. Only thing left before that is to fully launch the CUPv2 into production, get modders onboard and collect more data.

You can read more about future plans in the roadmap.

Authorship protection

Another interesting aspect is the model protection. While we were working on the new system, news broke out about the old model encryption being broken. Taking into consideration all the controversies surrounding old system, and the fact that realistically any encryption done on client side cannot be secure forever, we are considering an alternative approach where CUP/CM Workshop could be used to track things like content authorship, to ensure some bad actors would not be able to simply steal content and pass it as their own (which seems to be the main point of encrypting models in the first place). There will be some extra features to automate this process and make stealing more complicated (while still allowing users to tweak mods to their own liking, which, of course, is one of key features of Assetto Corsa).

Coming soon

There are a lot more of interesting aspects this system could be used for, such as streaming content directly to AC for a faster launch, partially loading remote content online to save disk space, RAM and VRAM, maybe even unloading unused content to save a bit more disk space, and more. Stay tuned!