GTA V Redux Modder Alleged to have Stolen Code

A GTA forums user has accused the creator of one of the best-looking Grand Theft Auto V mods currently in development of stealing his code to make it. Forum user _CP_ claims that Josh Romito, developer of the GTA V Redux mod, stole chunks of code from his VisualV mod which, if _CP_ is to be believed, is the third time that Romito has plagiarised his work.

_CP_ wrote (verbatim):

“Josh Romito didnt learn a bit from his earlier attempts to mod Rockstars blockbuster game. I guess you remember why Miracle of V and Pinnacle of V were removed. If you dont remember, I’ll remind it for you his mods had a parts or even whole files from the other authors without permission, marked as done by Romito. What happened with GTA 5 Redux?

FILES WERE STOLEN AGAIN!

For the third time, he ripped off my work, a mod called VisualV. Now youre thinking am I doing a nonsense indictment just to hate him or something like that? Nope, there strong evidences which Ill show you right now. If you dont belive download both mods and compare yourself.

One of the files is visualsettings, related to various lights settings for the game, motion blur etc. One of the taken parameters is heightReflect.width and heightReflect.height. Their values are 140.00 and 225.00 used in VisualV, Redux has identical values.”

While many of the forum users agree that the two mods appear very similar in places, one poster argues that the entire mod scene is built upon ‘borrowing’ code from each other.

“It’s not even really ‘code’, they’re configuration,” LtShadow writes. “What’s the big deal if someone builds on top of another project? The original code/configuration is Rockstar’s anyway. The argument of ‘stolen files’ doesn’t hold up to much if they aren’t CP’s to begin with. More of like stealing an idea, which is still not a sound argument.”

Romito released the GTA V Redux mod on 15^th September.