Is choosing to use CBA, MSO etc. a good thing? Need advice

[bewilderbeest 10]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the Arma series with the Alpha of 3. I'm currently maintaining a Wasteland server with a friend, and we're engaged with active development on it, introducing a Bounty Hunt mission, player persistence and numerous other tweaks.

The codebase is very frankenstein-ish. No offence to Sa-Matra, 404 and anyone else, but the sheer number of different people who've had a hand in adding code is huge and has led to a bit of a mess. This is on top of the fact that many of the scripts are very definitely targeting ArmA2 and have a lot of specific workarounds for things which may or may not have been fixed in the new engine, and a user interface which feels dated.

This brings me to today. I'm looking at how best to implement something (mission? mod?) similar to Wasteland in the sense that it has Rogue-like qualities. Random loot, random missions, improvised gameplay, Perma-death, character progression. I don't want to remake DayZ, and I think there should be lots of equipment on offer, but there should be a sense of value to it all.

I've started with Arma2NET and the MySQL extension, and have a serviceable player persistence layer, but I'm now faced with a choice:

Do I start leveraging community addons like CBA, MSO and others? Or are they going to cause me more issues than benefits? Does it cause code-bloat or slowness? I have no experience in how this works, so I'd really like some advice from some seasoned ArmA coders to give me some basis for evaluation.

Also, since CBA is GPLv2, does this mean I need to consider my code being forced to be open?

I'd love to hear what people think about where the ArmA3 coder community will be going.

Cheers,

[KoS]Bewilderbeest