What is Infernus

The name Infernus comes from the vehicle with the ID 411 in the game (specifically in san andreas).

Infernus is a library built on top of samp-node, which allows calling the game's SDK from the JavaScript layer.

WARNING

Infernus project has entered maintenance mode and will be gradually archived. Future ecosystem development will be led by the omp-node community, and we warmly welcome interested developers to join and contribute.

🚧 Work in Progress

• omp-node is currently in active development, it will replace Infernus in the future.
• If you want to try out omp-node or prefer the native syntax without too much wrapping, check out @open.mp/node.

Comparison

/	Infernus + samp-node	omp-node
Runtime	Windows: Node.js 16/20 Linux: Node.js 16	Windows/Linux: Node.js 18+
Module System	CommonJS	ESModule
Architecture	x86	x86/x64
Implementation	Via sampgdk→fakeamx→native calls	Direct omp-gdk/omp-sdk calls
Performance	Relatively slower	More optimized
Compatibility	Third-party plugins via polyfill layer	Requires SDK adaptation
Philosophy	1. Full Infernus rewrite recommended (avoid Pawn) 2. Mandatory Steamer adoption	See official documentation

Limitations

DANGER

Yes, it's important to understand the limitations before getting started.

Several limitations significantly impact the development experience. It is recommended to approach samp-node ecosystem development with an experimental mindset.

Overall, the ecosystem is currently unstable due to various factors.

Samp Node Ecosystem

Existing libraries developed in Pawn, such as fcnpc, colandreas, nexac, and other well-known libraries, may present two situations if your project depends on them: nobody maintenance or incompatible.

Since samp-node plugin development is based on samp and not omp, certain plugin ecosystems are not compatible. For example, accessing certain plugins' native functions, such as raknet, is not possible.

This greatly limits the development of samp plugins using the node.js ecosystem. It requires joint efforts from samp-node's authors and the community to address this issue.

However, omp's focus is primarily on building omp itself rather than third-party libraries.

Sqlite and Bindings Support

Unfortunately, this project is based on a 32-bit embedded node.js, which does not support node-sqlite or calls to bindings from other programming languages like Rust.

Perhaps this will be resolved in the future with a 64-bit omp-node.

Terminal Blocking

IMPORTANT

This issue has been fixed via monkeyPatch as the current solution.

Due to poor compatibility between the underlying samp-node and certain asynchronous node.js libraries, there may be occasional terminal blocking.

For example, when using orm libraries like typeorm/sequelize, it can cause terminal blocking and the server becomes unresponsive until you manually press enter in the terminal.

Therefore, it is recommended to adopt a distributed development approach, even though it may sound cumbersome.

One approach is to create another separate node.js project for database operations, such as using NestJS to build an API specifically for CRUD operations. The game server can then access the database logic through HTTP requests, or you can explore more advanced communication methods like RPC or sockets.

The benefit of this approach is that the game server only handles game logic, while the database logic is offloaded to another project. Additionally, you can develop an administration system that shares the same API as the game server.

Composition

In general, you only need to focus on the topmost layer, which is the application development layer.

Infernus primarily works with the second and third layers, depending on samp-node and omp game server.

If you are unsure how to start a project, please refer to the Quick Start.

/	Layer	Description
1	Application	GameMode, such as free-roam or role-play
2	Class Wrappers	Functionality wrapped in classes
3	Functional Wrappers	Wrappers for libraries like samp/omp/streamer
4	Samp Node	Bridge to the underlying SDK
5	Omp Game Server	Underlying game server

Why Develop

For beginners in programming or frontend developers, getting started with game script development using Pawn, a procedural language similar to C, can be challenging. Additionally, performing basic low-level operations in Pawn, such as string concatenation, deletion, and array manipulation, is more cumbersome compared to object-oriented JavaScript.

Furthermore, implementing asynchronous functionality is quite difficult within the Pawn language ecosystem. Internationalization is typically achieved using UTF-8 encoding, but since the release of sa was quite early, it did not utilize UTF-8 for internationalization. Instead, it relied on different charsets based on the ANSI of the Windows system, such as ISO-8859-1 in Western countries and GBK encoding in China.

Developing localized scripts in Pawn often requires setting the file encoding to match the localized Windows system language charset. This can lead to unforeseen encoding issues, such as storing GBK data in a UTF-8 database, which may result in garbled data if not handled properly.

By using JavaScript for development, we can leverage the power of the Node.js ecosystem, including libraries for date and time processing (e.g., dayjs), databases (e.g., MySQL, Redis, MongoDB), and asynchronous programming (e.g., Promises, Async/await). This allows us to replace Pawn ecosystem libraries with equivalent ones from the Node.js ecosystem.