I understand the frustration all too well. Back in October I wanted to implement my own workshop files aswell. We will be looking into hiring a programmer post Contagion: Outbreak's release to PSVR. This will be one of several issues to look into.

It took half a year when the workshop was the first time down and now without anyone on charge here I doubt that it will ever be fixed even though the issue is just a connection problem with Steam :/

You have to upload it on a third party site to share your content even though there is a workshop here...

Sorry for reviving this old thread, but since I already posted most of this stuff on Monochrome's Discord, I thought it would be a good idea to post the same thing here for the sake of visibility.

A few days ago, I started my own investigation about Contagion's workshopper not working properly and here's a report of my discoverings so far:

First thing that I noticed is that the workshopper will start the main window only if your Steam client is not running. This is clearly a bug because if the workshopper can't establish a proper connection to Steam and perform a series of mandatories checks, the workshopper will just not function at all. The proper behaviour in this scenario would be to close the workshopper.

After a more in-depth analysis of the current workshopper and some research on Google, I noticed that the library being used for the communications between the workshopper and Steam is obsolete, it's last update by it's original author was made back in 2015. You can't blame Monochrome for that because Contagion was released back in 2013 and therefore the library was still maintained, they couldn't magically guess that this library's author would stop working on it.

At this point, I'm running out of ideas, I tried different approaches to run the workshopper, Steam binaries and they all failed. This is where I had the idea of using my programming skills and my knowledge of Steam's back-end (thanks to the fact that I'm a programmer for Zombie Panic! Source and Half-Rats: Parasomnia) to my advantage.

I programmed a test application, it basically connects itself to Steam as "Contagion", perform a series of mandatory checks (valid Steam binaries, Steam client is running, logged in on Steam, ownership of Contagion...), create a workshop item for Contagion, assign dummy data to it (title = "Shepard's Test", description = "Don't subscribe, it's a test (doh!)", visibility = private...), upload everything to Contagion's workshop, close the connection to Steam and finally closes itself.

Everything was fine until I reached the uploading stage, the workshop item creation is a success, it gets assigned to me and the "posted date" field is correct. However, it didn't assigned the dummy data (title, description, preview images, files...) so I ended up getting "blank" workshop items.

After a few hours debugging my test application, I couldn't figure out the problem. Suddendly, I had this weird idea of switching the concerned application from "Contagion" to "Zombie Panic! Source", I gave this idea a shot and my test application worked from start to finish. When I switch back the concerned application to "Contagion", it fails again.

I have already notified Monochrome about all of this, assuming they want to keep the current workshopper, they would need to replace that obsolete library by something more modern. However, it's not as easy as changing a file, code refactoring will be inevitable. The worst case scenario would be to remake the entire workshopper from scratch. The decision is up to them, it's their game, they do whatever they want with it, I'm just a player, I have no authority on this matter. Also keep in mind that Contagion Outbreak (VR) is still their priority.

I also notified Monochrome that they can talk to me on Discord if they need help with this, in the meantime, I'll keep digging about debugging that "uploading" issue.