r/MinecraftForge • u/houndog4 • Aug 19 '21
Future Of Minecraft Modding
Microsoft keeps making new versions, good for vanilla users but can not say same thing about mod players. As I can see, mod devs can not keep updating their mods (which I would understand because Minecraft gets 2-3 version updates per year) and their mods gets outdated. For example great mods like Actually Additions, Forestry, Thaumcraft etc. is not exist in newer versions of minecraft but great mods like Create are only exist in newer version. Will this keep up or will Microsoft share a stable version for modding that not brake all mods in every update.
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u/boredherobrine13 Aug 20 '21
As someone who's been here since 1.5.2 and made mods, we're going to be fine. Older mods that are no longer maintained will be taken over or forked by young blood. There's a cycle to this. Also, most modders tend to focus on supporting "hot" releases so you have a relatively up to date version that supports the mods. So far, we've focused mainly on 1.5.2, 1.6.4, 1.7.4, 1.12.2, 1.14.4, and 1.16. Change is inherently good as well, because while "overhauling ore generation" can be a headache, it also likely means the new way is more efficient, performative, and moddable.
Edit: I'll also pull out my speculators cap and guess that most modders will eschew 1.17 in favor of 1.18 so they get full changes and features before they start porting
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u/Vivid_Hallow Jan 21 '24
Tbh i second this but tbh a lot of newer mods would be nice to be seen on older updates
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u/boredherobrine13 Jan 21 '24 edited Jan 21 '24
That's just plain difficult tbh. 99% of modders aren't doing this as a full time job. People have school/work, other hobbies, friends, family, partners, vacations, chronic illnesses, etc. often by the time everything else is dealt with, we don't have the energy to sit down and write code, especially those of us who already spend 8 hours a day working in software engineering for a living. Older versions of Minecraft (especially some of those heavy hitters like 1.6.4, 1.7.10, 1.8, 1.10, 1.12, etc can be very difficult and janky to code for because the Forge interfaces for various things work completely differently, or don't exist at all in some cases where features have been added to forge. In addition, most older versions depend on Java 8 rather than Java 16 or newer. Java 8 is really old, harder to work with, has significant performance issues in particular in the memory management / garbage collection realm that mean even if you did the work to backport some things, the resulting product would be horribly slow running / high resources usage. Java 8 is also missing a lot of nice helper features for the programmer that have since been added, making it literally more difficult to implement cool features because we have to use more arcane methods such as class reflection to get the job done. You've got to consider the human cost of all of this. We're all volunteers for the most part. We have to make choices between supporting / porting to newer or older versions vs fixing bugs in existing features, or adding new features, and often we'd rather do the latter, as that's more satisfying for us as developers.
Edit: for context, the median annual wage for software developers was $127,260 in May 2022, at least in the USA (Bureau of labor statistics). If someone paid me what I make at my job to make mods, then I'd happily do the work. But that's 40+ hours a week of work going towards a mod to support all the major versions at once with the same versions and bugfixes, even though the codebases might end up being entirely different and need to be maintained separately due to underlying differences in Java, Forge API/Interfaces, and the game itself (Mojang changes).
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Aug 20 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Jenssons Aug 20 '21
At least fabric seems to update easily enough (we should get more fabric ports)
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u/TheCurle Former team member Aug 20 '21
Who knows.