by Pannoniae | 2025-07-30 17:39:01+00:00
> You may want to decompile to look at the original code, but that takes one command, because people have already set up scripts to do all that.

Yup, but it's very much not the same... you don't have the original documentation, you don't have the actual local variable names and stuff. And the build process is a mess, especially when you want to do cross-modloader mods. (or face users screaming at you for different modloader compatibility)

And you have two different sets of mappings too, alongside the 4 modloaders.

See this post for an example: https://emi.dev/blog/mappings-and-maven/

> Yeah, absolutely. I was more talking about the state of modding and availability of mods in general, from a mod user perspective so to speak.

Oh, from the users' perspective, it's quite a bit better. Except when your favourite mod doesn't work with the other mods. Or it's on a different modloader. But in something like KSP, it's fairly seamless, that's just a Minecraft problem.

> Also, my love of programming and tinkering with software pretty much started with this discovery :)

Yeah, this 100%. pretty much any game with easily accessible mod tools grows a modding scene around itself, just see CS or Portal custom maps, Paradox games, etc... and it's a good thing, many people get their love from that :)

> Do you have anything to share regarding your project? Sounds pretty interesting to me.

I'm pretty much making a retrofuturistic Minecraft-like. I loved the original beta versions which Notch made, but since he stopped developing it, all the soul has been gone from it, it just feels empty. Instead of adding random shit because it's cool, now it's replaced with traditional, polished but boring game design ;) I believe that it's possible to do better, add stuff like more emergent worldgen, even new dimensions, a bit deeper progression and random cool mechanics like playing sports or maybe even minigames.

In terms of modding, I favour a visible source model (it's on my github, my name's the same there), you can check it out if you want. Beware, it's not really playable yet, that's coming soon. The game's written in C#/.NET so it's kind of similar to Java in that regard.

Basically, I plan to make it so you'll have a fairly basic integrated modloader (load mods, maybe a few events) then the community can provide additional patches or hooks if needed. There will also be coremodding support (transforming the game dll before loading to add fields or completely rewrite classes) and I plan to ship Roslyn with the game so you can make plaintext .cs mods which are compiled on startup.

If people make something cool, I'm also open to adding it into the vanilla game (if they sign over the rights, etc.). I think that a huge part of Minecraft's success has been the strong community involvement - in 2010 that looked like posting and answering on Twitter because that was the new thing, today maybe it's Discord. Obviously, most games (including modern Minecraft!) do it only one way, there are the developers, and there are the players, the players play whatever the developers put out, and if the players complain too much, the developers might consider it. I think that it's possible to do better, although it definitely takes a degree of humility to pull it off.... especially if you're attached to something you've made. But I think it's possible, can't know if you don't try ;)