LexManos

October, Goals/Ads, and working with the community.

Hello again everyone, another month has gone by. Unfortunately this month we did not reach the Adfocus goal, and as such for the Month of November, ad-focus will be re-enabled. I have spoken with the owner of Adfocus, and still believe them to be the best solution at this time. We are now in their new program, where supposedly I am going to be given the opportunity to whitelist ads that run on their side. We will see how things go.

Forge is progressing nicely, we have many projects out there that are working on getting 1.14 releases out. For those who don't know we've gotten to the stage where cpw has setup Forgecraft for 1.14. This means we are getting a lot of bug fixes and play testing done for the community. It's rather exciting. We are aware of a few issues in Vanilla's codebase {namely the chunk threading issue} that we are hoping to address. But they are large projects and will take time to get right. But, Mojang is ever marching towards 1.15, which we are hoping will be the next 'stable' Minecraft version.

Finally, there isn't much to update to the idea floated in last month's post, about working with the community to define a LTS version of Minecraft. I have been working to expand the Triage team on Forge's end, but we are still desperately short on man power to do anything LTS wise.

September, and 1.14.4 RB!

Hello again everyone, Here to give you another update. It finally happened! On September 12th, we released a Recommended Build for Minecraft 1.14.4. You can see the full information here  https://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/topic/75934-forge-281-minecraft-1144/  but sufficient to say this has been a long hard road. I have to apologize to everyone for the delay, I always feel bad about it, but here we are. So with a RB being released, the official supported version of Forge is now 1.14.4. With 1.12.2 as the 'legacy' version. We already have modders updating their mods. Notably Optifine has released a preview version that has support for Forge. I can't speak for other large projects but they seemed to be working towards updates as well.

There are a few major things in the works on Forge's end, one is too early to talk about, but the other one is an idea I need to float by the community.  Since modding began, and then the first Minecraft update was released. People have always complained they don't want to update because old mods haven't updated. Forge's stance on this has always been "too bad, we're developing for the current version". For the most part that will not change. But we have thought about creating an official system with the community to select LTS (Long Term Support) versions of Minecraft. Developing for both that version, and the contemporary version.

The number one issue for this, is manpower. I am only one man, and the 'Forge team' is rather small as well. Especially ones who actually work on Forge's code itself. None of which are full time, and graciously donate their free time. So if we were to do this LTS idea, we would need the community's help. A while back, we introduced a 'triage team' to our git organization. This team is a small group that go through our issues/prs and do all the grunt work making sure they are sane, categorized correctly, simple generic things like codestyle/logs/justifications are done. Unfortunately, this team is small, and is done in everyone's free time by volunteers. So it isn't keeping up with the inflow of issues/prs. So this is my call out to anyone who thinks they can help. Start doing so, and if you are noticed doing a good job on the repos, you will probably be asked to join the Triage Team. This isn't a team you can just walk off the street and join, but if you're helpful, nice, and accurate we will most likely notice you.

So, how would a LTS system work? Well if we get a group of triage members who are able to keep up with the influx of PRs/Issues/Etc, then we would select a couple who have proven themselves to be trustworthy {I have a few in mind already} to be the LTS Team Leads. And they would have permission to pull any PRs they want for old Minecraft versions. But what versions would be considered LTS? Well that would be up to the community managers as a while. This would be discussed and general consensus would arrive. But the idea would be to provide a stable Minecraft target for about 2 years at a time. So if we go back through MC's history we would get something like this:  1.2.5 (18 months) -> 1.6.4 (26 months) -> 1.8.9 (21 months)-> 1.12.2 (24~ months) -> 1.14.x? Once we select the current MC version, to be the next LTS version as soon as Mojang releases a new version, the transition would take place. 

I don't know, this is something we're thinking about, nothing is set in stone, and it all is dependent on if we can find the manpower to do it.  So I figured letting you guys know about it would be a good way for people to decide if they wanted to help or not... We'll see how it works out.

Now, time for a little update related to Patreon itself. So the new month has come, which means people have update/changed their pledges. And sadly, we have fallen below the Adfocus goal. So if we are still there at the end of this month it means Adfocus will be making a return to the Forge download page. Nobody likes ads, but bills need to be paid.... alright enough begging, RB HYPE!

July/August

Hello again everyone,

Just wanted to give you guys a little bit of a update if you haven't been watching my twitter, or github. But 1.14.4 is moving along quite well. Albeit slower then I had expected due to things outside of my control. However, we are nearing a recommended build for 1.14! I was hoping to have one today so I could announce it in this post/at PAX, but delays.

Anyways. New crafting system, new fluid system, tons of bug fixes and cleanup/backend features. We've dropped our old jenkins and moved everything to the new one. We backported some S2S changes to older FGs so everyone will get the performance boost. 

Over all, people PLEASE start testing and reporting bugs, the more we squash the better i'll feel about a RB and be able to do it. This has been a long time coming, but between re-writing literally everything in our tool chain. And delays introduced by trying to more incorporate the community into this process. You don't understand how bad I feel about the delay, but i'm doing the best I can without releasing something that's horribly broken and trying to be inclusive as possible.

We have some new projects in the works that should be good for the community as a whole. But unfortunately they are not at a stable enough stage to announce yet. 

There is however one thing I wanted to announce, apparently myself, KingLemming, Darkosto, and Tamas, are running a panel at PAX this monday.  https://west.paxsite.com/schedule/panel/modding-minecraft Feel free to come and ask any questions you have if you're at PAX. Or else people will have to sit there and listen to us drum on about things. :p


Edit: Oh I forgot a minor thing. I've added additional tiers to patreon, all they do is give you a little more flair on discord. But people requested it and I'm not gunna say no <3

June Support

Hello again everyone. Just wanted to send out an update. Thank you all for your continued support. Adfocus has been removed all month, and it seems that the community is really liking it. Obviously the complaints over types of ads has flat out disappeared. Making my life quite a bit less stressful. So thank you.

A bit of an updated on Forge. 1.14 was released, shortly followed by 1.14.2 and 1.14.3. Forge has been updated to all of these versions. 1.14.3, within 1 day of it's release. Forge for the most part is completely stable for the 1.14.x lifecycle. I am currently waiting on a few things before making an official recommended build. We still have to re-implement the in-game mod config GUI. So if anyone good at rendering wants to chat let me know. As well as the re-write of the Fluid system. This is cpw's & KL's baby so i'm currently waiting on them to get time enough to help design it.

However everything else modding wise should be good to go. Modders have all the tools they need to start updating their mods. So I encourage anyone who has a mod to do so. The more people update and dig into the new systems. The more we can figure out what needs to be expanded and tweaked for you.

I have officially rolled out the new triage team, now that Github allows us to assign those permissions. This is headed by Mezz and Tterrag. They are in charge of doing the basic filtering of PRs/Issues. And making sure that I address things that need to be addressed. So this should lower the bar and "issues" people have with this process. So please uses it, and be nice to our triage team.

Once again, thank you for your continued support.

Adfocus and First month of goals!

Well, thanks to everyone who has subscribed. We have officially reached our first goal, to remove Adfocus links. So come midnight tonight I will be disabling them until July 1st. Each month we reach the goal, will get a month without Adfocus.

And since we met this one I decided to add another stretch goal. A basic 'stability' goal to cover basic costs of living, such as rent and bills. I'm not sure of anything I can put as the 'reward' for this goal, besides my gratitude to taking away a lot of stress in my life.

Since my last post Minecraft 1.14.2 has been released. We are starting our update process. However it has been a lot more painful then we expected. I have been spending about 16 hours a day for the last week working on this. Having to go through and reapply all of Forge's patches by hand is a large process. HOPEFULLY this will be the last time we need to do something of this scale. As the main cause of this is the standardization and major renaming of the vanilla codebase. It's a one time cost that should benefit the community as a whole.

Anyways, with that said, I wanted to remind everyone that we are having our FAP this Sunday, Noon Pacific Time. On cpw's twitch,  https://twitter.com/voxcpw/status/1133066276111364096

Come and ask questions and about Forge and future Minecraft development. So see you guys then!

1.13/1.14

Hello everyone, people have asked me to update you guys here. I am working on 1.14 at the moment. 1.13 has been out and ready for people to test for several months now. 1.14 is in the works, we had to re-write a few of our update tool chains. And I opened up the update process to allow more community input when it comes to class names. We have also started to design a naming standard for the MCP environment. So that took some time to allow everyone to discuss and vote.

After we finalize the MCPConfig update. We can get started on Forge itself. So be sure to keep an eye on the forums/github for more details.