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I maintain some Minecraft mods. One of the "joys" of Minecraft modding is that the APIs, the frameworks, have a nasty habit of changing in unexpected and poorly-documented ways from major version to major version. This is because Minecraft was not designed for modding by outsiders. Modding is permitted and tolerated and, PR-wise, encouraged. However, for a long time, the internal code was simply not designed to encourage it. However, since the original Minecraft was written in Java, it was easy to decompile and possible, thought not easy, to deobfuscate. People did that. People originally modded by writing replacement classes for Minecraft classes, and then inserting them into the Minecraft jar.
Modding this way was not easy, either for the programmer or for the end user, who had to master the art of unpacking jar files and inserting the provided modded jars.... not something that gamers are normally encouraged to learn or do.
Eventually, some bright lads came up with the idea of a standard mod loader, that would automatically load those modified classes as Minecraft launched, so that the end user didn't to do surgery on their game executable. They also decided to solve the other problem, that if two different mods modified the same base class, you'd have a mess.
They created an API for modding, so that mods would play nicely with each other, and have a standard interface with which to mod Minecraft. That combined mod loader and API is called Minecraft Forge. Originally, you had to do surgery on your Minecraft executable to install Forge, though it would then handle all the other mods, but the Forge guys got tired of explaining how to do that, so they wrote an installer to do it automatically, and the rest is history.
So, I write mods using the Forge API. At some point, Mojang (the developers of Minecraft, now owned by Microsoft), decided to start cleaning up the internals of the game to make it easier to write mods and other add-ons. This necessarily required large internal changes, which made modding across major versions... interesting. Players who don't write mods have little-to-no idea about this, and just want to know "have you ported your mod to 1.8 yet?"
Repeat ad nauseum for every single major version change from 1.6.4 => 1.7.10 => 1.8+ => 1.9.4/1.10.2 => 1.11.2 => 1.12.2
Not ONE modder I've ever heard tell about likes being nagged about porting code. Not one. Fortunately most forum moderators figured out a long time ago that "When are you going to port your mod?" is 99% of the time, a passive-aggressive way of demanding that you hurry up and port your mod, and so forbid the question. One, it is rude and entitled to demand that modders work for you for free, and two, annoyed modders have been known to quit modding. Or put explosive bees in their mods.
So don't do that.
Modding this way was not easy, either for the programmer or for the end user, who had to master the art of unpacking jar files and inserting the provided modded jars.... not something that gamers are normally encouraged to learn or do.
Eventually, some bright lads came up with the idea of a standard mod loader, that would automatically load those modified classes as Minecraft launched, so that the end user didn't to do surgery on their game executable. They also decided to solve the other problem, that if two different mods modified the same base class, you'd have a mess.
They created an API for modding, so that mods would play nicely with each other, and have a standard interface with which to mod Minecraft. That combined mod loader and API is called Minecraft Forge. Originally, you had to do surgery on your Minecraft executable to install Forge, though it would then handle all the other mods, but the Forge guys got tired of explaining how to do that, so they wrote an installer to do it automatically, and the rest is history.
So, I write mods using the Forge API. At some point, Mojang (the developers of Minecraft, now owned by Microsoft), decided to start cleaning up the internals of the game to make it easier to write mods and other add-ons. This necessarily required large internal changes, which made modding across major versions... interesting. Players who don't write mods have little-to-no idea about this, and just want to know "have you ported your mod to 1.8 yet?"
Repeat ad nauseum for every single major version change from 1.6.4 => 1.7.10 => 1.8+ => 1.9.4/1.10.2 => 1.11.2 => 1.12.2
Not ONE modder I've ever heard tell about likes being nagged about porting code. Not one. Fortunately most forum moderators figured out a long time ago that "When are you going to port your mod?" is 99% of the time, a passive-aggressive way of demanding that you hurry up and port your mod, and so forbid the question. One, it is rude and entitled to demand that modders work for you for free, and two, annoyed modders have been known to quit modding. Or put explosive bees in their mods.
So don't do that.
