Hi everyone!
While we continue working on the foundation of Minecraft itself, we'd like to get started on our promise to involve the community in shaping the official API by having our first planned Minecraft API discussion. This Saturday we're hoping to have an informal discussion on the community's thoughts and ideas on what they feel the API should provide and how it should be shaped. We already have some topics in mind of our own that we'd like to cover, but we encourage you to prepare some of your own topics of interest for the discussion for you and us to get the most out of the opportunity.
To keep things manageable, we'll most likely have to limit the amount of people that are able to talk. As such, we'll be giving representatives from modding groups that develop a modding platform, like Bukkit, Spout, etc. priority when selecting who will be provided with voice. If you're a part of a group that is interested in attending, please elect two representatives (one backup in case the first can't make it) and RSVP in a post below.
If we feel that more participants will be manageable, we'll provide other modders with the ability to participate. We wish we could just let everyone talk, but that would be a bit too crazy, sorry. If you believe that there is a better way to go about doing this, feel free to mention it in a post below and we'll take it into consideration.
If you're interested in joining us for the discussion, we're planning to hold the meeting this Saturday at 20:00 CEST on the Esper IRC network in the channel #minecraftdev. If you can't make it, we'll be providing logs of the meeting after the fact. For people who won't be actively participating in the meeting, we'll have another channel #minecraftdev-discuss where anyone is able to discuss the current topic in the meeting.
Who:
To keep things manageable, we'll most likely have to limit the amount of people that are able to talk. As such, we'll be giving representatives from modding groups that develop a modding platform, like Bukkit, Spout, etc. priority when selecting who will be provided with voice. If we feel that more participants will be manageable, we'll provide other modders with the ability to participate. We wish we could just let everyone talk, but that would be a bit too crazy, sorry.
If you're a part of a group that is interested in attending, please elect two representatives (one backup in case the first can't make it) and RSVP in a post below.
What:
An informal discussion to get an idea for what future discussions should be about, a feel for what ideas people have regarding the API and so on.
When:
This Saturday, June 30th 2012, at 20:00 CEST (check what time this is in your time zone).
Where:
Moderating meeting will take place in #minecraftdev on the Esper IRC network, irc.esper.net. Regular discussion will be taking place in #minecraftdev-discuss.
List of Attendees:
- Afforess from Spout
- Searge from MCP
- Amaranth from Bukkit
- UltraMoogleMan of WEDGE fame
- RoyAwesome of Spout GUI fame
- TkTech of #mcdevs and MCEdit fame
- Jarvix from Canary
- LexManos from Minecraft Forge
- FlowerChild of Better Than Wolves fame
- ShaRose of GuiAPI and ID Resolver fame
- Cojo of Tropicraft fame
- Corosus of ZombieCraft and Tropicraft fame
- medsouz of SocialMiner fame
- Xie of Xie's Mods fame
- Snowl of MCForge (classic) and LibMinecraft fame
- DV8FromTheWorld from Minecraft Port Central
- Kulttuuri from MinecraftEDU
- Eloraam of Minecraft Forge and RedPower fame
- sk89q of WorldEdit, WorldGuard and CraftBook fame
Agenda:
- Our plans for involving the community in the API development process for the future.
- Our considerations on how we might handle contributions.
- Our plans for keeping the community in the loop.
- The direction we're taking to prepare for the API.
- General Q&A.
Hope to see you there!
// The Minecraft Team
1. Forge may still exist, in one form or another, even after the API release. This is because Forge is a common platform to allow modders to make base edits, without mods conflicting. If Mojang removes this need by allowing modders to submit base modifications, there may not be a need for Forge at all.
2. My impression of the API is that it's a high-level API, functionally equivalent to ModLoader, that should allow basic level mods to be made.
3. If Mojang commits to removing obfuscation, we won't need MCP.
4. Servers should only require a base set of mods, like the server has Mods A, B, and C, and the client has Mods A, B, C, D, and OptiFine, the client should be allowed to connect, but Mod D will be disabled. This is to prevent abuse of the system by server owners.
5. Tools like MagicLauncher and MultiMC will continue to exist, due to the amazingly large number of newfags whom probably won't know how to install mods, and they can use these to help out instead.
Personally I would like to see topics on:
LexManos won't be there, but cpw will be representing him (not confirmed)
Minecraft staff plus all the great Modders in the same chat room... I don't know if I should be scared or happy so I'll be both.
You should be happy there even making it. Plus the fact they postponed it leaves them more time to further develop it .
Be Happy bro!
Err, how about NO? I'm not wasting time on this. Sorry. It's a long weekend and I have a real life to attend to. I'm only interested in the discussion so I can make FML 1.3 look vaguely similar to the long term to try and smooth the transition over time. I can find that data out after the fact. There's plenty of opinion and most of it is not going to be germane to the real problems Mojang faces. See: the rest of this thread and the epic trolling on #minecraftdev ever since the announcement.
No. Since this is going into Minecraft, there would be legal discussions about it. They must create it from scratch.
Sadly, it has not. It was supposed to be added in 1.3, but it was delayed and they pushed it back to 1.4, or maybe even later.
It has. About 80% of game development is design, planning and experimenting and doesnt really involve writing code.
I am not very familiar with Google+ hangouts, so maybe someone else could validate or knock down this idea, but I think it would be very productive to have a Google+ hangout between the Mojang crew and selected Mod reps (the big 4, etc.) which the Minecraft community could then watch. This would probably best take place after this first IRC discussion. I have seen some public hangouts on Google+, but I haven’t actually watched one, so I am not sure how well this would work out.
Input?
Again, just a thought.
That is what I am thinking as well, but with good and knowledgable representatives, the risk of that is minimized. I am thinking, however, that there is some way, maybe through IRC, that live community feedback could be brought to the reps if they were to do something like a Google+ public hangout.
Yes, no?
That's not entirely true. Flowerchild simply won't struggle to make BTW compatible at the expense of good gameplay. Gameplay (within the bounds of his mod) is always his number one priority, and he takes that responsibility very seriously.
Also, the fact the Flowerchild is not interested in turning BTW into a plugin does not mean that he wouldn't have helpful input regarding the modding API. From what I understand, a good modding API would reduce the number of base class edits he needs to make and enable him to clean up some aspects of his code, making his project easier to maintain. I think he is a terrific developer and would love to see Mojang include him in the discussion. It looks to me, however, like the folks who will be voiced in the meeting will mostly be the API developers.
What I want to see more is multiplayer contents that is not only easier to add-on, but has no restrictions on it's effectiveness on a platform.
For example a way to add a new monster, new blocks, new items into the server without forcing everyone to download and install it themselves, yet at the same time isn't a platform that's severely crippled to the point of only text and only command line based functionality.
I want things that are really innovative, not things that people develop for the retarded sense of profit.
When I look at mods, and you see adf.ly links, all I can see in the minds of those developing are 'profit profit profit', and less of 'fun fun fun'.
The moment one thinks about profiting from their actions, they will cease to innovate any further and development will slow to a halt.
Sure Mojang brings out snapshots and content updates with fixes, but the pacing can be slow, and player contribution can't adapt very well in user friendliness or interfaces.
Maybe because in reality, Java sucks so some programmers would rather do other things than that.
There is pros and cons of mojang and modders talking together.
The pro side is that both parties will get to talking about a way to change things for the good of the game.
The cons side is the restriction both side will inevitably agree to, for the sake of the 'licencing'.
The Minecraft code isn't even protected per say, so it's quite easy for anyone to decompile it and figure it out, so even if they do want to control modding in a way, they can't do anything about the vulnerability that's already there.
Regardless there will always be people who will do things outside the scope of the API, so trying to protect or enforce it then won't do crap.
Totally agree, I mean seriously texturepacks support animated items, terrain, etc. It'd take a while to do the same thing for mods.
They have a discussion channel already set up called #minecraftdev-discuss