Leaderboard

1.7.10 is outdated and is not supported by Forge anymore. They won't add/update/remove old versions as it's pointless and unnecessary work. Maintaining 2 versions is enough for work for them. I don't think there was an "extremely vital API" removed if it was that important. If it was removed, they most likely added a replacement, if didn't exist already. My guess: the author is just lazy.

That looks mostly correct, but there are some minor changes I'd recommend: Only catch the most specific exception you have to, i.e. IOException rather than Exception. This lets other exceptions propagate upwards so they can be handled by Minecraft itself. Log the exception with a log4j Logger rather than just printing its stack trace. This will ensure it's formatted properly in the console and FML log. Consider using ItemStack#serializeNBT (from the INBTSerializable interface) rather than ItemStack#writeToNBT. This creates the NBTTagCompound for you and returns it. That should be all you need, yes.

WorldSavedData only saves data to the disk on the logical server, so it's not really suitable for your purposes. You can look at how MapStorage reads and writes WorldSavedData instances to .dat files using CompressedStreamTools, though you won't be able to use ISaveHandler#getMapFileFromName from the logical client (since the client-side implementation always returns null).

They can, using AnimationModelBase. This also allows the model to be animated with Forge's baked model animation system.

1) 1.8 will take a VERY long time, just update to 1.7.10 first. 2) Forge is not an abstraction layer, you're asking for one.

Great to read, thanks for an official word on the matter. I did read your reply to someone asking about Forge for 1.8.0 - for some reason I can't find the thread now (ninja moderated?). In it you said we could expect a release mid-September. Are you sure? Even for an initial alpha, that is *crazy* fast. You may have also implied that you yourself work with the MCP team in a lot of the primary deobfuscation, if this is true I had no idea you were directly involved there. I don't know what this beef - or the "recent events in Bukkit community" - is about, but it sounds like the usual stuff and I can imagine. I may only be a new modder but I've already publicly stated that, if I get to the point where people want to donate - that I would split it 50/50 between MCP and Forge if I could - you guys work very hard to do something that people like me just do for fun, it's the least we should do. Well, some don't have anything to give I guess, so in that case the least we can do is not harass developers to update... ...anywho, thanks again for the news. Enjoy yourself!