Porting a fabric mod to forge

[Paul Carlisle]

Since the death of schematica, people have turned to a somewhat updated version called litematica. The problem is, if you have a forge server, you have to use forge and NOT fabric loader which the mod runs on.

I was wondering if someone with coding knowledge could port a fabric mod to forge for me, for 1.19.1. There is only one person working on litematica and the associated library mod, and they are definitely not prioritizing it.

litematica: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/litematica/files

malilib: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/malilib/files

 

The death of the schematica mod was a terrible tragedy for the community, I would really appreciate it if someone could do this.

[Draco18s]

4 hours ago, Paul Carlisle said:

could port a fabric mod to forge

AH HAHAHAHAHA! 🤣

No seriously though, the two ecosystems are so wildly different that it wouldn't be so much a "port" as "rewritten from scratch."

Forge: make everything compatible because no one touches vanilla code directly. If Forge doesn't make what you need possible, make a PR.
Fabric: we can update to new versions quickly because we only have the basics. So if you need something special, you're going to have to patch the vanilla code yourself, have fun~!

[warjort]

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Forge: make everything compatible because no one touches vanilla code directly. If Forge doesn't make what you need possible, make a PR.
Fabric: we can update to new versions quickly because we only have the basics. So if you need something special, you're going to have to patch the vanilla code yourself, have fun~!

That's a misrepresentation and I think you know it. 🙂 Isn't having fun the whole point of writing mods?

I agree they are 2 different philosophies (which you prefer is a matter of taste):

 

Forge: A one-stop shop for everything you need for modding, concentrating on mod compatibility/correctness

Fabric: An a-la-carte (don't pay for what you don't need) approach where the fabric-api concentrates on common use cases and the ecosystem provides more specialised apis, and don't expect it to hold your hand when it comes to writing correct mods

 

Forge itself has something of the a-la-carte with mods like curios, "waila", jei, patchoulli, terrablender, etc. having specialised apis not provided by forge.

It's really a matter of where the 2 draw the line.

 

I agree the difference in philosophy makes porting mods more difficult.

For the original poster, Litematica are already working on it (but they have been for a while): https://github.com/maruohon/litematica/issues/234

Edited August 24, 2022 by warjort

[Draco18s]

6 hours ago, warjort said:

Fabric: An a-la-carte (don't pay for what you don't need) approach where the fabric-api concentrates on common use cases and the ecosystem provides more specialised apis, and don't expect it to hold your hand when it comes to writing correct mods

It also leads to everyone writing their own API addons that duplicate efforts and makes things incompatible with each other because everyone creates a patch that does what they need and only what they need. It also means that when Minecraft updates if you have a mod that relies on one of these additional specialized APIs, you have to wait on that author to update it, even though Fabric's main API is already current.

Quote

Forge itself has something of the a-la-carte with mods like curios, "waila", jei, patchoulli, terrablender, etc. having specialised apis not provided by forge.

Neither Waila nor JEI require additional source patches to work with Forge. They have their own APIs, yes, but that's not what I'm referring to when I say that Fabric requires modders create additional hooks inside vanilla code.

Forge makes sure that every mod stays well out of vanilla code so that mods don't conflict with each other and crash the game.

I'm referring to this:
https://fabricmc.net/wiki/start#mixins_asm

Fabric pushes modders towards ASM. ASM is dangerous, complex, and highly fragile. It can lead to code that crashes code that isn't your code with the resulting stack trace having no evidence as to which mod caused the issue! It can DO anything, but it doesn't do it safely.

Edited August 24, 2022 by Draco18s