Hi, all.

 

I am a professional programmer with 25 years experience. I am very good at it. Mainly C and C++ but I have spent some time with Java.

I am used to proper documentation of libraries and APIs. I don't use an IDE as I prefer to read and understand the documentation.

I have looked at the forge documentation and had a conversation with one of the maintainers and understand that Forge is layered over a Vanilla Minecraft API, a collection of Java objects that form the basis of mod development.

 

Where is the documentation for this collection of Java objects?

 

I have been pointed at "Parchment". I ended up downloading a JSON file that is not, frankly, human readable.

 

Where is the documentation?!?!? How does anyone write a Minecraft mod without documentation? Are you all just using IDEs that prompt you with the function or object name you need and automatically add the required imports? How do you understand what the functions do, deep down?

 

What I really need is something like https://linux.die.net/ or https://en.cppreference.com/w/ or https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/classes.html. Proper detailed documentation, properly organised and searchable. Does anything like that exist online for Minecraft?

 

Welcome to the world of modding, remember, we are working with obfuscated, decompiled code. And something that doesn't survive the compile process is comments which is where those documentations you linked would be. As such we need to rely on community projects such as Parchment to build these comments. Most modern IDEs allow for simple navigation and parsing comments into pretty documentation. 

Your best option if you refuse to use your IDE, is to setup the project yourself with whatever version of Parchment, or other crowdsourced comment data. And then run the javadoc executable over the jar yourself. We do not host javadocs because things change so much in both MC's code, and in the state of the crowdsourced data that it would be useless.

So to answer your question, yes people use their IDEs for what they are intended for. The automatic addition of imports and function suggestions have nothing to do with the docs. But to answer your question about how we 'understand what the functions do, deep down'... we read them.

So Minecraft don't export their API to help the modding community...figures.

 

What's the best way to view the Parchment data in a searchable format? Is there a tool for that?

 

Anyway, thanks to your clues, I found this: https://nekoyue.github.io/ForgeJavaDocs-NG/

It only goes up to 1.19.1, but it's a great start!