Who to give credit and "Domain Knowledge"

[Vega Alpha]

I'm making my first Minecraft mod and I have a couple of books.  The books describe the mcmod.info file.  That file includes a place to enter credits.  I decided I wanted to give credit to the makers, suppliers and contributors of the materials and resources I will use in making my first shareable Mod.  Among those resources is this forum.  So that left me thinking, "Who else should I be crediting?"  I'm afraid I don't yet understand the players.  There seems to be something called "FML." I don't know what that is since the books have not made it plain to me. I thought I knew what Forge is but now it only seems to be the name of the API I'm learning that will enable me to write a mod.  I could go on about my confusions.  Answering them all would likely consume more time than you will have to spend on me.

 

I think the root problem is I lack "domain knowledge" of Minecraft, Forge and the modding scene in general to carry on an intelligent conversation.  So perhaps describing those things is a lessor task to answering a large number of discrete questions.

To help you minimize the effort to write the primer I should describe your audience, me.  I am a 47 year old Software Engineer who has been excited about programming since I got a Commodore 64 computer in 1982.  I learned Basic first then moved on to assembly since that was the only way to get the best performance from that computer.  From there I moved on to Pascal.  In 1986 I went to college and learned many other languages including C and C++.  I have 26 years professional programming experience starting in 1989.  Today I am up to date with C/C++, Java, and web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript and HTML 5 and still as enthusiastic as the 15 year old child I was in 1982. I've been playing Minecraft for years now.  I have never killed an Ender Dragon but I have built a red stone calculator.

 

I’m off for Christmas, so I thought I would make a MineCraft adventure map featuring some mods and then play it with my four children.

 

[jabelar]

Hey, good to hear from another "old guy" who is into Minecraft modding!

 

In terms of credits, I don't think you need to go too far with it. You don't need to thank the people who developed the Java language and stuff of course, and I don't think the creators of Minecraft really need it either (they're a large company and the creative people already reaped significant reward through the commercial success). But FML and Forge are actually done by a small set of people in the community for no commercial reward, so it would be nice to thank them.

 

Regarding your questions about how the FML/Forge API came to be, diesieben07 and LexManos can give much better explanation, but here is what I understand:

- MCP: Even after deobfuscating the Minecraft JAR the method and field names are cryptic (you see things like p_23435_a) so the community has created a mapping called MCP to make the vanilla code more readable. MCP is the mapping of "SRG names" to readable names. Every time there is new version they have to do it again, so at the early part of adopting a new version there is a lot of stuff unmapped. (Note for this reason, it is important to specify the newest mapping you can in your build.gradle file.)

- FML: The whole point of this system is that multiple mods can be "loaded" at the same time. It is possible to make different mod loaders, and some people argue that they prefer others, but FML seems to work well. The loader adds dependency helps interleave the pre-init, init, and post-init FML lifecycle events so that you can control interactions between mods.

- Forge: This provides all the "hooks" that allow modders to do common things and for the most part play nicely with other mods. Some of the most important parts are the various registries, ore dictionaries and events.

 

There is probably a lot more details and history others can tell us. But hopefully that gives you a working knowledge.

 

 

 

[larsgerrits]

To be clear, FML and Forge aren't seperate projects. They used to be, but about 5 months ago they decided to merge them as nobody used FML or Forge alone.