How best to describe Forge to an audience of programmers

[kwpugh]

Hi,

 

I'm looking for some guidance on how best to describe what Forge is and its relationship to Minecraft.   I have been asked to give a "Ted Talk" style presentation at work about how I ( a non-programmer by profession, I work in HR) learned to program (still learning) in Java.   The angle of the talk will be "How I learned Java by playing Minecraft" or something like that.   The point of the talk is to encourage non-programmers in the audience that anyone can get into programming, if you find the right motivation.

 

There will also be people from our technology divisions in the audience, so when I describe Forge, I don't what to be talking out my "behind" and look uninformed.  I'm looking for simple and technically accurate.

 

I also expect to get the question: "How does Forge do that, isn't that illegal?  Aren't they hacking Minecraft?"   So a straightforward answer to that would be help.

 

Thank you in advance and regards.

 

 

[Oscarita25]

1 hour ago, kwpugh said:

I also expect to get the question: "How does Forge do that, isn't that illegal?  Aren't they hacking Minecraft?"   So a straightforward answer to that would be help.

 

This is 100% allowed by Minecraft as in the eula described:
 

Quote

If you've bought the Game, you may play around with it and modify it. We'd appreciate it if you didn't use this for griefing, though, and remember not to distribute the changed versions of our software. Basically, mods (or plugins, or tools) are cool (you can distribute those), hacked versions of the Game client or server are not (you can't distribute those).

 

[Cadiboo]

Forge was initially a jar mod (you would directly drop it into the minecraft jar) which is legally questionable.

It was quickly converted to load by wrapping the minecraft launch and modifying specific class as they were loaded (with binary patches that were applied to the raw bytes of the classes as they were loaded from disk). This method is a lot less questionable.

Since 1.13.2 it applies it’s patches once (at install time) to a copy of the minecraft jar which it then launches. This removes the time it took to patch the files each launch making loading faster.

 

Forge is “the unofficial modding API for minecraft”.

 

It provides an abstraction layer on top of Minecraft and many useful API features. It allows many mods to load at the same time in a highly compatible manner.

 

If you’re interested in how Forge applies it’s patches google “delta patching” and “java ASM”/“bytecode modification”.

[Draco18s]

2 hours ago, Cadiboo said:

“java ASM”/“bytecode modification”

Do be careful though, this is a dark abyss that looks back at you.