I think it's amazing to have a massive commercially successful game such as Minecraft give the fans the ability to be very liberal with what they can do with it. Now we have open-source re-implementaions that are pretty close to vanilla!
I have not played minecraft in a few years but I think nothing has changed. Mojang, even pre microsoft, has never provided any sort of modding support. I grew up on quake where ID would give you the game code and tools necessary to make mods. Mojang gave nothing. modding on minecraft involved decompiling the bytecode, dealing with the terrible symbols the decompiler gave you then recompiling it back into a jar. It was ugly and unpleasant. later the bigger efforts produced some tooling and libraries to make this better, but mojang had no part in this.
So minecraft is wierd, one of the most modded game in existence, yet the developers have provided no mod support.
It wasn't easy and majong did not help back then.
new Block("mymod:mystone").setShape(Shapes.CUBE).setTexture("mymod:stone_texture").setStepSound(Sounds.STEP_ON_STONE)...
you now have to do some of this inline (the part that can't be customized in data packs):
new Block("mymod:mystone").setStepSound(Sounds.STEP_ON_STONE)...
but the rest is looked up across 5 different cross-referenced JSON files full of magic values with no autocomplete or syntax highlighting. Start with an indirection layer in assets/mymod/blockstates/mystone.json: [2]
{"variants": {"": {"model": "mystone"}}}
then of course you have to actually specify how to display the block: [3]
{"parent": "minecraft:block/cube_all", "textures": {"all": "fabric-docs-reference:block/steel_block"}}
(you see that? there are inheritance and variables in Minecraft's ad-hoc JSON language)
You need a second file to specify how to display the item when it's held in your hand. Usually it's similar boilerplate. But have a look at the abomination that is "item property overrides" [4] [5] as an example of inner-platforming. Instead of render(is_cast ? cast_model : uncast_model); there's this whole infrastructure of a registry of item property predicates written in Java which can then be referenced in JSON to select a different model file under specific conditions.
[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_inner-platform_effect
[2] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/1.12.x/models/blockstates...
[3] https://docs.fabricmc.net/develop/data-generation/block-mode...
[4] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/1.12.x/models/overrides/
[5] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Models#Example:_...
Yes, having to declare json files for your new block in your mod is a pain...
Meanwhile what it was built for, resource packs, this actually gives a good amount of power to the pack maker without having to ask the client to run untrusted java code.
You can still override it in Java code instead of tweaking values, but it's much more painful because all the existing code is geared towards reading the tweakable values.
[1] https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-comple...
not even separate textures are necessary, you could very well use atlases and just stitch them together at runtime with rectpacking and just remap the input texcoords to the new, bigger atlas... boom, mod support with atlases without creating 400 2KB .png's in the game folder.
similarly, blocks can be done in code, and modders can either use that, and optionally you can expose the same API in LUA or whatever if you need a less involved / sandboxed version of mods which can be downloaded from a server or whatever.
Here's an example of shit being done from code, it's fairly terse and you don't need to trawl through 7 files to do anything: (yes I know it doesn't have i18n yet but that won't make it much more complex either)
SHORT_GRASS = register(new Flower(Blocks.SHORT_GRASS, "Short Grass"));
SHORT_GRASS.setTex(crossUVs(8, 1));
SHORT_GRASS.setModel(BlockModel.makeGrass(SHORT_GRASS));
SHORT_GRASS.transparency();
SHORT_GRASS.shortGrassAABB();
SHORT_GRASS.noCollision();
SHORT_GRASS.waterTransparent();
For data files (textures, sounds and other assets) you could use a virtual filesystem like Quake did (PhysFS is a good library which vaguely approximates that) and get rid of the stupid amount of folder nesting specifying behaviour, you can just have toplevel folders and use modloader order to disambiguate.
tl;dr: almost anything can be made to work with the most convenient/most sensible method of making stuff instead of using a bunch of awkward and convoluted JSON files you aren't even using! (MC internally generates the JSONs from code, so the data lives through a code -> JSON -> code roundtrip, they aren't even dogfooding their own format lol)
Bedrock added support for modding in 2016, 9 years ago, with resource packs and behavior packs. You can make custom entities, custom items, custom blocks, etc. There is also a marketplace available to distribute these to players, built right into the game.
Java edition also has had similar things for many years.
Take the pack I'm re-playing at the moment, Compact Claustrophobia.
Even the opening moments of that pack are nothing related to the Minecraft game you can buy. Scraping materials from the bare walls? Not a thing in Minecraft, but the mod adds that because otherwise how are we going to make even a block of dirt. Oh right yeah, no dirt, we start inside an unbreakable [as far as we know] object and we have to burrow deeper and deeper into recursively defined Compact Machines, none of which exists in the Minecraft game. Your character in Compact Claustrophobia needs their own faeces to survive - if you've read "The Martian" you know how that goes. Base Minecraft of course does not have poop, so they add that.
To make all this happen requires a lot of reverse engineering. Are Microsoft doing everything they can to stop it? Not at all. But they're also not some benevolent entity adding hooks left and right for the modifications.
Did you read my post? I'm saying that Bedrock has mod support built in with public documentation. There are a bunch of hooks. You can add new blocks. You can make things happen when clicking in them. You can add brand new items.
With the approach they're taking in Bedrock maybe the Compact Machines I was first playing with years ago become possible (if somebody puts in a lot of labour) in ten years, or in twenty - if sanctioned. But they've existed for years in Java, so why bother?
Are all of the servers/mods still written in Java and it was just the desktop client that was rewritten in c++? Or is there a division between Java mods and c++ mods?
the main modding community is around java edition
It will always be more limited that Java modding but is catching up in large areas of functionality.
Amazing seeing what people are making in Bedrock running on old Android phones, Switch, and company.
I believe Mojang now provides deobfuscation mappings[0] which makes life slightly easier for modders.
[0] Although all I can find are people saying "we should move to Mojang's mappings!" rather than an official Mojang announcement.
Umm no ?
They provide deobfuscation mappings, they keep features in the code that are not exposed to players while specifically mentioning modders (new dialog system, game tests API).
You also have a couple of Minecraft developers hanging out in modloaders discord servers.
While it's true that they really started embracing modding in like 2019 (when they started releasing deobfuscation mappings), they were never hostile to modding
I do think that I have yet to see a bedrock player on windows as compared to java player on windows & I have been playing minecraft for so long and joined so many discord communities of minecraft related as well and that's my experience.
Java is really peak minecraft, with modpacks as well. You should try out prismlauncher, its open source and works quite smoothly on linux and you can try a lot of modpacks which the bedrock players can't play.
Fabuously Optimized is a must have modpack given how efficient it can make minecraft / give fps boosts
Yes, exactly. It seems the demographic for Bedrock tends towards kids because it's supported on tablets. IME the demographic for Java is either older kids or adults or people with interest in modpacks, which is a lot of people. All the major YouTubers who have run worlds for challenges for years are all on Java.
Whenever someone in my group asks to play some MC, there's no "Bedrock or Java?" question, it's just Java every time.
The only major thing Bedrock has right now that Java doesn't is the new stock shaders, but I assume that is coming to Java soon.
RealismCraft 2.0 would like to have a word with you. And it's paid.
Of course the course of Microsoft and jeb_ might be different and he might get pushed towards some decisions later. The problem is that kids nowadays don't use computers. They use phones and tablets. For me Minecraft experience on phone is awful but there are many young generations that consider it native way of playing games
Although I see now that the project is archived, not sure the story behind that.
Part of it was the almost year between 1.7.x and 1.8, so some major mods like Thaumcraft never made the jump.
Gregtech New Horizons (GTNH) has been back porting mods and features to 1.7.10 (like the ability to run on Java 20+) because that’s easier than porting the whole mod pack forward.
Of course, they are fine with you making youtube videos about their game (itdraws people in) but try making a video about a bit darker topics related to the game and you can quickly find your video striked.
I even found an instance of a project like this one (a unfinished open-source MC clone which is vaguely similar but original assets and code and everything) receiving an LLM-written copyright claim based on "it looks similar and that's protected by our IP"