Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwdisswordfishy | Hacker News Reader

> But we encourage people to get creative both in Minecraft and with Minecraft – so in 2019 we tried to make this tedious process a little easier by releasing “obfuscation mappings”. These mappings were essentially a long list that allowed people to match the obfuscated terms to un-obfuscated terms. This alleviated the issue a little, as modders didn’t need to puzzle out what everything did, or what it should be called anymore. But why stop there?

Indeed, why did they even bother with this half-measure in the first place?

View on HN

A lot of mod tooling was built around the obfuscated or community names for those APIs.

I wouldn't worry too much about it breaking anything with how version-specific modding already is. And by the time the full release is out, I'm sure every tool will have updated based on the new names from the snapshots.

Still is for legal reasons. Also the community names (Yarn) come with javadoc that actually explains what the function does

Hyrum's Law

If I had to guess, the legal team's brains started melting when de-obfuscation was mentioned.

If my memory serves, the stated justification for not going open source was copyright and trademark protection. Apparently, that is no longer a concern, if it ever really was.

Now I'm bracing for them to drop support for Java Edition entirely and go strictly Bedrock in a couple of years.

Perhaps Minecraft 2.0 is finally nearing release.

Actually, there was technically a Minecraft 2.0 release, but it was an april fools prank in 2013.

Relevant wiki link: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_2.0

I don't see that happening any time soon. Too many people at Mojang care about the Minecraft Java Edition community too much.

Perhaps it was easier? There were also probably legal reasons.

Were the mappings only a subset of the obfuscated classes/methods/etc? Basically making the mapping a sort of public API

Reply on news.ycombinator.com