Well this sounds like a wonderful step in the right direction. In theory. Maybe I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but this is Microsoft, and I feel like I really need to check the inside of this gift horse for a group of heavily armed Greek soldiers.
I don’t trust them. What’s the catch? What’s their strategy here? Gifts from Microsoft are never free.
Have the community been asking for this? Is the existing de-obfuscation process onerous or problematic? Obviously it’s ultimately unnecessary and less than ideal, but as a developer I often value consistency over correctness and this seems like it’s potentially creating a large inconsistency for the sake of correctness and possibly little practical value and that raises a few red flags for me.
I’m wondering what the reaction to this news from modders is like. I’m not super into Minecraft modding personally, but won’t this disrupt the modding scene at least temporarily and break backwards compatibility? Unless it’s 1:1 perfectly aligned to the previous mappings they released, and even then, this feels like something that could sow a lot of chaos and confusion and create a lot of extra work at least until the dust settles.
This is objectively a great thing. If you look at bukkit/spigot/paper development, you can see they have to do mojang mappings to deobfuscate and do all kinds of NMS stuff. There will be a pivot period where the mod engines need to catch up, but in theory this should make time between updates faster and easier to untangle when there’s a bug.
I question their motives with Bedrock more than Java. Though there is some stuff like the chat censorship in Java that is questionable.
No Chat Reports my beloved
Modders will still be going through an intermediate library like Forge or Fabric, but it will make the development and upkeep of those libraries much easier. And might be a huge boon in bug finding in the base code.
There’s no catch I can see. It’s probably just recognition that Minecraft’s extensive modding scene is financially good for it and there’s no real point in trying to make free promotional work by fans harder.
The catch is by having the Bedrock cash cow, they care less about Java Edition.
Guessing the site is also affected by this Azure outage, lol.
Fucking finally. When they released the mappings they use a few years ago and specifically said “you cannot use these mappings for modding” it was very frustrating. At this point it will still be an undertaking to make current mods compatible with the new mappings, but it should be able to be automated.
When I was a modder back in the Beta and early release days, using Modloader and then the hot new Forge API, I would constantly run into variables that hadn’t been named by the MCP mappings and it was a pain. Glad to see them finally making this step.
