My 2020 Recap

Weird and unexpected is, I think, the best way to describe this year for me and everyone, but it was also an amazing year for MCreator and me. Take a hot chocolate, some marshmallows and read my new MCreator story.

Last year, I said I wanted to continue and work on Farm Adventure II. If you remember what I said, I wanted to start a new (secret) mod, but I finally didn't begin this mod. I only have a few ideas for a part of the mod written of a document. I love History and particularly the ancient civilizations. With this mod, I wanted to remake these civilizations in Minecraft. I wanted to try to make them as realistic as possible. My goal was to generate these civilizations in the world as if they were a part of the real game. I think you can now understand why I decided to stop this project. This project was just too big and too ambitious for one person. Even with my knowledges and all that MCreator can do, there are limits. To make what I would like to do, I need to code myself, but I don't have enough time and motivation to learn Forge, develop complex systems for the mod, have the school and do other things I want. I don't know if I will continue this project one day in a mod. However, I hope this project will become a reality one day. I think it can be a nice thing, with a map, an animation series or something. Enough talking about that. Let begin the real story!

Once upon a time, in a world not knowing the events of 2020, I started a new year. During this year, I wanted to make the most beautiful and worked mod that I ever made. This mod was the new one I started the previous year, Farm Adventure II. However, something happened during the first week of January. I was a Wiki Contributor. This event can appear ordinary for everyone else (and it is). However, in my MCreator life, I think it is one of the most important. Why? To be honest, I'm not 100% sure of the reason. I would say it's the moment that I began to put a lot of myself in MCreator.

During the following weeks, I continued to work on Farm Adventure II and to work on the Wiki. I couldn't work a lot on it (Farm Adventure II) because I could only use the family's computer, the week-end. I won in January a MOTW for Farm Adventure II. This MOTW was my only one this year (the beginning of my end :'().

March 11th, the announcement of the plugins. Three days later, the beginning of my ascension to the god status (You are maybe exaggerating. - Maybe, let say to the best MCreator users.) On the day of the second 2020.2 snapshot's release (thank you, it was a Saturday), I started to understand how to make a custom generator. Even if it was a basic (and bad) generator, I released my first plugin and generator the next day (3 hours after SomoneElse (first released plugin). Grrrrr). (I started to learn generators before procedure blocks and triggers. Don't ask me the reason I don't know it.) I tried, then, to understand how to make other features, but except for AI tasks, I didn't fully understand them. Now I know how plugins work, I think this was because I didn't understand dependencies. This "problem" followed me a few times (until my first plugin adding new procedure blocks I think).

Two days after, I wrote my guide(the Wiki pages) on the plugin system. I spent my whole evening and the next morning to write this guide (about 7 hours to write it). I think we can say (I was crazy, and it announced things for my confinement. Hello, Covid-19 (Why China didn't wait one day to report it to the WHO. As they reported it the December 31st, 2019, it's called Covid-19 when everything happened in 2020. It will be a good question in the future. xD I should stop to talk, close all parentheses I opened and continue my story, no? Just a last thing before I continue, do you remember what I was saying before I started to talk about that? I had to re-read the beginning of my sentence.)) it is at this moment, and with plugins, I started to be involved in the community. Before, yes, I already helped users, was active on the tracker, but for an unknown reason, with plugins, I started to go more on the forums.

At the beginning of April, I wanted to make a Spigot generator. However, Spigot doesn't work with Gradle (or at least, it was what I thought until this summer). So, I decided to make my most famous plugin, a Fabric generator. This one was my first real generator. My resource pack generator just used one or two files, but Fabric needed to work like Forge works. I spent 2 or 3 weeks to have a basic generator (create the workspace without errors, download files, etc.). Then, I implemented the items (with basic support only) to finally release a first development version the April 29th. I continued to work (and learn Java + Fabric) on it during the following weeks and months alone. In June, BoogieMonster started to help me with the plugin. After he became the main developer of the plugin. (To answer a question, I stopped a few months ago to work on it because BoogieMonster re-wrote it in 1.16.x and I was not (and I'm still not) enough good to understand everything he made. I asked him if he will continue the development, and he answered me, yes, but I don't know if he's still really interested.)

A few days after I started the Fabric generator, in-app helps were released, and I made (almost) all of them during the 2020.3 snapshots.

Maybe old users can remember them, but before the 2020.2, several Wiki pages were not up-to-date. So at the beginning of May, I decided to update all Wiki pages about mod elements (and a few others) for MCreator 2020.2. It took me a lot of time (so much I updated them two times), but it had to be done, and I'm happy with the result. Some of them didn't receive a good update for a few years. I hope it helped, and it will help you if you are a new user. :)

We are now in the summer (and at 1100 words for 2 hours of writing), and I released more plugins (I don't remember which and when exactly). During the summer, I released new plugins. One of them is the Spigot generator. I did some researches, and I found that there is a way to download Spigot using Gradle. There is, however, one thing I made and released during August, my plugin creator/helper software, MCR Plugin Creator. I started to be very good with plugins, and I saw we were just a few users to make plugins. My original objective by developing this software was to help me when I made my plugins. I quickly decided, after, I could make it for everyone. I also wanted to use this small project to learn more Java, but I decided to use an external plugin to make the UI (Scene Builder). To be honest, I almost forgot this software until a few days ago. I also never used it to create plugins or procedure blocks because it's faster to code what I want myself. However, I hope it helped, and it helps, some of you to create or learn plugins.

During the summer, I also published something I started to work on a few months ago, the story of MCreator. I began to write this in February, but I took several breaks. I finished the first version of the story at the end of March, but as I wanted to make it as a video at the beginning, I just waited several months. In July, I decided to continue and finish the story to update it for the last months. The July 27th, I published the story on the forums, and I'm glad you loved it. I would like to thank again Klemen for his help with the dates of the first years as I wasn't a member of MCreator yet.

I consider the September 5th and 14th like the beginning of 3.0. Why? The first date is the day of the open-sourcing of MCreator, and the second one, its end announcement. When Klemen announced that MCreator was finally in open-source, I started to make new biome features, then, for another thing. After that, I worked on something else. I think that I have finally found the project I needed to learn Java because, since this day, I almost always make something for MCreator. Since this day, I've learnt more than since I have tried to learn Java (in March 2018, if my memories are exact). I'm still not the best with Java, but MCreator helped and will continue to help me. It was maybe how MCreator was supposed to "learn" me Java, but it's my way. The September 14th Klemen announced he will eventually stop to develop MCreator. NorthWestTrees, Max, Blackout, and other contributors have immediately thought to make a project to continue it. This project is MCToolkit. Since this day, the project became biggest than the beginning, and our plans also became bigger. We want to challenge ourselves, and to make one big Minecraft community. We want to help Minecraftians to make all projects they dream of. We are maybe crazy, but we love MCreator.

At the end of 2019, I wanted to continue to make mods and to make a new big mod, but life brought me something else better. I don't know how will be my 2021 year, but I'm sure it will give me new amazing things because life always gives us what we expect the less. I learnt so many new things this year, and I couldn't expect anything better for me with MCreator. It was not what I wanted, but it was what I needed.

I hope this year also gave you new things.

I wish you a happy New Year and new decade. May this New Year be something you did not expect.