The final chapter of my journey

Hi everyone,

At the end of April, I said I would be gone for about a month. Therefore, I would not be able to update my plugins until then. We're now mid-June and still nothing. I already talked about it and announced it to the MCreator Team and a few other people on NeoToolkit Discord server a few weeks ago. I'll go straight to the point: I decided to stop MCreator and leave the community.

If you know my name, this is surely by one of my known plugins such as the Fabric Generator, File Manager or Array Lists. However, these aren't the only things I've done in the community. For the few of you who will understand this, my journey started almost simultaneously with the journey for MCreator 2.0... I just finished elementary school and now, I'm done with my first university year. That's quite a long time honestly and I got to see the big evolution of MCreator... as well as me, because it's surely not something known, but I also started as a very basic user, annoying Klemen with stupid basic questions and problems, not understanding a single word of MCreator (thank you for your small help Google Translate! 😅) because it was only in English (I wasn't good), knowing nothing about coding and Java. Anyway, I started by making bad mods, I had big (too big?) ambitions and no skill (ok... the event system wasn't helping). However, Klemen constantly made big improvements, adding tons of new features, me starting to understand the software (and English), I finally achieved to get my first MOTW with Farm Adventure (I still don't understand how I was able to get it with such a bad mod...). Later, I gave myself the challenge to create RPG-like systems inside Minecraft using MCreator. It was quite hard due to many limitations, but I got them working. Farm Adventure II and Little Camera were my last mods, both with more ambitions and technical challenges (mostly Little Camera). Ho9wever, I started getting bored of MCreator and modding in general... but it was the first half of 2020.

Three things happened in the first months of 2020. The first one is (officially) becoming a Wiki contributor. The two others, I think if I tell you March 2020, you'll understand, but if you don't: COVID-19 and literally one week later, the implementations of the plugin system. We could only make new Blockly blocks (procedures, AI tasks and advancement triggers), new global triggers and new generators, but this was enough for me to switch to making plugins. A fun fact I didn't tell much about, after making my resource pack generator (mainly to understand a bit how plugins worked), I wanted to make a full Spigot generator. However, Spigot doesn't use Gradle as its main way like Forge and Fabric do, so I didn't know how to make my Spigot Generator. This is why I started working on a Fabric Generator... just the time to find a solution... if only I knew how that would turn 😅

Staying at home really helped me to go full-steam into making plugins, make the FB Generator bigger and create numerous new plugins such as File Manager and Array Lists. In September 2020, outside the fact I perfectly remember what I was doing and where I was when Klemen announced he wanted to stop MCreator (spoiler: it never happened), MCreator became open-source just a few days before this announcement. Everyone could finally make features and work directly on the software... and I obviously was the first person to open a Pull Request (something on GitHub to merge new code). In the beginning, I was mostly adding some features I wanted to have for a very long time, but after a few months, I started making some changes to the plugin system to add new features. The first big system I changed was the variable system because I originally wanted to implement a new Date variable type, but the code was so messy and not understandable (we had to write code in dozens of files just for a single variable type) that instead of understanding the current system, I erased it at 90% and code it again to simplify, uniformize and group everything. It was so big that we had to give up on a good implementation for global variables and change them once the original changes (so the overhaul of the var system and the pluginization of local variables) were merged. Around the same time, I also wanted to add resource packs for MCreator... so I changed the resource loading system and added the possibility to make new UI themes inside plugins (Klemen surely didn't like me with both big pull requests being reviewed at the same time and me not doing (and understanding) things correctly 😅 (sorry)).

A few months before all of this (in February 2021), I started to work on something that would take more than a year to be merged, but something that is still in my opinion one of my biggest feature contributions to the software (excluding everything related to plugins), the command arguments. It was something that was asked for several years as in the past, commands only allowed text arguments and never received an update when Mojang rewrote the commands in 1.13. It took a very long time, like explained previously, but it also helped to change and improve existing the Blockly editor systems (the reason it took so much time) by big chunks of them to make smaller and removing all the redundant code (also allowing us to simply have to create a variable if we want to add a new blockly editor). It also allowed, for the future, to make most of the code ready for a move to the plugin system.

My last two big system overhauls were about the mod element type and the preference systems. I changed the first one because even if Java plugins were still not a thing, they already were in the talks and the plans for the future, so I wanted to finally make possible custom mod elements (which was the last major thing, we, plugin developers wanted to have). Originally, this was supposed to be a first step for custom mod elements in JSON plugins, but Java plugins were introduced sometime after, so it wasn't important anymore. I finally finished my additions with the preference systems, because I first wanted to change another system (again), but I also wanted to improve it because the old one gave us a lot of limitations and was very strict (numbers, checkboxes, drop-down menus... that was the only things possible). With my new system, I wanted to give Java plugins the freedom to add new preferences (which was also impossible with the design of the previous system), but also allow new types of preferences (e.g. selecting a file).

During this time, I still worked on other features, changes and bugfixes as well as porting to new Minecraft versions and I never stopped working on my plugins. Although I liked spending time on MCreator, I was spending most of my free time, on either my plugins or new features/porting generators for MCreator. At this point, if I had something counting the hours I spent on MCreator, I think I can safely say it would be in the 4 digits... and this is the problem. I spent a lot (too much?) time on MCreator, no matter what project we are talking about, my plugins were no longer a challenge as contributing to MCreator helped me learn Java and programming concepts, they became more a task than a hobby, as more people wanted them to get more features and/or stay up-to-date. I was ok with that when my motivation was at 100% because I knew I was the only one capable of doing it and if I didn't make it, nobody would make it. I don't want to say I'm better than everyone, but I tried many times to get someone to help me and the only other user that was as active as me was Nerdy. Everyone else stopped after some time, which is understandable but still something to keep in mind.

The real "problems" began one year ago. I no longer had the motivation to work on either my plugins or contributions and on top of that, I also no longer had ideas for new features for MCreator and for new MCreator plugins. My existing plugins (read: my Fabric Generator) were taking me a lot of time to update each time and it was more of a burden, but at this point, I still wanted to continue working on new things. After some time, I decided to take a break for a few months to see if my motivation would come back and it did. it didn't last long, but during this period (in January of this year), I could do some updates to my plugins. Something to note is that in September, I started university and even though I still had quite a lot of free time (very good schedule), my classes took me much more time than before... and I started new hobbies in the previous years that I was enjoying (and still enjoy) much more.

I know many of you use one of many of my plugins and leaving will cause you problems. I tried for a very long time to avoid this problem, but I never succeeded in finding someone to take back my Fabric Generator once I'll leave and it's sadly still the case. I don't know what will happen of it, but like the rest of my other plugins. They are open-source and have a license allowing anyone to take the plugin where I left it and continue it. However, about File Manager and Array Lists, Nerdy already told me and announced to some other people he had the will to continue them and keep them updated. He also said he planned to add many more features to File Manager (I also had some ideas, but I never took the time to implement them), so I suggest you stay tuned for that!

If you were on MCToolkit or NeoToolkit, you know I started to work on multiple features such as Mojang's entity animation system, official support for list variables and some other things, but I never finished and continued them. Sadly, I won't continue and finish them and another contributor will need to implement them. However, we talked a little bit about Mojang's entity animation system a few weeks/months ago on the (private) MCreator Team Discord server and it seems one of the main problems I had with the feature can/will be solved. Nerdy told us he will/would take a look when he has some free time, so it may be a small hope, but don't expect anything until this is officially announced by Pylo (Klemen).

I tried to keep this short (but still wrote 2000 words), but I think that when we look back at what I did and achieved during my time in this community, we can easily understand why I want to stop and leave. Nobody can do the same thing over and over for eternity without getting bored of it, even if this is a hobby. Our brain needs new things to happen or it'll want something else. I didn't write everything I did during my time here because that wasn't the point and if you are interested in my past, you can find it with some research, but I think I can say without being shy I will (and hope) leave an important legacy to the software and the community, with my plugins, my many contributions to the software or even all the pages I wrote and (tried to keep) updated on the Wiki.

Even if we had problems in the community and I think most people on the forums should take more time to find the answer to their question/problem before asking here, I still loved the community 💖

A wise man once said, "Do not be sad because this is the end. Be happy because it happened!"

Thank you for everything Klemen and Matej and all the memories everyone ❤️