Topic category: Website and community discussion
You thought it was another person and topic saying MCreator generates bad code or it only allows users to create basic ore pack mods, didn't you? 🙃
First of all, I think we should come back a bit about the generated code because even if it is not as bad as some people think, it's not as good as it could be with a hand-written mod. The problem is here, the code we generate when you do something was not written for your exact case. This mostly affects procedures, but when we implement a feature, such as a procedure block, we are not adding one new possibility. This can be a mountain of new possibilities that are being added, even for a single procedure block. For example, when a procedure block executing an action on an entity is added, we need to keep in mind that users can use it alone inside a procedure or with 100 other procedure blocks. This means that in the case this single block is used, the block has to be auto-sufficient with the dependencies and the calls it does, to not cause errors. However, when the block is used among multiple other procedure blocks, the same code is also generated as we can not affirm the dependencies and the required calls can be done everywhere. To avoid problems (and partially due to Blockly making our life quite hard to optimize things) the decision to duplicate the code when too many possibilities are available was taken. While MCreator 2021.3 drastically improved the generated code of mod elements by adding multiple new systems for generators, it is not possible with a software like MCreator to generate the same code as if we were making a mod manually.
Now this is said, I think we can talk about one of the main problems MCreator currently has, the lack of tutorials or the lack of help for beginners. Don't say what I'm not saying. I'm not saying MCreator lacks tutorials to make things, NorthWestTrees made and still makes a ton of video tutorials about a lot of features and possibilities. Just take a look at the Pylo YouTube channel's playlists (here). No, what I'm trying to say is when you are a complete beginner and you use the software for the first time, you have nothing helping you directly inside the software and the online help is either hard to find or not available in the user's language. With the other Wiki contributors, we are trying to keep them updated as much as possible the Wiki pages and improve them as much as possible. However, they are in English, covering features and not the global UI and they don't explain why something works or gives a proper path to achieve something. They mostly explain the different properties/actions of mod elements or other MCreator systems (e.g. code editor, GUI editor). I know that constantly providing up-to-date and in-depth tutorials for everything and in multiple languages is neither easy nor possible at our scale. In-app help tips were added to contribute to this problem, so users could have a good explanation of the specific parameter and what it does with some help and some examples of Minecraft elements using it. However, when you start using MCreator for the first time, you don't know English, MCreator translations in your language are either bad or nonexistent, you are not aware of the existence of the online help and you don't understand used terms, MCreator can be hard to use. Learning something new is always hard, I know this, but the objective of MCreator is to make that easier and maybe help people learn how to code or make them want to learn. As an objective, not being able to provide a good understanding is maybe not the best problem to have. Multiple solutions exist and with the rest of the contributors, we always try to do our best, but something nobody should forget is that MCreator is a free project, maintained by people (not a robot!) taking a lot of their free time to keep it updated, improve it and make your life easier. So I think that considering this element changes the situation. MCreator is not a program made by a company with employees. It is an open-source project developed in the free time of university students or people who have a job and everyone can help fix the problems, so I think in general we do a good job if we consider the situation :)
Very good points! I get tired pretty quickly of people complaining about the very tool that's allowing them to get into modding in the first place. No, it's not perfect, but it's not reasonable to expect an open-source, volunteer run project to be up to some glorious standard all the time. Everything I've seen with MCreator and its recent updates exceeds my expectations.
MCreator helped get me into modding, and from there into coding my own games, partly because it made the development process easier to understand, but also because it taught me to approach problems from a coding perspective. ...Which isn't to say that the boatload of problems that comes with using an open source program and several different third party tools to modify a ten year old game that's constantly being updated is nice, but they certainly taught me useful ways to approach issues. Unironically, coding my own games after dealing with all the bugginess of minecraft modding wound up being easier to get into, at least in part because I had that problem solving experience.
Ultimately, I find people's opinions sort of come down to drive, or just maturity. For people with a genuine interest in modding, and a willingness to accept help, there's generally good intentions. It's the people who take up modding on a whim and/or expect everything to work exactly how they want the first try that can make things difficult. Modding can be frustrating, and I personally believe in trying to help people regardless, but there are certainly people who would rather complain than accept help.