All stories have an ending

Published by Klemen on
All stories have an ending

I know this post is probably a big shock and not expected, but as said, all things have an end, unfortunately. I will try to explain everything as much as possible in this post.

 

 

EDIT:

There are more updated news around this here, as some parts of the future plans got changed and/or polished and better explained here: https://mcreator.net/news/67886/minecraft-116x-and-future-mcreator

 

 

I still remember the day my brother Matej (also developer, moderator, and co-maintainer of MCreator) showed me Minecraft and told me it is written in Java, this was all the way back in the days of Risugami's modloader. I immediately got the idea for MCreator. Since then, the project has kept on growing and becoming better and better, and the community got bigger and bigger, and things started to move faster and faster.

With its growth, there was more and more time needed to maintain the project and the community. In the past few years, I have become very overworked and have reached the point of burn-out, unfortunately. I have another job at a robotics company that pays and will pay the bills, while MCreator is a free project. Unfortunately, I can't maintain both of them. MCreator is time-wise-looking another full-time job for me. My day no longer consists of free time and I had to cut down on all other activities and things I love in order to be able to sustain MCreator while working and studying at the same time.

I was somehow hoping open-sourcing would improve this, but it turned out being an open-source maintainer, no work was taken from me, just additional work of managing pull requests and planning the work was added to the mix. I have big guilt that I gave a false hope with the open-sourcing move as many community members really bit into the opportunity and helped a lot with contributions and new feature additions, but unfortunately, I was not able to foresee the outcome of open-sourcing properly.

What will happen now?

I do not find it fair to just shut it down immediately, as many contributions from the community were already made, so I will try to work with the community to finish the MCreator 2020.5 update in the next few weeks. I will try to add some of the pull requests to the update, but will very likely not be able to add all of them, especially not larger ones. For this reason, I am also asking contributors to slow down with PRs to the official repository, as they might not all get into the update, to avoid any disappointments if I will not be able to merge them all.

I was hoping for a stable 1.16.x Forge to come sooner, but it didn't, so there likely won't be an MCreator update adding support for this Minecraft version (this is not definitive yet, it depends on the time I will have in the first university semester). After the 2020.5 update, I will eventually halt my development of MCreator software.

Open-sourcing might have given MCreator an option for a second life, on the other hand. Some members of the community and contributors might recognize themselves as possible future maintainers. I will keep the MCreator name, as it is part of my life, it is my child. But if there will be community interest in running the project forwards under a new name, new website, and new lead after the 2020.5 update, I will gladly support the new project by promoting it as a successor of MCreator on the website in the future. Keep in mind that I am quitting development entirely so I will not be able to offer any help on the potential future development.

I plan on keeping the website alive as the community is not dying with the end of software development. Matej plans on running mod of the week to the end of this year and making one final yearly recap video. I might be revoking wiki contributor and moderator roles in the future (depends on the need of them and the activity of the users having these roles) but will keep running the website for some time after that, and then once in the future (probably far in the future, depending on the activity of users), put it into the read-only mode.

I would like to thank each member of the community, we were an awesome family. MCreator's community is one of the friendliest and most supportive communities I was ever part of. Big thanks to moderators, wiki contributors, people who helped on forums, thanks to code and translation contributors, thanks to donors who helped me work on this project, thanks to all the people who were making tutorials for MCreator, and thanks to every single user of MCreator that was part of this story. I will be revoking monthly donations as I don't find it fair to receive any more donations from this point on.

I know MCreator plays an important role in the lives of many of you, and believe me, it is very hard for me too, especially after working on this project each day, even during weekends, for almost 9 years. It was a big part of my life and me growing up and I am writing this with tears in my eyes thinking back to all this. But as the title of this post says, all stories have an ending, and this is MCreator's ending.

It was an amazing journey, thank you for everything!

Klemen

EDIT 15. 9. 2020

Thank you for all the positive comments you wrote. I am still reading them and will try to respond to them as soon as possible, but it is a really hard time for me right now. MCreator was all for me, but unfortunately, life has its own ways.

I noticed new versions started to emerge and I really like this. I would like just point out that naming new projects something like MCreator + adjective could be a bit confusing for users regarding the maintainership of the software. Ideally, I wanted the names to be something like XYZ - The successor/fork/next thing/ ... of MCreator. If you still want to use "MCreator + adjective", just make sure to clarify this is a new version and new software based on MCreator and is not MCreator itself. Naming it MCreator 2 or similar is not acceptable as this is still the original name and too confusing.

Another thing I want to clarify is that MCreator is licensed under the GPL-3.0 license, so all forks need to use this license too due to legal implications and need to be open sourced under this license. Make sure to understand all the requirements of GPL-3.0 when making forks and distributing them (including things like keeping the original copyright notice for the year 2020 and only adding new ones for the modifications of the source code).

TLDR variant

Some users don't read all text and make assumptions and spread incorrect information, so here is a short summary for such users, excluding reasons and backstory. 

In short, the software development will stop after 2020.5, the website and community will remain up, so will downloads and plugins, open sourcing allows others to make new variants of MCreator under new names. MCreator is not dead-ending, nor shutting down, but the development will be halted in the future. The software will still be downloadable and usable, the website will still be up, and the community will still be here to be part of.

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Comments

thank you for seven years of mod development, from someone too stupid to mod minecraft directly.
we'll miss this, and i hope mcreator gets picked back up at some point in the future.

I am honestly so sad. I found this project years ago, back when it was just a small community of avid minecraft modders and the software was basic. I have seen this project grow and flower over my years of lurking in the background and it breaks my heart to see it go. I hope you can move on to bigger and better things, Klemen. We are all with you. I hope someday, you post an update and inform us how you are doing. For now though, go pursue your dreams. We are all with you in this. It breaks my heart to see the discontinuation of the project that inspired my love for coding, but I must let it go. I hope you remember the community you built and grew and the lives you changed. We will support anything you do Klemen!

That is all I have to say. Goodbye, MCreator, and goodbye, Klemen. (╯︵╰,)

"I hope someday, you post an update and inform us how you are doing" - good idea, will keep this in mind ;) Thank you for all your kind words! Also very glad to hear MCreator inspired you for coding, this really makes me happy!

Yeah, please do. Would be interesting to see how you are in a year. Also, thank YOU for all the work you have done for this community. And I probably wouldn’t have decided to learn how to code if it weren’t for you. So ty!

Klemen,

Even though this really hit me in the soul. And how much I hated to know this was going to happen one day.
You made something awesome. And I am very sure you made the right choice.
I will never forget your name and how much of an awesome developer you are.

Thank you.

I always hoped this day will never be a thing, but it is today. I really loved to be an "important" user of this awesome community and I am glad to have helpes your project. I am sad to see you get a burn out because of us, but I understand. You worked a lot to develop and moderate MCreator, mainly in the last 3 years. I will always thank you for everything you give me as Java knowledges and everything else. You worked a lot on the open-sourcing for almost nothing for you, and for that I am really sorry. We were too much happy that we added a lot of things we wanted since a lot of time. I hope your "new" life will be better, and as someone said "Do not be sad because it is finished, but be happy because it hapenned." You stop MCreator, but you can be sure that with the other users we won't accept that MCreator dies. We will take your work and continue it, until the end!
Thabk you for everything you made, Goldorion

It was not because of you guys, please don't take the guilt on you, really, don't do this. It was due to unfortunate was my life turned and the fact I could not turn MCreator into a real job. "You worked a lot on the open-sourcing for almost nothing for you, and for that I am really sorry." - I really was hoping this would be the solution to the problem I was having, but I was wrong unfortunatelly. This really tore me, but it happens. I still don't see this as a lost time, maybe MCreator will live due to this for years to come. I really believe into you guys that you will do great job, just don't go my route and overwork yourself!

"Do not be sad because it is finished, but be happy because it hapenned." - This is probably the best thing I heard this day, big big thanks for this. I will write this somewhere to help me cope with the ending. Thank you! ;)

Thanks Klemen for creating MCreator! I Hope you have a good rest of your life and people contribute and improve MCreator for the good of this and people make the best MCreator they can!
-Sam

Oh...
Damn, sorry to hear about this. Glad you're choosing to do something that you want to do, and I completely understand how you feel about Mcreator getting rid of your free time.
It's been a great journey, and I'm sure I speak for all of use when I say that we'll miss you.
However, I think you made the right decision to stop.

I think I'll go through my Mcreator journey here, just for old times' sake.
(cont. in reply)

Thanks for patronage Klemen, you created a source for creativity and if you don't feel like it anymore we are happy that you choose what is the best for you, this might be the end for mcreator but i hope other clones come out of this.
-Sam

I remember when I started Mcreator, and had no idea how any of it worked. I made mistakes, but I learned from them. Eventually I was able to publish my first mod. It wasn't great, but it was a start. I continued working, and made more mods, until eventually I released Cogwheel Dungeons, my first and (currently) only MOTW.
And then I started work on Trailblazer, a mod still in progress that most likely won't be stopped even by Mcreator shutting down. This started to take a up a lot of my time, and I went on a few months' hiatus. During this time, I set up the Mcreator Modding Support discord, which began, slowly to grow. We still don't have very many members, and we're pretty inactive, but it helped me really feel like I was a member of the Mcreator community. It was actually from this discord that I heard about this, with one of the moderators, Player Max = new Steve(); posting this in the announcements channel.
And damn if that didn't feel like a punch to the gut.
(cont.)



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