Let's talk about the future... again?

Published by Klemen on
Let's talk about the future... again?

So almost a year ago, I announced I would be stopping working on MCreator, but it does not seem like that happened. So what does this mean? Read on. 

A recap

To recap a bit, I open-sourced MCreator around a year ago and soon after announced I am stopping development due to lack of time due to day job and school. Things settled down a bit due to the pandemic and also due to some unpredictable changes in my life. We also got along with the developer team, so I decided to carry on with development for a bit longer. 

But this "longer" now became a year :D Some users are now becoming impatient and are asking when forks (MCToolkit) that promised continuation will come out and if I am leading them on about what is actually happening. That is definitely not true. As I stated many times, things in my life changed due to unpredictable factors I could not foresee. But this opens another question, what is going to happen in the future then?

So, what now?

So as we can see, I am not a future teller, so we can only make plans and try to stick with them and hope unpredictable things will not happen. I can predict that I will be able to work on MCreator as it is now for probably around half a year, but then my private life will undergo some more changes that I can't predict the impact on MCreator properly just yet. 

I have talked with the bigger contributors about the situation, and we came up with two options that could happen in the future: 

  1. MCreator is developed for some more time while I have time to work on it as I do now, then contributors start their own fork as it was already planned, but delayed.
  2. Bigger contributors become more active in the field of fixing bugs and reviewing pull requests (and after a while possibly merging them too) and I can step back a bit and have time to still maintain and steer MCreator as it is and it lives on because it is no longer that big-time consumer for me.

We also talked about MCToolkit. They are preparing their own statement on this too, but in short, the project will wait for the potential ending of MCreator if option 1 happens. This is so we don't introduce incompatibilities between workspaces and split our workforce and make two incompatible and unmergeable projects. If option 2 happens, developers of MCToolkit (that are also major contributors of MCreator) will become more involved in maintaining and steering MCreator to take some load off me. What will happen with the fork, in this case, is not fully clear yet. Its developers are thinking of making a mod maker for other games in the long term in that case. 

The plan

So what option will happen and when? That depends a lot on how my future will turn, and I can't predict this, so I will do my best to keep you updated on this and keep it as transparent as possible, keeping doubts and speculations at a minimum. I will also keep close contact with contributors so we evaluate if we are ready for option 2 in the future. 

Sadly this post does not answer how MCreator will look in the future as this is not possible to predict. What I can do is keep the process as transparent as possible, and this is the reason behind this post. I hope I cleared up at least some of the confusion and questions with this. Stay awesome!

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Comments

Thanks for the update Klemen! Crossing my fingers for support up to 1.18, but your health, time, and emotional state is whats important! Keep on keeping on Klemen!

all of this is good to know (especially option 2, which sounds like a fairly good future for the software and you guys)! thanks for staying open and dedicated to continuing the project (also to contributors), i honestly appreciate your work throughout those times and hopefully you're still doing fine. stay strong y'all! lastly, whatever the future might hold, i only wish the best for MCreator/MCToolkit :D
P.S. I honestly wanna help, but I'm still quite the beginner at coding mods and don't have a lot of clues as to how MCreator does things although i could always check the source code (though i gave it a shot recently, I'm still learning). but maybe in the near future, who knows. hopefully that's fine ;)

It's ok if you need to take breaks sometimes, I just hope we are able to get 1.17/18, I really wanna make cave biomes but that is not able to be done with 1.16.

It actually is possible, but requires a quite tricky strategy and could not fit all features you would want these caves to have: https://mcreator.net/forum/66175/how-make-cave-biomes-tutorial-kind
But 1.17/1.18 versions would be cool just for having our mods updated for new versions, of course :D

Thanks for the update! Honestly, I'd love to contribute my part to MCreator development in the future, when I learn more coding/programming stuff, maybe even support 1.12.2 generator, as it seems really abandoned and I think it should get as much love as Goldorion's Fabric generator. The only thing keeping me from contributing is my lack of programming knowledge tho.
Aside from my dreams anyway, I will just agree on other's point, second option seems great and it would be so great to see MCreator living on. Either way, I'm really thankful for all of you from Pylo team, for both creating awesome program and maintaining so great community which arose around it <3

I will try my best to finish my studies soon and try to get into 1.12.2 coding more as a "holiday task", so I really hope to work on it in the future. I have to say, seeing Goldorion's work on his plugin is really inspiring :D
(btw redstone output feature is now here, thank you thank you thank you!!!)

Be sure to take breaks when you need to avoid burning out. Life and health always comes first, so it should always be a priority! I wish you'd get more attention for the work you've done over the years, and I understand for some it could get discouraging; though keep that head up man, you're doing great work :)

This is great! I was so sad when you released the last post about this, but this has given me hope!



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