Source: OSNews
Gaming isn’t something we talk about very often here on OSNews, but I think this piece of news is actually a rare piece of good, welcome news from this industry. Mojang, the Microsoft-owned company behind Minecraft, has announced it’s going to stop obfuscating the code behind the Java edition of Minecraft. A refresher: the Java edition of Minecraft is the original version of the game, which exists alongside the Bedrock Edition, which is written in C++. Both variants are kept more or less in sync with each other.
The Java edition has historically been far more moddable, and comes with far fewer restrictions than the Bedrock Edition, which Microsoft maintains far tighter control over. Still, the modding scene around the Java Edition sprung up in spite of Mojang and Microsoft, not because of them, but over the years the modding scene has been embraced more and more by these two companies. The final step in this embrace comes today as Mojang will no longer obfuscate the code behind th Java Edition.
Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn’t see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled – and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did.
But we encourage people to get creative both in Minecraft and with Minecraft – so in 2019 we tried to make this tedious process a little easier by releasing “obfuscation mappings”. These mappings were essentially a long list that allowed people to match the obfuscated terms to un-obfuscated terms. This alleviated the issue a little, as modders didn’t need to puzzle out what everything did, or what it should be called anymore. But why stop there?
↫ Minecraft website
This is excellent news for the game, the wider modding community, and players. Minecraft is still a massively popular game, and making modding easier is very welcome, as for a lot of people, mods are what make Minecraft actually interesting. It’s also rare to see a massive force in gaming making a positive step like this, so they deserve the few kudos.
> …and the folks on Java are on Java for the modding, or Linux users, or other sorts of people who are useful for community goodwill but not money.
There’s the issues of how the wiring and logic system (redstone) function between the two games, and lots of limitations and some baffling decisions brought about by the switch from platform-specific ports (Pocket edition, Console edition) spurned a lot of users, who often do fall directly into the “useful for goodwill but not money” camp.
One such difference of particular note between the versions is a bug introduced early in the development of pistons that was later declared “Won’t fix” by the Java devs because players found it useful.
Console ports faithfully reimplemented this behavior.
Bedrock did not reimplement this behavior, despite the community wanting it, Java having it for years, and being well-defined.
Later, Bedrock devs introduced their *own* different bug to pistons, and decided to keep it because the community wanted it.
It was a couple years ago that msoft stopped releasing the .PDB files for Bedrock’s server executable, making modding significantly harder outside of msoft’s marketplace-compatible and less capable system.
Java has had mappings for years (though of course there’s multiple competing standards) so from conversations with mod devs this change is more “this garners and shows goodwill” than “this removes a technical barrier”.