My point is that literally nobody has been looking at obfuscated code for at least 5 years by now. All the toolchains automatically handle de- and reobfuscation transparently to the point that nobody has to think about it anymore unless maybe you are one of the like 3 people who is actually maintaining the classloading stage of a modloader, or if you are manually writing a bytecode transformer (which almost nobody has needed to do for years either, ever since tools like Mixin entered the scene).
For 99.9% of the modding community, and this includes most optimization mods, the only thing that is going to change is everyone deletes a line or two from their build.gradle and continues about their day.
As far as reporting things to Mojang: again, nothing changes here either, everyone who has ever set up a mod dev environment already has a copy of the deobfuscated source code on their computer, which is the only thing they are looking at when inspecting the minecraft source code or making changes to it. There have been reports on the issue tracker with actual suggested code changes basically since the issue tracker became a thing.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
It has. There have been major rewrites of parts of the codebase, like Sodium, Cubic Chunk, server frameworks, just to start.
The issue is that any major modification is inherently incompatible with other major modifications, hence most persist for one version (or a few) before the devs burns out maintaining it. There are two solutions to this:
Get Mojang to pull in the optimizations. Thus far, they have been uninterested in this (though some controversy over Optifine may have left a bad taste).
Pull the changes into a modding framework. Understandably, Fabric/Forge aren’t willing to pull in a huge overhaul they’d have to maintain.
Some modifications (like Sodium) minimize vanilla changes to prioritize compatibility, and are popular to the extent that some other mods implement workarounds. But this is rare, and it’s still problematic.
Unattributed@feddit.online 22 minutes ago
I remember that. I think the issue there was it mostly handled badly… It seemed like Mojang was trying to go behind the communities back (which I thought sounded a lot like the way Microsoft does things…so I blamed them instead of Mojang). IMO - if this is an era of more open-collaboration it may be possible for Mojang to benefit from working with the community. (There is an excellent example of this in the way AMD has worked with the Open Source community…)
I can see that too… That’s why I am thinking that it might be possible for there to be a more collaborative effort… Like a repository set up where community devs can submit PR’s for changes, and Mojang can either approve or deny them. If that started working well, I could see a situation where there are specifically Mojang employed community devs, the role of working on changes that will help both the main Minecraft tree and the modding community.
(Okay, I am probably more optimistic than I should be – after all Microsoft is in the mix here…)
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 11 minutes ago
Yeah, that sounds dreamy. It could certainly work.
And yeah, the problem is not just Microsoft but Mojang. Mojang is an extremely conservative/careful dev, even before they got bought by MS. It’s why the game hasn’t enshittified too bad, but also why development seems to move kinda slow for arguably the biggest game on Earth.
Unattributed@feddit.online 2 minutes ago
Yeah, Mojang’s conservative development style is arguably the reason for Minecraft’s success, while also being a source of frustration and friction for the community, IMO.
MS is another story altogether, though. While Mojang is a very thoughtful company, MS is driven by profit. I’m honestly surprised there aren’t more collisions between the two cultures.