A recording of the meeting can be found on YouTube.
Date: 2023-07-17 at 3pm EDT
Duration: 1 hour
Purpose: To discuss governance, new Council members, NAP23, and branding; answer questions; and set the standard for Steering Council Meetings.
Location: Discord
Meeting Secretary: SizableShrimp
Current Council members:
| Name | Title | Present |
|---|---|---|
| cpw | Permanent member | ✓ |
| Curle | Permanent member | ✓ |
| Orion | Member | ✓ |
| SizableShrimp | Member | ✓ |
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Review governance drafts
Drafts summary:- Three core groups: Steering Council, Maintainers team, Moderation team.
- Maintainers in charge of technical matters; Moderators in charge of community matters; Council in charge of the rest (and generally supervises the other two).
- Other teams created by Council (with approval of other two teams in certain cases), with charter delineating responsibilities and authority.
- Modification of certain docs (core governance, Code of Conduct, technical structuring) require approval of two/three core groups, depending on areas the docs fall into.
- Steering Council has permanent members (currently cpw, Curle) and elected members (none yet). Elected term is 1 year. Council has spokesperson as first among equals.
- Council may have interim members standing in for a regular member due to inactivity. Temporary members until original returns to activty. Original member can nominate their interim, and approved by rest of the council.
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Appoint new Council members
Three Council members are necessary in order to break ties. Temporary appointment is necessary until governance is finalized and elections can begin. Curle is also taking a temporary leave, so an interim member will be placed in her stead.
Response: The current Steering Council team will become cpw, SizableShrimp, and Orion. Curle will still be a permanent member but on leave. -
Discuss NAP 2023
NeoForge Annual Parley (NAP) is an annual public discussion held to inform the community on the state of the project and answer community questions or show off cool things. It is a continuation of the Forge Annual Parley from prior years. Necessary to discuss is the planned date for NAP23.
Response: We plan to announce the official date later and think it will be sometime in September. We will also have a longer meeting during NAP23 where we will be able to answer more questions. -
Decide where NeoForge officially breaks compatibility from upstream
Given the breaking changes and bugs that upstream has introduced in the past few days, it is necessary to determine where NeoForge will officially break compatibility for the sake of a stable product.
Response: Our official stance is that we will try to maintain as much compatibility as we deem reasonable. We will review upstream changes on a case-by-case basis and either fix it to meet our standards or choose not to implement any that we deem not beneficial to maintain and support. -
Look at demo branding art made by the community
The Steering Council is looking to find 1-2 artists who made demo art and officially commission them to make NeoForge branding art. It is also a goal to make art with consistent color themes and art styles to make the brand easily recognizable. To look at all the art made by the community, see this Discord thread.
Response: One thing we want to make clear is that we are trying to get away from the anvil motif and develop our own style. After consideration during the meeting, we have decided to contact Mr. Crayfish and Ultramega for further discussion on the style that Mr. Crayfish brought to the table and Ultramega improved upon. Congratulations! Here are the links to Mr. Crayfish's demo and Ultramega's demo. We want to reiterate we are so thankful to everyone who submitted demo art for consideration. Again, you can see all the art in this thread on the Discord.
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Is NeoForge the final name for the project? Why does this name still have Forge in it?
Yes, NeoForge is the final name for the project. This was chosen as a nice mix between the new and the old. We still want people to immediately recognize the connection to "Forge", while also emphasizing the new and freshness with "Neo". -
What are appropriate abbreviations or nicknames for NeoForge? Neo? NF? NeoF?
We prefer Neo or NeoForge, thanks! -
What's the difference between NeoForged and NeoForge?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
NeoForged is the name of the GitHub organization and the website domain (neoforged.net). This is because "NeoForge" was simply not available. Therefore, NeoForged is the organization name, while NeoForge is the modding project itself. This also means we can better distinguish the two.
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What is NeoForge's mascot?
We aren't fully sure. Mascots in consideration include foxes, squirrels, and frogs.
- How are plans to procure funding for the project going? Will NeoForged become a legal registered non-profit organization?
Part of our plan is to be a zero-sum hosting project, where we don't incur any cost in hosting by using things such as CloudFlare or partnering with other community members and projects. This would mean we don't need any funding. NeoForged will become a legal registered non-profit organization; we will have more information later. We will still take up funding from people who want to provide it to us and perhaps try to set up a distribution model among contributors to give them some pocket change for their hard work. - Will there be more public Steering Council meetings?
We will tentatively say that we want to try and do these meetings every so often. We want to emphasize that we don't want this to become a chore, so we will try to keep it fresh and interesting each time we do it without becoming boring and monotonous. We also have NAP23 to think about. - Is there a publicly viewable roadmap?
We do not have a roadmap yet; however, we are working on it. We'll let the community know about our plans as we know more.
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Have you been in communication with CurseForge / other partners yet?
Yes! We don't have more information than that right now. CreeperHost is currently providing the server that neoforged.net is hosted on. Thanks, CreeperHost! -
Will the McModLauncher GitHub organization and ModLauncher itself remain independent of NeoForge?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
Yes.
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There was talk of buying the original Forge, are discussions for that happening?
The NeoForge team does not have any plans to buy the original Forge. -
Any possible collaboration with Sponge, if Sponge decides to move to NeoForge?
We are happy and open to working with any team, not just Sponge. If they want to work with us, we are happy to start communication channels. -
Are you planning on making Forge somewhat compatible with Fabric?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
We will be making sure that next-gen NeoGradle tooling will be able to support multi-platform scenarios. Using Fabric directly in NeoForge will probably not be something we consider in any reasonable timeframe. However, future collaborations with Fabric developers are definitely a possibility.
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Are you going to support Bungeecord/Velocity?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
If they wish to talk to us about what they need from us, we are willing to talk to them.
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What's the attitude towards Bukkit+Forge hybrids? Any chance of collaboration?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
There is little chance of collaboration from our side. Bukkit is too invasive to put on top of (Neo)Forge, and vice versa. Attempts have been made in the past, and they always lead to issues. It's not something we are interested in pursuing at this time.
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What will happen to the Forge Community Wiki (FCW) going forward? Will it document both projects or will it focus entirely on NF?
There are no concrete plans yet. It might turn into a general modding wiki. -
Some people believe NeoForge will further split the already-shattered modded Minecraft community. What's the NeoForged team's stance on this?
Curle and cpw decided that the best way to continue Forge and keep it running long into the future was to fork it and create NeoForge. This was not an easy decision, but it is the one they made.
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What's the path to starting to accept outside contributors?
We will work on getting a public document up and running that people can use as a jumping-off point to get started with us. We will let you know. -
Is the mere mention of coremodding still considered a threat in PRs and issues?
There will be zero punishment for the mention of coremodding/Mixins/whatever in PRs going forward. If you have a proof of concept using Mixins/coremodding, please let us know and share it with us in the PR. This can make it easier for us to test your idea. -
What are some issues that went unresolved that will be picked up now that Forge has been forked?
We will be comprehensively taking a close eye to everything in the NeoForge ecosystem and improving what we see fit. Some things on our mind include overhauling registries, the Gradle toolchain, and the installation process. -
Is the whole Java Platform Module System (JPMS) thing imposed by modlauncher going to stay or change?
Yes, we will be keeping this going forward. We think that jumping ship to JPMS now is the best step forward to the future, as Java itself continues locking us into this system with newer JDKs. However, this isn't all bad! There are many, many things in the JPMS that we simply cannot do with the pre-module systems. There are both drawbacks and benefits, as with any solution. -
Many of the project leads are well known to have difficult time commitments. The triage team also was mostly inactive for the last few months. What can be done for Neo to improve the pace of development?
The triage team inactivity was largely due to internal disagreements, which have since been resolved with the fork of NeoForge. The triage team will cease to exist and will be merged into the new general Maintainers team. cpw himself recognizes his inactivity in past years, but he also has new passion for the fresh NeoForge project. He will stay active and around as he is a Council member. Do note that we are humans and have busy real lives. We will continue to improve upon this by designing our processes around the fact that team members have their own commitments to ensure that nothing gets stalled. -
Is NeoForge's code style going to remain the same as Forge's? Are patches/the decompiled code still going to have three-space indention?
We will definitely be getting autoformatters for our codebase set up and changing the decopile/patch output to look nicer for everyone. -
Will you continue to have a private repository for updating NeoForge to newer versions of Minecraft, or will the porting procedure made public?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
Having an internal, private repository for update NeoForge is a necessity so that the team can collaboratively fix compile errors without having to rely on generating patches. This means the entire decompiled game is stored in private Git history, which we obviously cannot share for legal reasons. However, we still have much to discuss on how this process might change in the future to be more visible to the community.
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Are there plans to try and create a cross-version API?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
No. Efforts like Bukkit already exist for this purpose. Part of the problem with cross-version APIs is that you lock yourself into design choices for years to come without even knowing what is coming in future Minecraft versions. The effort needed to design these APIs is also huge and taxing. For these reasons, we will not be making a cross-version API.
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Factorio has a really nice system for syncing client and server mods before joining. What are the thoughts on adding that kind of functionality to Forge? They do control the mod portal as part of that, but could you partner with CF/Modrinth and do this?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
While this may work for Factorio, it is not something we are planning on adding into NeoForge itself. We have no control over external mod distribution platforms, and downloading arbitrary code gets risky.
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Adding mods right now requires a complete reboot of the client. Is there any future where Forge mods could act more like datapacks, being able to be added/removed on the fly?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
This is a potential future goal, but it also requires engineering to support. We may look into this.
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Will existing Forge modpacks (like Better Minecraft, Create: Above and Beyond, and Vault Hunters) be supported on NeoForge?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
We plan to keep compatibility with original Forge, for the time being. This means that existing modpacks on 1.20.1 should work the exact same on Neo. Going forward, we will see what compatibility looks like with new Minecraft versions. It's up to modders and modpack makers which platform they want to support.
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Will older minecraft versions (mainly 1.7/1.12/1.16) receive some degree of support, or at the very least not result in a ban when asking about them?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
You can already receive user support for these versions in the NeoForged Discord. You will not get banned for talking about legacy versions. There are still plans of continuing RetroGradle, which is an effort to get our modern toolchains working on legacy versions. Currently, 1.12.2+ can already be used on our modern toolchains.
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A common refrain from the old Forge team is that they don't have time to do X, but also that they don't want help with X. Will this attitude be similar?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
Asking for help for things we can't spend time on is tricky. We take pride in our work, and we need to be able to ensure that other side projects (like maintaining 1.7.10 or 1.12.2) have the same quality standards. Taking on random community members with no verification is not something we are willing to do, people have to be vetted and onboarded. Making this process easier and more open is something we are wanting to move towards.
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Will Eclipse still be a supported IDE?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
Yes.
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Is NeoForge going to be free?
This question was answered in advance of the meeting.
Yes.
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What will be the new running stance on 3rd-party launchers auto-installing NeoForge?
Our stance is to do whatever you want! If we can get our zero-sum hosting plan in action, then 3rd-party launchers installing NeoForge through our servers should be no problem at all. -
Are there plans for having NeoForge builds on snapshot or pre-release Minecraft versions in the future?
We want to have snapshot builds, but there is also a lot of work that goes into these updates that we have to change to be able to more publicly share it with everyone. We will look into this moving forward. -
Are there plans to curate a list of mirrors for the NeoForged installer to use? Forge itself uses CreeperHost's mirror, see https://files.minecraftforge.net/mirrors-2.0.json. Are y'all open to someone offering mirror services to share the load?
We currently have no plans for an official mirrors list because we have (almost) nothing to mirror! If we can properly setup CloudFlare hosting/caching, then it will probably not even make sense to use any mirrors at all, as CloudFlare will be the fastest we can possibly achieve around the globe. -
Can we expect an official Kotlin language provider? Over the years, the community has maintained one; however, official support would be nice.
We want to provide better support to language providers going forward. Forge itself has gotten burned in the past by providing official support for Scala, so we have to be careful and ensure we are doing what is best for everyone involved.
- Will there be a NeoForgedJam? If so, will it be possible to use Mixins in the mod submissions without getting judged harshly for it?
We will announce if we are having a NeoForgedJam at NAP23. If there is a NeoForgedJam, you will be able to use Mixins. We might even have a criterion for the most creative Mixin.