Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-26335978-20160106162844/@comment-25101089-20160109004226

I will respond to the two parts of this post that irk me the most.

The point about Gandalf is wholly irrelevant. I could code a 'Gandalf' mob in five minutes and add a skin for it. So what? Would it have good speechbanks for many different situations? Would it have special fireworks? Would it have all the other features and countless underlying mechanics that allow it to be integrated into a well-functioning and interesting quest storyline (which is disable-able in multiplayer with no adverse effects on the mod)? No, and therefore what someone can do with Custom NPCs is about as relevant as what you can do with getting yourself a Gandalf skin and changing your name to xXx_Gandalf_69_xXx.

As for the updating. What everyone seems to forget, and no this is not a beg for sympathy or pity or anything like that: updating the mod is not something that just happens. In order for the mod to be updated to 1.9 or 1.8, I would need to sit at my computer, for hours, days, and weeks on end, doing repetitive extremely boring coding. Things like:


 * going through the code files and replacing ten thousand (not an exaggeration!) function names with a new name;
 * changing every single place where the code deals with X/Y/Z coordinates to a new format;
 * figuring out why things seem to break for no apparent reason - maybe a couple of days for each 'thing';
 * replacing each of the several hundred blocks and items in the mod with a new model file system that Mojang so wisely decided to implement in 1.8 - and because of the way it works, many blocks would need more than one. So we'd be looking at a few thousand model files, that I would have to spend my days writing, copying, pasting, and testing;
 * a lot of other things.

And it doesn't actually add anything at all to the mod. In fact, it would likely take a lot away.

The very idea of doing that fills me with dread, and rightly so. Imagine how you'd feel if that were on the horizon for you. At the end of the day I make this mod because I like doing it. Adding new features and improving old ones is usually fun for me. What I have just described would not come within a hundred leagues of fun. And there would be no meaningful benefit; the mod would not be better as a result; I would not be paid for it; the mod would not be made available to a wider audience or easier to use.

Listen to what Sinthoniel and Ranger are saying, and read those reddit posts about 1.8. I appreciate a lot of it may not be meaningful if you're not a programmer, but try to get a general idea of what they're saying.