They got over a million downloads and believe me, they made thousands of dollars, and should try their hardest to update as soon as possible. And with the issue on porting. Most mods are very small, only megabytes and some even kilobytes in size. A rewrite is not a hard as you people complain it is because you expect to put it minimum amounts of work and get high yields.
And yes, I have made mods before. I work in circuit manufacturing and I have spent thousands of hours learning about computer coding. You think your Java is difficult, I beg you to study Boolean logic and assembly code.
The difference here being you get paid for your work, while these devs are working on this in their free time and are only getting donations for their work, which surprisingly isn't as high as you think it is. I definitely don't have the free time to deal with everything they do, and I have more free time than quite a few of them.
First of all, it isn't free content. Mod authors do make money from their mods and since most Java IDE are free, there really is no reason not to mod if you got free time.
How about not wanting to deal with the entitled masses who complain when you don't update the day a new update comes out, or yells at you for having a single bug in your mod, or my personal favorite, yell at you for fixing bugs and exploits?
You don't seem to understand the problem. At the current pace we are going, FTB wont make the shift from 1.7.10 to a new Minecraft version in atleast another year. Do you see many FTB Infinity servers doing well. I remember in the days of FTB Ultimate, there were over 30 professional grade servers with 50 + people. Now, FTB Infinity servers are dieing down as many servers cant deal with the immense lag caused by mods. People want change and new content or they simply quit the server and play another pack, and then in two weeks quit that pack and move on. This hurts 2 people. The server owners you really are the mvp since they provide a free environment for people to play in, and FTB in general since FTB does profit from their packs. Im talking about the general public, not just to you since you seem to be pretty important around here.
Let's be real here, no one except the pack devs know the pace of the new packs. They could be out tomorrow, or in five years. Attempting to guess when they come out is going to result in some rather hilarious failures and extreme anger when the devs don't meet those estimates.
This isn't a problem. Servers aren't dying because of 1.7.10 or the lack of 1.8 any more than WoW is dying because of the lack of expansions. There's just an awful lot more saturation in the market and people are a) spreading out more (more modpacks/servers) and b) moving onto new (non-minecraft) things.
You've alluded to this, but: Content is driven by need. When there's a need, there will be content. I could care less if I play 1.7.10 for the next 5 years because it still works for me, and clearly it works for enough people that the need for an alternative isn't strongly driving development.
Similarly: When I personally develop content for free, I'm doing it for my enjoyment. I don't give a shit what it adds to the 1.7 or 1.8 or 1.9. I don't care if people use it. Its for me and I share it because I'm awesome like that and somebody out there might find enjoyment in it too.
@Pyure pretty much hits the nail right on the head here. This is exactly what's going on in this community and other game communities.
In the end I realized that both you Pyure and Chocohead are very intelligent people. Lets agree on something for once. Do any of you believe that one day in the future we will play on 1.9 modded, or even the far future 2.0 update, or doing you think the majority of FTB will stay in 1.7.10 essentially forever. And also, whats the ETA. I dont need a release date of some experimental FTB pack, I just want to know how many Quarters I have to wait( 1 year = 4 quarters)
If anyone is interested, Eloraam( The original Red Power developer, and made Forge possible), is making her own game. Time to mod the hell out of that
They will be released when they're released. Simple as that.
Also, Eloraam was one of three original Forge devs, and trust me, Forge would have gone just fine without her ever touching it. SpaceToad and FlowerChild knew what they were doing back then.
If enough people care, yes, we'll definitely see a 1.9 OR 1.8 scene. We'll probably mostly skip one or the other.
Some developers I've chatted with are extremely concerned about porting their code to 1.8 but are willing to do so for 1.9. Not because 1.9 is so much better, but because they're not committing themselves to refactoring for "every single version that comes out ever."
As far as ETAs are concerned: as a developer you already know the answer to this. Its going to be incremental and cyclical. Its already happening a lot with 1.8. And the more it happens, the (considerably) more pressure it puts on those developers who are sitting on the fence but not super-willing to commit. Once enough people move over to 1.8, others will cross the line so they're not left behind.
This is a nice and natural progression, so I don't try to rush it.
Can speak from experience, this is exactly what's happening right now.
Now that all of that is said, I'm stepping in as a moderator to tell everyone here to cool it before posting again. Things are getting borderline rule breaking.
