Meet the new forge, same as the old forge. Forge has been forked, with the majority of forge’s developers moving over to the fork, NeoForge. They hope to implement some major improvements come 1.21 and maintain compatibility with Forge mods on 1.20.
They say many should already know why this is happening - I, for one, have no idea. Any goss or theories why?
My bet is something overly technical that nobody cares about, but that it piled up with LexManos’ shitty behaviour over the years and became the last straw, making cpw leave. And if people had to decide between LexManos and cpw, they’d rather follow the later, even if the project is under LexManos’ control, so they had to fork it. (That’s just my bet, mind you.)
And frankly… LexManos is only the lead Forge developer because everyone else left. Forge started from Eloraam (from RedPower), SpaceToad (from BuildCraft) and FlowerChild (yes, that one - from Better than Wolves). Then Eloraam brought LexManos in, Eloraam and FC fought because Eloraam was “your mod has this feature? GOTTA HAVE IT IN REDPOWER 2!”, SpaceToad eventually disengaged, Eloraam started focusing more and more on RP2, and… LexManos was left with the grunt job, the modding scene equivalent of the almight janny.
If you remember the drama back when Fabric came around or even before then: the head developer of Forge has been what the youfs call a “discord moderator” for a long time. A petty tyrant stifling innovation and using his stranglehold on the entire Minecraft modding community to suppress competition and simply people he doesn’t like. The behavior was tolerated because no alternative was developed/popular enough to gain influence.
Not sure what the final straw was though. Perhaps a critical mass of mod devs escaping to Fabric.
Nope. I was just done defending him and his shitty behaviour. Especially when I found out what he did to curle, the person we specifically placed in a public facing role, a task she handled with aplomb. I was through defending him.
I hope that NeoForge thrives, and Forge itself becomes deprecated.
I’m no modder but I’ve been following the drama in the modding scene across the years, and when it was about Forge it was always around LexManos; always. It was always “Lex insulted someone”, “LM can’t compromise”, LM this, LM that… and in the meantime you were actually trying to dialogue with everyone else, even FlowerChild. And people might say “it’s just code, it’s maths”, but this sort of social work is essential to get anything good of those maths, so I hope that you guys are now in a better position to do it.
(I also agree with sauerkraus - you guys have done a great job, in spite of circumstances.)
I tried being nosy and went to the discord server. From what I can gather within the official discord, it seems likely a similar situation to former Minecraft mod loaders drama. Weird, intercommunity drama and general disagreements about the future of the project resulting in a massive split. It seems that there was discussion of potentially improving upon the code of forge and having it run smoother and maybe incorporating an existing project (sodium it seems?) and if such suggestion was actually incorporated that would have potentially disrupted the forge main download site’s ability to generate ad revenue, and such suggestion apparently morphed into tension that had been seemingly brewing for months. Apparently, the guy they parted ways with was given the forge project and basically owns the rights to the name, website, ad revenue on the website, and is in control of community donations. All of it seems like a hot mess regardless, but we will see what the truth is in time I presume.
Take what I’m saying with a grain of salt though, I could be completely wrong.