Let's talk about the future... again?

So almost a year ago, I announced I would be stopping working on MCreator, but it does not seem like that happened. So what does this mean? Read on. 

A recap

To recap a bit, I open-sourced MCreator around a year ago and soon after announced I am stopping development due to lack of time due to day job and school. Things settled down a bit due to the pandemic and also due to some unpredictable changes in my life. We also got along with the developer team, so I decided to carry on with development for a bit longer. 

But this "longer" now became a year :D Some users are now becoming impatient and are asking when forks (MCToolkit) that promised continuation will come out and if I am leading them on about what is actually happening. That is definitely not true. As I stated many times, things in my life changed due to unpredictable factors I could not foresee. But this opens another question, what is going to happen in the future then?

So, what now?

So as we can see, I am not a future teller, so we can only make plans and try to stick with them and hope unpredictable things will not happen. I can predict that I will be able to work on MCreator as it is now for probably around half a year, but then my private life will undergo some more changes that I can't predict the impact on MCreator properly just yet. 

I have talked with the bigger contributors about the situation, and we came up with two options that could happen in the future: 

1. MCreator is developed for some more time while I have time to work on it as I do now, then contributors start their own fork as it was already planned, but delayed.
2. Bigger contributors become more active in the field of fixing bugs and reviewing pull requests (and after a while possibly merging them too) and I can step back a bit and have time to still maintain and steer MCreator as it is and it lives on because it is no longer that big-time consumer for me.

We also talked about MCToolkit. They are preparing their own statement on this too, but in short, the project will wait for the potential ending of MCreator if option 1 happens. This is so we don't introduce incompatibilities between workspaces and split our workforce and make two incompatible and unmergeable projects. If option 2 happens, developers of MCToolkit (that are also major contributors of MCreator) will become more involved in maintaining and steering MCreator to take some load off me. What will happen with the fork, in this case, is not fully clear yet. Its developers are thinking of making a mod maker for other games in the long term in that case. 

The plan

So what option will happen and when? That depends a lot on how my future will turn, and I can't predict this, so I will do my best to keep you updated on this and keep it as transparent as possible, keeping doubts and speculations at a minimum. I will also keep close contact with contributors so we evaluate if we are ready for option 2 in the future. 

Sadly this post does not answer how MCreator will look in the future as this is not possible to predict. What I can do is keep the process as transparent as possible, and this is the reason behind this post. I hope I cleared up at least some of the confusion and questions with this. Stay awesome!