Did you read my README?

[coderbot16]

I see you may be attempting a port of Iris.

Please read this section in full: https://github.com/IrisShaders/Iris#but-wheres-the-forge-version

How do you plan to address these issues? If you do not have a plan, then I ask that you do not port Iris because that will create a lot of problems for me and my support team in addition to damaging my mod's reputation.

You should see the corresponding version of that document for CaffeineMC as well: https://github.com/CaffeineMC/caffeine-meta/wiki/FAQ#where-are-the-forge-versions-of-your-mods

[Devocity]

"Damaging your reputation," give me a break. This mod is awesome and Forge players want it. The fact that it is even getting ported means it's a good mod.

The Iris readme simply says it's possible but annoying on Forge. And that you don't want someone attempting a low effort port. I don't see how those are technical issues that need "addressing."

CaffeineMC seems to be opposed almost entirely because of personal problems with Forge staff. While that's entirely understandable, that's no reason to be against having a Forge port.

I don't understand the problem with the name, this is literally a port of the mod back to forge, the title makes that clear, and the author is different. Anyone with a brain can figure that out. Renaming all of these mods would only make it more confusing to know which is which.

I have no clue who this dude is or if he's component enough but if he thinks he can port Iris, I fully support him. He's already done three so far. We'll see if he's able to bugfix for the forge ecosystem. I'll be here to test to the best of my ability because I don't think your internal politics should judge who gets to play with which mods.

I think coderbot's point is valid though. However I think this is best solved if the guy responsible for porting Iris to Forge would just temporarily rename his port until it can be proved that his porting efforts are of high quality and approved by coderbot himself. I hate the split between fabric and forge but some porting efforts have simply been terrible and mostly discontinued. (example Halogen or any previous sodium port)

This guy should perhaps also make his own Discord server where people should go to talk about issues and bug reports to prevent further frustration for CaffeineMC and coderbot by having issues from the forge port reported on their Discord.

edit: I also think any attempt to replace OptiFine should be encouraged. Open Source replacements are going to make the future of modding with good performance, Forge or Fabric.

[jellysquid3]

CaffeineMC seems to be opposed almost entirely because of personal problems with Forge staff.

No, it isn't. I find it really frustrating that people spun it this way. It was just what broke the camel's back.

Simply put: I found it difficult to work on the mods in Forge. After some time it became apparent that Fabric provided a better environment for the specific things my mods were doing. Those technical issues came long before any interpersonal nonsense.

My issue with "forge ports" were that people took my mod, copied the CurseForge page & kept all our GitHub/Discord links, and often wrecked the stability of the mod all while calling it "Sodium" -- something that happened multiple times.

The Caffeine mods are open source. The FAQ page states that you can port the mods so long as you don't confuse it with the official thing. The license gives you those same rights. I don't believe that's unreasonable.

[jellysquid3]

"Damaging your reputation," give me a break. This mod is awesome and Forge players want it. The fact that it is even getting ported means it's a good mod.

Firstly, I want to honestly address the irony here: Saying that you are not damaging my reputation doesn't make any sense when you then go on to discredit the actual reasons why we're not developing for Forge as petty interpersonal drama or political conflict. My FAQ page, which is linked in this original post, covers these reasons.

... because I don't think your internal politics should judge who gets to play with which mods.

My biggest frustration with the Forge community, if we had to point to any single issue, is the player entitlement demonstrated right here.

I don't know how else to interpret this other than you feel slighted, like we have taken something away from you. We haven't. It's a selfish opinion that the people who actually make the mods shouldn't be allowed to use what tools they want, and then to insist that any effort on our part to avoid player confusion & burden on our side is "internal politics" that somehow damages the community.

Are ports good for mod developers?

Now, to address the core point: I think you're trying to describe this as a good thing for the mod authors... that we should want our mods to be ported to every platform and for there to be dozens of forks, with the same names, all broken in some different way.

I do not think that situation is good for anyone. It's confusing for players, who get turned away from our mod because of a potentially broken port that shares our name. If the first impression a player has with that mod is a bad one, they are not likely to return. This is especially problematic because a lot of players don't even understand what the difference is between mod loaders, or that there are significant differences that make ports non-trivial.

Tragically, and more often than not, those players won't use the mod again because it caused trouble in their game. We see this all the time in various online communities, most notably Minecraft Discord servers with younger audiences. It's disappointing when we read that people consider Sodium no better than OptiFine for mod compatibility when those complaints are rooted in code we have very little to do with.

This is also ignoring the fact that as the upstream mod author, I will never:

• See any upstream contributions from Forge ports. More on this below.
• See any revenue or donations from these ports, even if that's pretty small already.
• See any valuable feedback on how we can improve the mod, since those ports will be contaminated by their own issues.

To be clear, I don't know what the quality of this fork is. I'm not making a statement on it. I don't have the time to review code. I assume by default it's of reasonable quality, even if that's most often not the case.

How is porting viable?

As it stands, most of the inquiries people send to me are requests to port our mods (probably ~95%, ignoring support inquiries). The number of inquiries for volunteering to help with our project? None. Really, that's not overly pessimistic rounding.

I am mostly a one person show with Sodium, a project that is a complete re-implementation of many core rendering systems in Minecraft (nearly 20K LOC at this point!) and have received little to no outside help on it.

The only thing people seem to be concerned with is porting my mods, rather depressingly. It's a take-take-take kind of situation, and then despite the fact that I allow this to happen, some people still go on to say that I'm being unreasonable by imposing any kind of request to be mindful about ports.

It's really not a great situation for me. And I suppose the most tiring thing is that the common rebuttal to this is:

Why did you choose an open-source license if you didn't want people doing the things it grants them ability to?

Because open source licenses don't dictate social behavior. My ideals in making the mods open source were so that others could contribute, help develop something better, and in the event of my absence, could continue building that project without restriction. None of these things have really happened. Maybe it was overly naive of me to assume that it would.

[coderbot16]

"Damaging your reputation," give me a break. This mod is awesome and Forge players want it. The fact that it is even getting ported means it's a good mod.

It's a good mod because I as the lead developer as well as the Iris contributors has poured hundreds to thousands of hours into making it a good mod, on Fabric. Iris has better mod compatibility than OptiFine on Fabric because we've spent a lot of time carefully working to ensure that Iris is compatible with what Fabric mods are doing, and because Fabric contains much better interfaces for compatibility between rendering optimization mods and mods adding new content for rendering.

On Forge, where most mods have already included OptiFine compatibility code, and where all existing ports of Sodium have been done in a haphazard way causing many compatibility issues, there's no reason to believe that a haphazard port of Iris + Sodium would actually have better compatibility than OptiFine. And that alone will certainly damage the reputation of Iris, ignoring all other potential issues.

I don't understand the problem with the name, this is literally a port of the mod back to forge, the title makes that clear, and the author is different. Anyone with a brain can figure that out. Renaming all of these mods would only make it more confusing to know which is which.

You seem to be out of touch with how most Minecraft players actually think. Back when Halogen was named Sodium Reforged, people called it "Sodium" all the time. What evidence do you have that just adding "Reforged" to the name will actually cause people to view the project as something not directly connected to the official Fabric version of the mod?

With this mod too being called Sodium Reforged, this seems to be history repeating itself.

I'll be here to test to the best of my ability because I don't think your internal politics should judge who gets to play with which mods.

I'd rather that Iris not have a Forge port at all instead of a broken one. Take some time to fully understand what has been written here instead of chalking it up to "internal politics." And, if a Forge port of Iris does exist, it shouldn't have "Iris" in its primary name.

[asiekierka]

Disregarding modders' concerns is a good way to prevent mods from going open source. Please, listen to the creators whose shoulders you build on top of.

[Neubulae]

"Damaging your reputation," give me a break. This mod is awesome and Forge players want it. The fact that it is even getting ported means it's a good mod.

The Iris readme simply says it's possible but annoying on Forge. And that you don't want someone attempting a low effort port. I don't see how those are technical issues that need "addressing."

CaffeineMC seems to be opposed almost entirely because of personal problems with Forge staff. While that's entirely understandable, that's no reason to be against having a Forge port.

I don't understand the problem with the name, this is literally a port of the mod back to forge, the title makes that clear, and the author is different. Anyone with a brain can figure that out. Renaming all of these mods would only make it more confusing to know which is which.

I have no clue who this dude is or if he's component enough but if he thinks he can port Iris, I fully support him. He's already done three so far. We'll see if he's able to bugfix for the forge ecosystem. I'll be here to test to the best of my ability because I don't think your internal politics should judge who gets to play with which mods.

Excuse me, but I think the elephant in the room is that THERE EXIST People who, by this definition, doesn't have a brain as they cannot figure out who is who and what is what. These people stirred up drama and fire before, not the ones with "brains". Just search the issue page about Chlorine or related keywords(Forge for example) should be enough as counter examples. Heck, I wouldn't even go any further than that as points like "Ports like these are per se already complicating Jellysquid's life" might be just as well too much for this conversation, but keep in mind that the situation, was depressingly, very true as well. Developers cannot undergo too much stress and demand. Dealing with a bunch of potentially entitled people is also a pain in the ass. I hope you understand that.

[jellysquid3]

I'm going to take the other commenter flaming on this issue tracker as indication there is no meaningful reason to engage with them. I've clarified my stance here since it was misrepresented. I am not interested in a flame war.

The author of this port did reach out to me before hand via email, and there isn't an issue between me and them, besides my general apprehension towards these ports... Though I would prefer if the repository clearly included the correct license and attribution (see coderbot's other issue), and didn't use my project's name directly.