The future of OpenComputers 1?

[asiekierka]

The initial OpenComputers mod developer team slowly departed at the end of the 2010s, with the final code updates from payonel coming in 2020. While I decided to briefly take up the mantle in 2022, after the release of OpenComputers 1.8.3 in July 2023, the mod has effectively become unmaintained. While I combined some community-contributed fixes for a 1.8.4 release in the past week, I cannot promise that will happen in the future - I have largely moved on from modding, at least for the time being.

As such, I'd like to provide some notes for the next person, people and/or cats willing to have a go at OC1 development:

• The largest OC1 audience is the 1.7.10 modpack "GregTech: New Horizons". They maintain a fork of the mod which is tailored to their pack, but many (not all) of their patches could be brought upstream with some cleanup and/or re-balancing.
• There's an almost complete port to 1.16.5 here: Port OpenComputers to Minecraft 1.16.5 #3572 - it omits most of the OC 1.8.x changes, but those should not be too difficult to re-integrate. There's a showstopper bug involving preserving keyboard input compatibility, but this should be well explained in the PR comment chain.
• If you're willing to go for a near-complete rewrite, consider dropping Scala as OC2 did. Nothing wrong with the language itself, but the pool of modders and contributors willing to write code Scala is vanishingly small compared to modern Java.
• Ask around in the #oc IRC channel, or its Discord mirror. Even if not many people there play with the mod, plenty have expertise and wisdom you can rely on.
• In my personal opinion and not that of the team, feel free to fork the mod if you'd like to see its existence continued on modern Minecraft versions.

Thank you for the decade of fun together!

[kappa-maintainer]

What will happen to this repository, new PRs and the CF project? Will you keep maintaining them or hand over to others?

[asiekierka]

What will happen to this repository

We have made a decision not to archive it. As such, it will be left as-is.

new PRs

As has been the case since 2020, most of the non-trivial ones will remain not merged. Nothing stops someone with commit rights decides to merge one, but I wouldn't count on it (since then, I have been almost the only person to do PR merges).

and the CF project?

Not even I have access to it, actually!

Overall, my expectation is that a fork is unlikely to get "official" status, if that's what you're asking.

[kappa-maintainer]

Thanks, that's all I want to know.