Forge Support

[roblabla]

It has recently been suggested in the gitter that support for the forge protocol would be interesting. BungeeCord supports Forge servers and clients now, so it could be used as a reference.

[mrfrase3]

Before I start, I should mention that I have been actively running large public forge servers since tekkit first came out, and have been a fairly silent member of this community for years now.
My two cents on this topic:

• I support this, I actually looked at implementing this myself, but ran away when I saw just the forge connection protocol.
• Before this is implemented, this project would first need to start supporting previous versions of minecraft again, really because most of the community is on 1.5.2, 1.6.4 and only just starting on 1.7.10. Additionally, forge servers aren't going to consider going any higher(1.8) until sponge is finished, due to cauldron being abandoned, which is going to be a while.
• Last time I checked, the documentation is rather poor, especially for the earlier protocols back when they had the "just look at the source code" mentality.
• It's worth noting that it took a fair bit of effort to get bungee to support forge, if I remember correctly, there was an unknown packet 4 that was causing a lot of issues. which leads to the next point.
• Some mods are unpredictable, and some have tried implementing their own protocols, which can lead to unpredictable results. Whilst this isn't really an issue for a chatbot that can ignore these random packets, its worth considering.

Anyway, just thought I might weigh in, I'll keep tabs and lemme know if you need anything ;)

[Corgano]

Just wanted to note, from what I have seen on server lists most the community is on 1.7 or later. This site has various statistics: http://www.gametracker.com/games/minecraft/ . I would count on forge support for anything before 1.7 IMHO

[roblabla]

node-forge-protocol will be implemented in its own module, in the following form :

module.exports = function injectForge(mc) {
  if (mc == null)
    mc = require('node-minecraft-protocol');
  if (mc.protocol.version == '1.7')
    return injectForge1_7(mc);
  else if (mc.protocol.version == '1.6')
    return injectForge1_6(mc);
  else
    return null;
}

This should avoid the problem of protocol support somewhat.

As for how horrible forge's protocol hack is, that's not a problem. I'm quite used to reading decompiled minecraft source by now 😄.

The biggest problem you mention here is the mods reserving their own protocol packets (which is stupid, since they should be using custom_payload packet). However, that doesn't really matter, since I believe node-minecraft-protocol ignores unknown packets (this is actually an undefined behavior that's a side-effect of an optimization I made. Heh. Should standardize this). So unless the mod involved does really weird stuff with the protocol, we should be alright.

Furthermore, those packets which have added info can be supported by injecting their own packets through the same way I'll inject forge's packet. Though again, if mods do this, they're doing it wrong.

[overjt]

Any news about this?

[roblabla]

Not really. Attention has gone elsewhere (mainly supporting multiple protocol versions, and right now we're migrating the binary parser to its own repo, ProtoDef). It's still in my personal todo though.

[rom1504]

related http://wiki.vg/User:Pokechu22/Forge

[overjt]

related https://gist.github.com/overjt/39010b23a2fa5e29113c

[deathcap]

Updated documentation: http://wiki.vg/Minecraft_Forge_Handshake

[deathcap]

Forge support working in #326 [WIP] Forge client, but I'm only doing the client-side for now, so I'd suggest still keeping this issue open for server-side Forge support