This is adapted from something I wrote for the EbXL team, but it applies to any active mod development.
NB: I am assuming a moderate degree of technical ability here. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about and can’t Google the missing pieces for yourself… I’m sorry.
I have been working for ages (read over a year) on a tutorial on fully customizing and massaging a modding environment capable of handling multiple mods at once. But the community shift to backing Gradle has thrown enough kinks into the process that I’m largely unmotivated to work very hard on it any more.
But it has been long enough – I just need to put something out there. So here we go, a quickstart for using Eclipse to compile an existing mod.
While some people recommend IDEA, I can’t get used to it. I used IDEA for the entirety of EbXL’s 1.6 to 1.7 port and hated every minute of the process… so am personally giving up – and going back to Eclipse (a decade of experience trumps all else in this case).
Step 0: Install tools
I’m not in a position to go into details on this right now. But suffice it to say that you need modern versions of:
- git
- eclipse – a current version of the Java IDE (Juno or above, anything else is WAY too old; J2EE version is unnecessary)
- jdk – Oracle’s OpenJDK (others are not guaranteed to work). Ideally, your mod will compile against Java 7 or 8, but it is probably best to use 7 for now as that is what most players should have installed – but you should probably refrain from using anything that doesn’t work in Java 6, just in case.