Yes, this was an early April 1st joke.
I'm sorry for anyone, we upset, but IC2 and RF? Really?
For a few months now the dev team has been working on updating IC2 to Minecraft 1.8.9. While we are still in quite early stages (We are currently down to ~1200 compiler errors, which is quite low regarding the fact, we started with ~ 8000) and are quite far away from an official release, we wanted to give you some quick update news.
Quite a lot has changed from 1.7.10 to 1.8 and we need to deal with that. To adapt to these changes without investing thousands of hours of work, we were forced to do some changes to IC2 itself.
Just to name a few examples:
Regarding UUMatter:
Liquid UU had too many problems associated with it. The rendering of liquids has changed so much in 1.8, that it would have been really hard to make it work in 1.8 again. It also had some problems in the past (mainly balancing-wise), so we decided to switch to the solid UU-Matter again until we find a way to make liquid UU work again and come up with good balancing ideas for liquid UU.
Regarding the Energy-Net
Struggling with the fact that Player has been busy with fastcraft we all agreed that any attempt of fixing e-net (which would have been a huge amount of work to update to 1.8 and polish) was not worth the effort. We were thinking about this and discussing about this for weeks and weeks and finally decided, that we will adapt to the RF power API. We know, this is a big change to the core of the mod and yes, we know, some people will not like this, but we all agreed, that this is a step, we would need to do for future maintainability of IC2. This is probably the biggest and most important change for future IC version and we are sad to have to get rid of EU. Although some tiles, that are already semi-functional are not fully compatible with RF yet, most of them are working. We will give a better explanation on everything once we release the first couple of builds.
Here is a quick demonstration video .
Here is another spotlight (by direwolf20)
Here are some more screenshots showing the progress of where we are currently at.
As you can see, a lot has changed, some changes had to be done, even if we didn't like them. Some things are still quite unpolished, untested and not-bugfixed, so despite the fact, we still have about 1200 compiler errors left, we still need to fix, polish and change a lot, before we can give you a beta.
At this point, I'd like to point at this forums rule and I'd like to point out, that it does indeed still apply.
After the community already asked a couple of times and I brought up that discussion on the internal board, a "war" started inside the IC2 dev team on wether we should call the new IC2-version IC2, IC3 or ICsomethingelse. I won't name any names, but there is one person on the "IC2, because 2 is a magic number"-side and two people on the "IC3, because so much has changed"-side. I personally am on the "IC2½, because some things have changed, but most things actually stayed the same as before"-side. For now we will just call it IC2: Episode 1. Any ideas or thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.
Feel free to discuss this in this thread. Please also feel free to ask any questions you have regarding the 1.8 update, but please keep the already above mentioned rule in mind.