Version 1.12.2 was just released in mid-September, with just some minor protocol changes (protocol version and Keep Alive packet changes, apparently).
"May have broken everything ... Most likely broke everything ... definitely broke everything ... absolutely broke everything."
I'm thinking 1.13 might break a few things. :-)
I don't know the system that well, but my impression is that even plugins will break.
Not to mention maintaining protocol-agnosticism between pre- and post-1.13.
In principle, Mojang is doing this because it's easier to maintain in their codebase (which I could imagine), hopefully the same thing applies to us.
Even after reading that article and inspecting the stupidly flickering image, I still have no idea what they mean by "flattening" and what it means for us. Either I'm dumb, or they're so far away from normality.
I don't think block metas will be removed as such (at least they don't say so in the page explicitly), only the different variants will be split into separate blocks.
From what I gathered, block states will continue to exist (like stone button pressed/not pressed, rotation of doors etc.), but the concept of block data/damage (typing a number to change some states of a block, like rotation, for example wooden_trapdoor:4) will be removed. This file (
https://bugs.mojang.com/secure/attachmen...tening.txt) shows that the data argument was removed from a bunch of commands.
Well the game engine has been changed, but gameplay is small indeed.
