TileEntity -> BlockEntity

[kashike]

What we call TileEntity should be called BlockEntity for consistency:

• we have BlockType, not TileType - Tile was renamed to Block in Minecraft years ago
• vanilla and the community refer to these as "BlockEntity"/"block entity", except in some legacy cases (doTileDrops gamerule, for example)

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Please react with 👍 if you are in favour, and 👎 if you are not in favour.

Deadline for feedback and voting is 12:00pm PDT on Monday (06/05/2019).

[phit]

I honestly don't care much either way, however I voted against this for the simple reason that the implementation uses MCP and as long it won't be changed there, we would be mixing these two which just adds needless confusion in my opinion.

[kashike]

The API doesn't rely on MCP and thus names shouldn't rely on MCP.

[phit]

yeah, but the API is still implemented using MCP mappings

[liach]

We get names significantly better than those in other mappings and even than official vanilla names, like LiteralText over TextComponent. I believe using more descriptive names like BlockEntity (which is fairly widely accepted as of now) is beneficial to the Sponge API.

[pie-flavor]

The reasoning behind much of Sponge's naming is to use names that make sense, not names that other APIs use (e.g. event verb-noun naming). So yeah, MCP shouldn't mean anything here IMO.

[BrainStone]

Where is all that MCP trash talking coming from?
MCP has been pretty much essential to the MC modding community for the longest so I really don’t understand the hard feelings expressed here.

And saying to keep naming consistent with MCP and therefore Forge is a good thing.

Now another thing that’s really bothering me about these votes in recent days is that it seems that most pressing issues seem to be to make pointless renames that do nothing. The code doesn’t care what the class is called.
Call me old fashioned but I strongly believe that renaming stuff for renaming sake after said name has been established for years is not beneficial, unless the name itself is either plain wrong or severely misleading. Like a boolean value which name is reversed to it’s logic. (Great example of a field that needs renaming is MCP’s World#isRemote. As remote is commonly used for the server side. Though in best case it’s ambiguous)

Now to reiterate, while MCP is not a direct necessity for Sponge, it’s more or less a type of common standard. And I believe it should be followed to keep naming in the community consistent, which I believe to be far more important than renaming an established name to a slightly more descriptive name.

Now this renaming should be taking place first in MCP. Though even there I would oppose it, as it’s again an established name. And renaming it would be a slight disambiguation at best. And breaking legacy over such a tiny thing doesn’t make sense to me.

[liach]

Note that Sponge is not Bukkit. There is no reason to keep legacy names; Notch initially called all blocks "tile"; would you still call BlockType TileType instead?

And saying to keep naming consistent with MCP and therefore Forge is a good thing.

If you want to stick with MCP or forge, look at ModCoderPack/MCPBot-Issues#815 ModCoderPack/MCPBot-Issues#816 and ModCoderPack/MCPBot-Issues#817. All these proposals have been done in sponge api in its birth days, yet it turns out sponge's naming scheme is efficient and comprehensible.

Now to reiterate, while MCP is not a direct necessity for Sponge, it’s more or less a type of common standard.

Moreover, MCP is not the only standard. Look up on your own; there is also bukkit mappings and fabricmc yarn mappings.

And breaking legacy over such a tiny thing doesn’t make sense to me.

1.14 is going to break. Commands, data packs, data fixers, async resource reloading, async lighting, mob brain... You should not try to preserve "legacy", especially one with adverse effects, in this case.

[johnfriedrich]

I would assume 90% (if not more)of all devs are using SpongeForge not SpongeVanilla so they are working with Forge somehow. Thats the reality. Even though the new name would be better, the change should be made at mcp first. Only changing it here would cause a lot of unnecessary confusion. Just my two cents

[gabizou]

One very important factor that I need to mention for this issue (which is likely to be re-added to the issue description):

If the change is made from TileEntity -> BlockEntity, so will the configs need to be changed for Sponge's configurations (tracker configs, error configs, etc.) referencing tile-entity etc. being changed over to block-entity. While this may not seem like much, it does mean performing that change will also require us to actually make a proper version upgrader for our configs to migrate all existing configs between API versions (and this will also play into our additions/changes as features are implemented, corrects implemented, optimizations added, etc.). So while this is an overall API change, this does have the side effect of changing our public facing configuration options being exposed through SpongeCommon.

[phit]

While this may not seem like much, ...

it will just confuse literally every user, because all of modded minecraft calls them tile entities and always has, great..

[johnfriedrich]

it will just confuse literally every user, because all of modded minecraft calls them tile entities and always has, great..

This

[Katrix]

I also agree with the fact that if this change should be made, it needs to first be made in MCP. IF we do make this change we can't just be quiet about it to the end users. It needs to me made very clear to everyone that uses Sponge that what other platforms calls tile entities, Sponge calls block entities.

While it may be true that the general community calls the block entities (I really doubt this), the majority of the developer community calls them tile entities. I won't be surprised if such a change, would lead to a common question being asked again and again by new developers.

Overall, if we do change this, I don't think it will be a mostly one time cost like it is for Forge to switch from prefix to suffix. IMO such a change should come from MCP, with Sponge then after some time following that direction.