I've posted warnings about this already on Discord, etc, however, I'm having a corneal transplant on the 6th (tomorrow, as I forgot to finish this post, in lieu of the blog I wanted to start to address this situation (and ramble on about other things)) and will likely not be around when 1.21 is released, which generally means that as the sole person who has been dealing with waterfall for the past few years on our side, I am not going to be around to setup the build system to pump out a build, or to be able to merge PRs, etc.
A large part of the reality is that this project has been in a state of limbo for a while, I was and am somewhat planning to create a blog post regarding this at some point, and, with a lack of community support, there's just little ability from us to work on the large things that I wanted to work on. Before I got really ill a few years ago, I worked on disabling entity metadata rewriting for the server, which allowed some reductions in the work the proxy needs to do, but, also, allowed for a bit more support for forge mods, this was, however, a headache in which I spent further weeks of work to get the thing to work in an environment where plugins dip into and screw with internals instead of API.
There have been many projects over the past few years I've wanted to touch on, but are generally thwarted because I cannot get the community support in this, as supporting Bungee itself is generally more lucrative. So I do not have the pull needed to steer this project in the direction it needs to go, which, generally places a huge damper on any large project I come up with that would make a difference, vs just bodge fixes.
My illness in 2019 had a pretty huge hit on my life, one that I'm still recovering from, being diagnosed with Keratoconus after losing usable vision in my left eye was just yet another hit. The surgery for a corneal transplant is a huge step in the right direction for getting stuff back on track, followed by some stuff I'm hoping will align over the next few months that will hopefully lead to me returning to a full-time role in due course.
I joined the PaperMC team eons ago as it was fun, and even though I get no real compensation for working on this project, I figured, I loved the community, I loved programming, and it was something to do which might look nice on my CV. Many years later, I'm still here, my role within the org has tilted more towards leadership as we've grown. Working on projects like Paper and Velocity is fun because I still get to toss out bits of code here and there, run the debugging sessions I loved to treat as puzzles (even if the scope of the issues might lead to early balding), I get to work with a team in which we can collab on ideas and pull off some pretty impressive feats, projects like the new bootstrapping API, the command API, in which while 90%+ of the effort belongs to the people who wrote and tested the code, I was able to aid and make decisions which I hope helped in allowing us and the consumers of the API we add to pull off some impressive things over the years.
The reality, however, for Waterfall, is a lot different. Pretty much any project starts with a "Can we pull this off with virtually 0 community support", because the reality is that for Waterfall, a lot of devs are not willing to break support with Bungeecord, and there's just little desire for them to work with us to add waterfall specific API to reduce their reliance on the internals I want to touch, because, well, the internals work and are unlikely to change in bungeecord. Many of the people I worked with and discussed Waterfall-related stuff related stuff ended up moving over to Velocity for the same reasons I once had an entire cry session to Tux over the position I felt I was in with Waterfall in terms of being unable to sail the ship. Issues like
https://github.com/PaperMC/waterfall/issues/318 have long been a thorn in the neck, I already have a few ideas of how we could patch this, but, the testing cycle we'd need with plugins to see if we can even pull any of those fixes off is a huge motivational and time cost, and that's before we get into the potential wallet cost if I have to start diagnosing compatibility issues with commercial license plugins. Being unable to work on anything "real", just kinda demotivates me from the hours I'd need to spend on making this project able to survive within the projects moving infrastructure and fixing the smaller issues I've come across over the years which wouldn't involve potentially breaking plugins.
