Multiversion support

[Protonull]

Moving this discussion here: should MapSync have multiversion support? And if so, what should that look like?

[Protonull]

Mulling it over, there are three approaches to this:

1. MapSync maintains multiple mod implementations for various Minecraft versions (perhaps even loaders too) that implement the newest protocol. This would mean, for example, backdating the websocket update to 1.18.2.

2. MapSync maintains legacy protocols. This would mean re-adding support for the raw TCP protocol.

3. MapSync would only maintain support for the current protocol and we refrain from making breaking changes. This would've prevented Prevent packets from having dangerously sized collections (Electric Boogaloo) #125 from making structural changes to the packets, instead only limiting the total size of the collections.

Keep in mind that we're going to NEED multi-version support at some point: CivMC has just added ViaVersion support for 26.1 and may Soon™ update to it. This will mean MapSync clients for 26.1 receiving archived 1.21.11 chunks from the sync server, so there's going to need to be multi-version support somewhere in the sync process just do to the data conversion.

[Huskydog9988]

I personally am leaning towards option 1. I should note however that we shouldn't just backport to each version forever. For example, civ doesn't support below 1.20.5. So it wouldn't make sense to go all the way back to 1.18.2.

[Protonull]

That makes sense, though I don't think it should be necessarily tied to whatever CivMC supports: if there are alternative civ-servers running that have a different band of supported versions, we may wish to support those too.

That said, I think there'd need to be some level of configuration where, for example, the server can down-convert 1.21.11 chunk data to 1.18.2, but wont accept chunks from 1.18.2 clients.

[Huskydog9988]

I'm cool with down converting, but also I think your imaging a server that doesn't exist atm. I think focusing on more modern version for support should be a priority, and if older mod versions also just happen to maintain protocol support, awesome, let em connect even if there might be reduced functionality.