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There are a lot of modpacks which are already tied to specific versions of the Minecraft client. Unless I'm missing something, those would be unaffected. What is affected are mods targeting the bleeding edge builds of the game. I expect that the longer effect, if any, is reduced mod support for those newer builds.
But as for this:
While Windows and Linux machines, with GPUs that are less than 10 years old, can run Vulkan just fine, macOS doesn't officially support this API either
Lol apple
AFAIK all modpacks are made for specific versions of Minecraft, so the current modpacks are completely unaffected. And even for future modpacks, the modpack creator doesn't need to care too much about this, since it'll affect the mods directly. (A modpack is, like the name says, just a pack of mods stitched together and glued with some configs.)
Plus popular modpacks are often for extremely old MC versions; for example a lot of people still run modpacks made for 1.16.5 (4yo), 1.12.2 (8yo), or even 1.7.10 (12yo).
Yup, i use Prism launcher or Atlauncher and play a number of modpacks mostly older versions. It's no biggie.
Ah right, they hard forked Vulkan and then called it something else, just for the fuck you.
With compatibility layers being what they are these days I don't think it's going to be too much of a problem.
"Switching from OpenGL to Vulkan will have an impact on the mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that updating from OpenGL to Vulkan will take modders more effort than the updates you undertake for each of our releases," explains Mojang. "To start with, we recommend our modding community look at moving away from OpenGL usage."
Question: how much does your typical content mod decide what's going to be rendered? Is this something typically handled by Fabric/Quilt/[Neo]Forge?
Because I can quite guess OptiFine and the likes will need a lot of elbow grease, but I'm not sure about the rest.
Sodium, Optifine, Iris, Distant Horizons etc... will likely require a lot of work. But the people maintaining those are genuinely geniuses.
For regular mods a lot is handled by FRAPI or Forge.
I guess that mods like create (and all the addons made by many people) would need some effort. create has it own rendering system called flywheel that it needs for all the animated contraptions.
The game is so insane popular the modders will adapt or new ones with appear even if it's a huge pain in the ass. Since they still support installing old versions of the game it's not so dire.
If they have to put in all this effort to port their mods to Microsoft's new code, what about also porting them to an open source alternative
Might make some mods that support multiple versions stop at 1.20.1 but any new ones will be fine on the new ones, various API, helper mods, and surely some OpenGL->Vulkan translation ones will come in as needed.