https://twitter.com/TheRealEloraam/status/477243498396012547 Is she going to disappear again? Also, will we get RP2/3 if it gets made? gone wait for her to vanish i really dislike project red and i dont know why rp2 pls Edit: Meke easier to read
No not a "cheap knock off". The back story for "new" players. In the beginning (1.2.5 for me ) there was no project red, or feed the beast for that matter. Tekkit was one of the biggest and well know modpacks. The Yogscast brought attention to it as well. Red Power by Eloraam was in the modpack. Jump ahead, in version 1.4.6 feed the beast is here and red power has been updated up to this version. Then Eloraam disappeared (https://twitter.com/TheRealEloraam). You can see on here twitter that she went a year without tweeting. This went for everything with that username. Even here irc NickServ expired. Naturally the mod was not updated for minecraft 1.5.2 and up. But wait, this has been a major mod in modpacks right? How did people cope? Eloraam is really finicky about owning here code, I respect that. It was against her terms of use to decompile red power 2 (I was planning on doing it myself, but now she is back). So nobody was allowed to update the mod itself. This is were project red comes in. Project red was written from scratch in hopes of recreating red power 2. Project red is also open source, so anyone can modify it / update it. This way what happened to Red power 2 won't happen to project red. So no, Project Red is not a "cheap knock off." It's basically the Official alternative to Redpower 2 because Redpower 2 wasn't maintained past minecraft 1.4.6. (Please note, my minecraft versions might be slightly off but that shouldn't matter. For example 1.4.6 was mostly/completely compatible with 1.4.7, Feed the beast, Tekkit, and the Yogscast are mentioned for reference because many people know what those things are.)
The thing with RedPower 2 is that a lots of its features were available in other mods, albeit with much fewer capabilities, but because most people probably did not use those advanced features, the loss of RedPower 2 was not that major. RP2 did very little hand holding and just gave you a set of very basic blocks which could be combined to do more impressive things. Even to this day, Project Red still hasn't recreated those advanced features.
Well, there's the Multiblocks, which were taken over by ForgeMultipart, then frames, which can be done by MFFS (although different and much more nerfed), and then the rest of the usage, red alloy wire, which is done by ProjectRed. Back in 1.4, RedPower had its unique niche, but these mods seem to have taken that over.