justJenkins

Slabs use the 0x8 bit of metadata to store where the slab is upside down not. The &7 is used to return the type of slab (stone, brick, etc.) and &8 returns the up or down position. If you remove the bitwise AND you can use the full 16 bits to have 16 different slabs but you won't be able to place them upside down as with vanilla slabs. A bit of a work around using another 'upside-down' slab block class and some placement handling could solve that (ie. if face placed on is bottom face of block, place upside-down slab id. Upside down slabs would drop 'right-side-up' slab id.) And instead of this.setLightOpacity(0); You can use this.useNeighborBrightness[id] = true; to fix the slab and stairs lighting

Okay, whilst I agree some more official documentation would be helpful for getting people started with using forge to make mods, but I wouldn't go so far as to have the team taking time from developing forge, to make tutorials on how to use it. Especially since Minecraft and Forge are currently in constant development it would just be too much of a burden that I'd want to ask from them. I'm no expert with Minecraft code, Forge or even Java for that matter but I've put effort into learning what I could from reading the tutorials, the javadocs and even browsing code from open source mods on Github; It hasn't been easy at times to understand some things but I've always felt accomplished when I finally figure something out. Better tutorials will come about (there are already good things on the wiki and forums), they'll be updated as things go along. Maybe you guys will even be the ones to write them? Modding Minecraft feels like what playing Minecraft for the first few times did to me; Exploration, experimentation, entertaining and exciting... Exception being that no creepers have blown up my code, yet

To fix the shading on stairs and slabs, add the following to their class constructor: this.useNeighborBrightness[id] = true;