jmoon224 wrote:What's the best way to go about installing it and using on LAN?
Do I just use the portable version, put it somewhere accessible on the server and create a shortcut for the student computers? Or is the installer version best? Is it necessary to install it on all of the client machines?
The installer literally just copies the portable version into
C://games/Minetest, and adds shortcuts.
(Source: I created the installer.)
You could make a portable version and create a shortcut. Be warned that the multiple clients editing the same configuration may be a bit weird - it's possible that when logging in, users will see the username of other people, although not their password.
To fix this, you could add a command line argument in the shortcut which pointed to a filename on the user's home directory. Eg:
minetest.exe --config path\\to\\file.conf
for example, this should work, but not tested:
minetest.exe --config "%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\\minetest\\minetest.conf"
jmoon224 wrote:I expect this will also lead on to some wanting to use the single player mode to create their own maps but presumably if all of the map files are kept in a folder on the Windows server, then all of the students will be able to access those single player maps at any time? And there appears to be no way of doing a 'Save As' once a map is loaded so any changes they make to someone else's map will remain. There's no way to password protect maps?
I don't know much about how you're sharing the files, but if they can read and write there as if it's a drive then it should work. You can't password protect files, all users will be able to see all worlds if they are in the same folder. If two players try and play the same world, they will cause corruption.
Note: "world" is our name for a save game.
Worlds are saved as they are edited, as they are stored in a mysql database. You could copy the folders to clone it, for example from minetest/worlds/world1 to minetest/worlds/world2 so that you now have two worlds which are separated.
For more info, see:
http://wiki.minetest.net/Command_line