FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

RPi - Free your Art

This game is specially being developed for old computer hardware and low and setups. Such as Raspberry Pis and old Pentium III and AMD K6-2s. (Pentium III and K6 and Raspberries are good for servers only, RPi game as client will need a netbook at least)

I first began to developed this for my flat world pixel art server and now I'm making it public.

I have a public test server where you can join and test it without the need to download it.
RPi Game Test - minetest.megaf.info 30001

There's not a lot of mods in it, only basic stuff.
doors, wool, dyes, stairs...

I will add only stable and lightweight mods and I need your help to choose them.

https://github.com/Megaf/RPi
https://github.com/Megaf/RPi/archive/master.zip



Screenshots:

Do you have any benchmarks to prove that it works better on the raspberry pi than other games?

rubenwardy wrote:Do you have any benchmarks to prove that it works better on the raspberry pi than other games?

Not really. The closest to that is. It's possible to play on a raspberry pi server with not major problems using RPi and you just can't play using minetest_game.

What are the main problems with minetest_game? Mapgen and leafdecay might be issues that come to mind. Also any kind of abms. Apart from that, I do like the "normal" textures more than those of the minimal game. Perhaps the new minetest_next might be tweaked so that it runs fine on a RPi?

Sokomine wrote:What are the main problems with minetest_game? Mapgen and leafdecay might be issues that come to mind. Also any kind of abms. Apart from that, I do like the "normal" textures more than those of the minimal game. Perhaps the new minetest_next might be tweaked so that it runs fine on a RPi?

I don't know Sokomine, it just does not runs well on low end hardware.
It's as easy as a folder copy an paste to get minetest_game textures on minimal, I tried that already and it works fantastically well, I just prefer the old textures.

Megaf wrote:it just does not runs well on low end hardware.

Well, it's very low end hardware, such a Raspberry Pi, but still. Figuring out what's the bottleneck could be helpful for other games, mods and situations as well.

As far as textures go, that's of course a personal issue - everyone has a diffrent taste. I personally like the wooden planks texture and was glad for its existance - it gives a nice contrast to the normal wooden planks and thus allows my furniture in the cottages mod to look better. The grass and trees I like a lot less.

Wonder how this compares to for example Minetest Nostalgia which seems to be relative fast for low end clients. I don't know if anybody tried it on a low end server. The server hosted by VanessaE probably cannot be considered as running on a low end machine.

Sokomine wrote:

Megaf wrote:it just does not runs well on low end hardware.

Well, it's very low end hardware, such a Raspberry Pi, but still. Figuring out what's the bottleneck could be helpful for other games, mods and situations as well.

If someone has any suggestions of a test I could do to figure out what minetest_game is heavy that would be great.

Sokomine wrote:As far as textures go, that's of course a personal issue - everyone has a diffrent taste. I personally like the wooden planks texture and was glad for its existance - it gives a nice contrast to the normal wooden planks and thus allows my furniture in the cottages mod to look better. The grass and trees I like a lot less.

I'm actually thinking in change the textures by another 16x16 texture, any suggestions?

twoelk wrote:Wonder how this compares to for example Minetest Nostalgia which seems to be relative fast for low end clients. I don't know if anybody tried it on a low end server. The server hosted by VanessaE probably cannot be considered as running on a low end machine.

Well, nostalgia seems like a normal minetest_game tuned to use some old 0.3.x stuff.

RPi is actually based on now a days minimal, and it's minimal, without any mobs and very little things that run and uses resources, only non static thing I see is saplings, they grow... But leaves will not fall.
On RPi I also tuned water and lava fluidity for much lower values, so they flow much slower.

Megaf wrote:On RPi I also tuned water and lava fluidity for much lower values, so they flow much slower.

That's not a speedup, just a stretched lag.

Megaf wrote:But leaves will not fall.

Leafdecay seems to put some stress on the CPU. Perhaps searching for connected leaves whenever a tree trunk is digged might help a bit. Some games on servers not as minimal as this one but probably not powerful enough for the amount of players they got have quite a lot of problems with it. Leaves don't decay fast enough, thus saplings are not beeing picked up by players and no new trees planted.