My impressions on Minetest

[Niebieski]

Hello mates,
I'm a guy who loves Minecraft and I used to play it with pirated copies but suddenly I decided to change that, whatever the sacrifices would be, so I installed a Linux distribution and I dived into the open source world.

I thought that I would easily find a free identical clone of Minecraft, because as you know... Minecraft is very very popular. I found Minetest, and my hopes were set high, but I was disappointed. I fell in love with Minetest too but I would be grateful if Minetest was able to be turned into a Minecraft clone. I would love to do just the things I used to do in Minecraft, tiny things like the Crafting Table, probably the developers saw it as a useless item, but it's logical, you can't craft a chest on the fly.

Here is a brief list of the things I would love to see in Minetest, ordered according to my personal priority :
-An integrated mod installer or alternatively we can make a Minetest build with all the available or popular mods.
I would love to code the installer.
-The survival aspect. People who play Minecraft will feel this. I think this can be done by combining several mods together, like monsters, farming , animals and animal breeding.

Sorry about the whining but I wanted to walk this out. I hope this is the appropriate section for this, it's a mixture of discussion and features requests.
I know C/C++ and I don't mind helping out, I just need some greedy guidance.
Thanks for reading.

[Evergreen]

Hello mates,
I'm a guy who loves Minecraft and I used to play it with pirated copies but suddenly I decided to change that, whatever the sacrifices would be, so I installed a Linux distribution and I dived into the open source world.

I thought that I would easily find a free identical clone of Minecraft, because as you know... Minecraft is very very popular. I found Minetest, and my hopes were set high, but I was disappointed. I fell in love with Minetest too but I would be grateful if Minetest was able to be turned into a Minecraft clone. I would love to do just the things I used to do in Minecraft, tiny things like the Crafting Table, probably the developers saw it as a useless item, but it's logical, you can't craft a chest on the fly.

Here is a brief list of the things I would love to see in Minetest, ordered according to my personal priority :
-An integrated mod installer or alternatively we can make a Minetest build with all the available or popular mods.
I would love to code the installer.
-The survival aspect. People who play Minecraft will feel this. I think this can be done by combining several mods together, like monsters, farming , animals and animal breeding.

Sorry about the whining but I wanted to walk this out. I hope this is the appropriate section for this, it's a mixture of discussion and features requests.
I know C/C++ and I don't mind helping out, I just need some greedy guidance.
Thanks for reading.

About the mod installer, that is already being worked on. The link for its website is: mmdb/
If you have any bugs to report be sure to shout at iqualfragile or rubenwardy. (it is already implemented into minetest, it just doesn't work very well)

[Krock]

Minetest is not a Minecraft clone. Please do not compear those games because they have diffrent targets.

There is already a mod downloader in the main menu. But, well, I prefer the "normal way": Looking into Mod Releases or WIP Mods and copy that one to my mods collection.

[Niebieski]

Minetest is not a Minecraft clone. Please do not compear those games because they have diffrent targets.

There is already a mod downloader in the main menu. But, well, I prefer the "normal way": Looking into Mod Releases or WIP Mods and copy that one to my mods collection.

I don't see a problem in 'comparing' Minetest with Minecraft.
The installer doesn't work for me, or I just don't know how to use it.

[rubenwardy]

Minetest is meant to be modded. It is the purpose. So go mod :D

I am responsible for mmdb's user interface. Iqualfragile created mmdb, and it is mostly his child. The main problem is bugs in Minetest's store code, and the fact that not all the mods are on it yet.

We would love more develeopers for the Minetest engine. Have a look at dev.minetest.net and the issues list on GitHub. By the way, dont look at the code around your changes for code style. Use the code style page on the dev wiki, linked above.

The in game mod store doesnt work very well for me, either. Blame sapier.

[Dragonop]

You can't craft a chest on the fly

Yoa cant craft sticks, on the fly, you cant craft steel tools with solid ingots, you cant fall more than 10meters, without breaking a bone... I recomend to you ''RealTest'' Minetest Game.

Minetest, it's meant to be an engine, not a cheap faster copy than Minecraft;
About the mod installers, I've played Minecraft, and Minetest, and the fast, simple way to install mods, it's a lot ahead that the ''complex'' Minecraft mods instalation.

[Sokomine]

Yoa cant craft sticks, on the fly, you cant craft steel tools with solid ingots, you cant fall more than 10meters, without breaking a bone...

My personal favorite is that people are seldom seen carrying thousands of cubic meters of cobble around in RL. We could circumvent that a bit by pretending that those cobble blocks are folded up and have a really, really thin surface and are out of extremly lightweight material.

tiny things like the Crafting Table, probably the developers saw it as a useless item,

There are mods which restrict the crafting grid in the inventory to 2x2 and add a crafting table. There are even some servers using it. I personally don't like it as it's rather annoying to constantly seek/build such a table.

An integrated mod installer or alternatively we can make a Minetest build with all the available or popular mods.

The idea of the MMDB is pretty nice, and I'd prefer that to be made more usefull instead of a completely new system added. The trouble with the MMDB is that every mod and version has to be added manually - hardly anybody does that. So most mods are missing. And those mods existing in the forum are difficult to search through.

The survival aspect. People who play Minecraft will feel this. I think this can be done by combining several mods together, like monsters, farming , animals and animal breeding.

To a degree it can be done. There are diffrent hunger mods, and mobs that chase you.

It might be helpful if one of the players coming from that other game could do a list of what those players expect and which combination of mods comes closest - so that others with similar taste have a good starting point. Guess that'd be more helpful than everybody posting that MT is not MC ,-)

I know C/C++ and I don't mind helping out, I just need some greedy guidance.

Join #minetest-dev on the IRC freenode network and get into contact with the devs. There's enough work for everyone if you can prove to them that you're capable :-)

[Wuzzy]

Minetest 0.4.10 already has an integrated mod manager!
Click on the “Mods” tab, then click on “Online mod repository”.
It already works … kinda.

You won’t find all mods there.
And the website is buggy, I still haven’t managed to log in into MMDB >_>.

[rubenwardy]

Minetest 0.4.10 already has an integrated mod manager!
Click on the “Mods” tab, then click on “Online mod repository”.
It already works … kinda.

You won’t find all mods there.
And the website is buggy, I still haven’t managed to log in into MMDB >_>.

Have you tried logging in recently ? It has been fixed to work with phpbb.

[Wuzzy]

No, this error is still present to me:
https://bitbucket.org/iqualfragile/mmdb ... d-with-non

Oddly, when the user name does not exist, the server does not fail. But if the user name exists, the server fails.
I never ever could login into MMDB because of this stupid bug.


Back to topic, concerning Minecraft:
Minetest is not Minecraft, and it can’t be. That’s because Minetest is “just” an engine for actual games, called “subgames”. But technically, little is preventing people from creating subgames which at least attempt to make a Minecraft clone.

But I wonder if it would be really so unrealistic to create a subgame which is a Minecraft clone. After all, there already are some attempts: Minitest (outdated), Overcraft Origins, Clonecraft, Clonecraft Classic. But they all come closer to very old Minecraft versions than to current versions of Minecraft.

But I think the biggest challenges would be these:

• Implementing the “dimensions”. In Minetest, there is always just one large world. But since Minetest does not have a frustratingly low height limit like Minecraft, some trickery can be used to make the “dimensions” actually just multiple parts of the same world, they just can’t. The Nether wouldn’t be particular tricky either, in fact, there have been several mods implementing this. But the most tricky part is the rule that walking a low distance in nether equals a large distance in the overworld. But maybe that’s not so impossible either with some clever code. The End could be similarily implemented
  
  So maybe this all can be done with mods with some serious “trickery”. XD
• Enchanting. I think this is literally impossible with Minetest right now, or only with some seriously ugly code by some ugly, ugly tricks. I am also not sure if implementing such a system would be actually a good idea.
• A decent (!) mobs system. There are mobs mods which get improved all the time, but IMO mobs still need much work. Especially the entity system of Minetest seems to need much improvement. But that’s just an unqualfied opinion of me. XD
• The Ender Dragon.
• Everything else can probably be implemented with mods, I guess (???).

I never played Minecraft, I only talk about of what I heard. So take what I have said with a grain of salt.
But I absolutely don’t understand those people who vehemently oppose those who suggest features which happen to be in Minecraft (or any other game, for that matter), too.
If it goes into subgames, fine, nobody forces you to play those. If it goes into the engine, that may be fine, too, since all subgames and mods can benefit, not only Minecraft clones. The development philosophy is not harmed by that. But with engine changes one should be careful only to copy those features which actually make sense. For example, enforcing a height limit of 256 in the engine because Minecraft has one, too would be exceptionally stupid. TL;DR: Feel free to copy the good ideas of Minecraft, ignore the bad ideas. :-)

Personally I don’t care that much if a subgame takes ideas from Minecraft or not. What counts is the actual end result, wheather it copied ideas from Minecraft or whatver else or not.

[Dragonop]

...in Minecraft you can carry up all your inventory, with golden blocks, while gold, it's the material with more mass in the world.

[Wuzzy]

Ummm … That’s a pretty basic feature. The inventory system works exactly like that since … the dawn of Minetest-c55 I guess???

[rubenwardy]

Wuzzy, it has been fixed but has not been added to forum.minetest.net/mmdb yet (thexyz hasnt updated)

Also, the password on MMDB uses the PHPBB password.

[gamergardencat]

I never played minecraft but have watched other play sometimes. They usually play in creative I think because things like crafting takes longer to do. I think Minecraft should be more like minetest. It would be nice if you could configure more of the game to make it more appealing to people. If only minecraft did subgames and only cost $5 to buy I might play it. But I guess if you want minetest to be more like minecraft and only allow 2x2 crafting and a less efficient lighting engine there might be a way to mod that in LUA otherwise you might need to fork the game it self and recompile. The only thing that really bothers me about minetest atm is the lighting. Only the skylight seems to change and the lightnodes I don't think can sample textures to creating a different color emitter and bounce like q3a or the idtech 3 engine does now. It would be nice also for a call_back for using nodes like I have seen in Trove. It uses key_e to interact with certain items in the world. Another thing trove does is jump over two nodes instead of the one. Another thing to fix a few bug would be to freeze the player in the world to ensure actions stay synced up with the server.

[Dragonop]

It uses key_e to interact with certain items in the world. Another thing trove does is jump over two nodes instead of the one.

About the creative stuff, that people don't what are missing from the real Minecraft (don't be stupid, if you can play Minecraft, enjoy the survival)
What is the item that you interact with the e key?
In Minetest you can jump two nodes while holding down the sneak key.

[gamergardencat]

It uses key_e to interact with certain items in the world. Another thing trove does is jump over two nodes instead of the one.

About the creative stuff, that people don't what are missing from the real Minecraft (don't be stupid, if you can play Minecraft, enjoy the survival)
What is the item that you interact with the e key?
In Minetest you can jump two nodes while holding down the sneak key.

I am not sure what the first statement means about creative stuff. Survival looks interesting to although if there was more adventure and a store like in Starbound. This would be cool to implement some kind of Questing API into Minetest LUA scripts. Portals, different crafting tables that use different sorts of minerals that glow and a barbershop. As your character gain experience it gains new abilities much like in forge. The forge allows you to upgrade things like armor and hats that give you health and dmg speed. Very much like WoW. I have an extra key key sent to me. I am thinking about sharing with someone. Sneak to jump two block isn't working. Looking at the keys for Minetest I see E is for use. What uses the use key in Minetest?