FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

SAMIAMNOT wrote:I actually think that Minetest is better than Minecraft despite its appearent shortcomings because if theres something you feel is missing someones probably made a mod for it. And with all the mods, texture packs and games theres actually more to minetest than minecraft. That should be the goal.
Wouldn't it be awesome if they made a free version of Minetest for iPad, iPhone and Android whereyou can access all the mods on this site? Thatd blow Minetest for iPhone outta the water.

I don't think there are any plans being made for an iPhone/iPad port.

Aww.
Is it me or do mobs rewind after 10 seconds? My little Vombies kept trying to go in the water and suddenly kept showing up again on dry land.

What's missing is the challenges,such as enchanting,nether mobs and the Ender Dragon.

SAMIAMNOT wrote:Aww.
Is it me or do mobs rewind after 10 seconds? My little Vombies kept trying to go in the water and suddenly kept showing up again on dry land.

That is because of lag. And yes, even on singleplayer lag can still be a problem with entities.

Okay. Yeah all I play is singleplayer so.

SAMIAMNOT wrote:Wouldn't it be awesome if they made a free version of Minetest for iPad, iPhone and Android whereyou can access all the mods on this site? Thatd blow Minetest for iPhone outta the water.

There is a version for Android which runs quite well even on lower-end phones/tablets. You can connect to normal servers with it and play there. A very mod-heavy server may however be too much for such a small computer. Servers with relatively few mods installed usually work best.

A $2 Bn deal with Microsoft.

Jordach wrote:A $2 Bn deal with Microsoft.

What? With Minecraft? Yeah I read about that in my WSJ this morning. The said the programmer would leave if Microsoft bought Mojang. I have a feeling he'll take his code and make like Minecraft 2 or something.

SAMIAMNOT wrote:

Jordach wrote:A $2 Bn deal with Microsoft.

What? With Minecraft? Yeah I read about that in my WSJ this morning. The said the programmer would leave if Microsoft bought Mojang. I have a feeling he'll take his code and make like Minecraft 2 or something.

The programmer? Notch hasn't touched Minecraft in years, he handed it over to a dev team of now 20+ people.

spamyak wrote:

SAMIAMNOT wrote:

Jordach wrote:A $2 Bn deal with Microsoft.

What? With Minecraft? Yeah I read about that in my WSJ this morning. The said the programmer would leave if Microsoft bought Mojang. I have a feeling he'll take his code and make like Minecraft 2 or something.

The programmer? Notch hasn't touched Minecraft in years, he handed it over to a dev team of now 20+ people.

Well WSJ made it seem like he's still with the group. Do you mean Notch basically does nothing at all for Minecraft anymore? Cause he said he'd leave Mojang.

Here's a comparison of the same room in MC and in MT. (Same time of day and textures as well)
(Pardon the leaf textures, that was a bad GIMP job on my part)

Minecraft:


Minetest:


From that it is obvious that MC provides a much more immersive feeling, as well as better lighting. In fact, due to the edge glitch, it almost seems like the lighting is inverted between the pictures.

Minecraft advantages:

• Partial or fake SSAO, (Really helps)
• Much larger light spread and intensity. (Also helps)
• More complete/effective lighting algorithm.
• Blocks in hand are partially shaded.
• Slightly yellow-colored sunlight? (Seems like this on the plank textures) [Perhaps just a bit of oversaturation]
• Thinner, less garish selection box.

I believe those are big deals in making the game feel more playable. Especially the ambient occlusion, makes the blocks feel more integrated into the world.

TriBlade9 wrote:Here's a comparison of the same room in MC and in MT. (Same time of day and textures as well)
(Pardon the leaf textures, that was a bad GIMP job on my part)

Minecraft:
https://cdn.mediacru.sh/kdqGWXQHXSyw.png

Minetest:
https://cdn.mediacru.sh/xEcOQuEKjTfm.png

From that it is obvious that MC provides a much more immersive feeling, as well as better lighting. In fact, due to the edge glitch, it almost seems like the lighting is inverted between the pictures.

Minecraft advantages:

• Partial or fake SSAO, (Really helps)
• Much larger light spread and intensity. (Also helps)
• More complete/effective lighting algorithm.
• Blocks in hand are partially shaded.
• Slightly yellow-colored sunlight? (Seems like this on the plank textures) [Perhaps just a bit of oversaturation]
• Thinner, less garish selection box.

I believe those are big deals in making the game feel more playable. Especially the ambient occlusion, makes the blocks feel more integrated into the world.

Both games have fake SSAO, which is called “smooth lighting”.

The lighting algorithms of Minecraft and Minetest are very similar (both use 16 light levels, sun light, block light, coloured moonlight…). As for light spread, the algorithm is fine, it's an issue of the light table (the brightness values used for each light level) which is too dark and not changeable easily. By editing (and compiling) the source code, you could change it to anything.

You can change the selection box to a dark grey colour instead of black to make it less visible. Add this to minetest.conf (open using a text editor):


Oh, we also have waving leaves, plants and water by default. Any kind of GLSL shaders can in theory be added to Minetest, provided you know how to write it.

One thing Minetest has over minecraft is that its indie ;) unlike Minecraft now

SAMIAMNOT wrote:One thing Minetest has over minecraft is that its indie ;) unlike Minecraft now

/s/indie/FOSS/

SAMIAMNOT wrote:One thing Minetest has over minecraft is that its indie ;) unlike Minecraft now

This is a sad fate for Mojang to face, even though they clearly have their flaws. Hopefully, open-source games will not share that fate.

Inocudom wrote:This is a sad fate for Mojang to face, even though they clearly have their flaws. Hopefully, open-source games will not share that fate.

Minetest is GPL, meaning it can't be close-sourced. Some people are apparently trying to sell closed copies for Android illegally, but that's as far as the danger goes for Minetest.

Other voxel engines which aren't licensed under GPL however, could decide to go close-source at some point. But even if that happens, the communities of those engines would fork from the last available source code... so that wouldn't totally kill the project either.

I'd like to elaborate on my earlier comments.

I still say the UI is really, really off in this game. Minecraft had a fairly nice UI before even indev. But this game, I don't know.

What's with this overlap?


The number of things wrong with this picture (my modified faithful texture pack) is insane. Bad scaling, overlapping hearts, hearts not aligned in any sensible way, and the fact had to remove the sections in between the blocks because they're not far enough apart.


Or how about the weird UI stretching it does?
vs

The fact that texture packs do not edit the font, the buttons, or the item backgrounds is kind of frustrating as well.

Also as a former Minecraft server owner, the multiplayer drives me insane. There is no player list. There are no colors in chat. There is no scrolling in chat. In fact, the chat is sort of pushed off to the side with a small font like a second-class citizen. That is so backwards, where chat in Minecraft takes a front seat to the rest of the game because it is a large and important part of every server.

Let's use a server I used to frequent as an example.


What is the very first thing you see in this picture? The chat. It is large. It is readable. It contains important information. It looks nice. Take note of the well-positioned, texturable UI elements. Take note of the clickable links and the chat colors.


This is a player list. When you press [TAB] you can see who is online, some useful information for talking to people on the server with the aforementioned chat.


This is a popular Minetest server. There is no player list. The chat is small and hard to read. It contains no important information for the most part, that is all in the MOTD box which is also small and hard to read. There are no colors or formatting. There are no clickable links. The UI elements are, in fact, looking slightly nicer thanks to a mod, but the main problems still remain.

I can't even begin to set up the server the way I would a Minecraft server without multiple worlds, customizable and large colored chat (actually important), block logging and rollback plugins, and a good selection of other plugins. Of course, some of that comes with the maturity of the game and community.

I really hate to shit all over this game. I love the idea, I love the moddability. I have nothing against the devs of this game, in fact I am amazed that someone is in fact able to make a game this cool open source. That said, I'm fucking done with Minecraft after this Microsoft and EULA bullshit and it crushes me to see that the closest replacement isn't making any faster progress than it was before. You'd think I'm not the only one that's leaving that camp, but maybe not.

I think what this game really needs is an art guy. Some better textures, better lightmaps, music, and overall better UI would make the game infinitely more enjoyable.

Sorry for the long-winded rant post. I didn't mean to come off as an asshole, I just wanted to point some things out that I would totally fix myself I knew how to code well.

spamyak wrote:Or how about the weird UI stretching it does?

You're right, that is a problem. Especially regarding formspecs. Has annoyed me several times as well.

spamyak wrote:The fact that texture packs do not edit the font, the buttons, or the item backgrounds is kind of frustrating as well.

Lately, there was support added for textureable background in quite a lot of menus (chests etc). That may not be much, but perhaps it's at least the direction you'd like it to go?

spamyak wrote:Also as a former Minecraft server owner, the multiplayer drives me insane. There is no player list.

You can get a player list when typing "/status" in the chat. It will show you the line you get upon connection - with all names in one or two lines. There was a patch out there that allowed to call up that list when pressing TAB (afaik written by sfan5), and there is a mod somewhere that gives a nice player list as a formspec, though I don't remember the name of that mod.

spamyak wrote: There are no colors in chat.

There is a mod out there that tries to create a chat like you want it to be. It's called kmchat.

spamyak wrote: There is no scrolling in chat. In fact, the chat is sort of pushed off to the side with a small font like a second-class citizen.

Press F10. Then you'll get a chat window where you can scroll around. It's not colored and not larger than before, but at least scrolling is possible. The font size can be changed for the entire game, i.e.:

spamyak wrote:That is so backwards, where chat in Minecraft takes a front seat to the rest of the game because it is a large and important part of every server.

You're right. At least there's no need to type "<" or ">" after 60 chars or so as it was in MC classic. But a better chat would definitely be good.

spamyak wrote:I can't even begin to set up the server the way I would a Minecraft server without multiple worlds,

Multiple worlds are not possible, but you can stack worlds on each other. There's a lot of space up and down!

spamyak wrote:customizable and large colored chat (actually important),

Most things are customizable. Might just be a bit more work :-)

spamyak wrote: block logging and rollback plugins,

You can increase the log level, although changes done by players ought to be logged automaticly anyway. As for rollback, the relevant commands are

(Yes, a very few commands even come with help texts :-) (Most don't.))

spamyak wrote:I think what this game really needs is an art guy. Some better textures, better lightmaps, music, and overall better UI would make the game infinitely more enjoyable.

Better art would certainly be welcome. There don't seem to be too many of these guys around.

spamyak wrote:Sorry for the long-winded rant post. I didn't mean to come off as an asshole, I just wanted to point some things out that I would totally fix myself I knew how to code well.

The points you mentioned seem justified. Perhaps my hints will help you a bit, although that won't be enough to recreate the feeling you're accustomed to. Most things can be changed with either mods or patches to the engine/client. It might be a lot of work.

A topic for
What's Minecraft still missing over Minetest?

spamyak wrote:I'd like to elaborate on my earlier comments.

I still say the UI is really, really off in this game. Minecraft had a fairly nice UI before even indev. But this game, I don't know.

What's with this overlap?


The number of things wrong with this picture (my modified faithful texture pack) is insane. Bad scaling, overlapping hearts, hearts not aligned in any sensible way, and the fact had to remove the sections in between the blocks because they're not far enough apart.

I think https://github.com/minetest/minetest/bl ... i.txt#L540 might be the fix to that problem. You might need to define certain offsets in the mod thing for your HUD.

I've been away from minetest for a bit, so my modding skills are a bit rusty again, so I can't help you there. But if you pop into an IRC and ask around, I guess someone there might help you out

I'd like to see a sort of Minecraft UI for Minetest. That would make Minetest look a lot better, the inventory menu especially looks very unpolished.

SAMIAMNOT wrote:I'd like to see a sort of Minecraft UI for Minetest. That would make Minetest look a lot better, the inventory menu especially looks very unpolished.

The 'Inventory Menu' in the Minetest game is not one of the main features that seem to make Minetest a bit lacking compared to Minecraft. The main ones, which have been touched on by many, are the sound effects and textures for the mobs and blocks in the Minetest Game. These are no-where near as good as the Minecraft ones and therefore make the game seem less inviting as Minecraft....

Also the 'HUD' and 'Inventory Menu' can be changed by a large number of different mods, some of which are similar to Minecraft's...

Achilles wrote:

SAMIAMNOT wrote:I'd like to see a sort of Minecraft UI for Minetest. That would make Minetest look a lot better, the inventory menu especially looks very unpolished.

The 'Inventory Menu' in the Minetest game is not one of the main features that seem to make Minetest a bit lacking compared to Minecraft. The main ones, which have been touched on by many, are the sound effects and textures for the mobs and blocks in the Minetest Game. These are no-where near as good as the Minecraft ones and therefore make the game seem less inviting as Minecraft....

Also the 'HUD' and 'Inventory Menu' can be changed by a large number of different mods, some of which are similar to Minecraft's...

The inventory menu is very laggy.

As someone who was using Minecraft since Alpha and just tried Minetest for the first time a couple days ago the answer is a bit more subtle.

It was easy to download mods to make the game mostly "feel" to have the same features, but once I entered a couple worlds there was an obvious isue.

The first thing I noticed was the Biomes. They just don't look and feel as vibrant as Minecraft's biomes. The procedural world generation needs some tweaks.

SAMIAMNOT wrote:I'd like to see a sort of Minecraft UI for Minetest. That would make Minetest look a lot better, the inventory menu especially looks very unpolished.

About unpolishness, even before getting to the menu, there is the title of the engine itself : MineTEST. First when I heard about the project, I tought it was just a small experiment (like the python version of minecraft) because of the name. Was it a "test" for something?

Maybe changing the name would be adding some more seriousness to the project?

SAMIAMNOT wrote:The inventory menu is very laggy.

Yes. And this is annoying as hell!

lstep wrote:About unpolishness, even before getting to the menu, there is the title of the engine itself : MineTEST. First when I heard about the project, I tought it was just a small experiment (like the python version of minecraft) because of the name. Was it a "test" for something?

Maybe changing the name would be adding some more seriousness to the project?

I'm in complete agreement with this, and I've said this before. I ignored Minetest the first time I heard of it for exactly the same reason. The only reason I even thought to try it at all was some FSF post called it a Minecraft replacement.

I think the idea of the name "Minetest" was in the belief that "test" means "challenge", which is technically true, but it's not the meaning I tend to think of, especially in the context of software.

lstep wrote:About unpolishness, even before getting to the menu, there is the title of the engine itself : MineTEST. First when I heard about the project, I tought it was just a small experiment (like the python version of minecraft) because of the name. Was it a "test" for something?

Maybe changing the name would be adding some more seriousness to the project?

I think you are right. Sounds like the developer wanted to try if he could make a simple minecraft clone and he needed a name because the IDE asked for one.

Really I think Minetest is a great name. Yeah people might get the wrong impression but it seems like people read too much into title names.

The brand and game of Minetest needs to become more testy and science-y. I am not sure how. Any suggestions?