FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I see that General Discussion is home to a lot of discussions about what minetest is missing, and I think this might be a simple way to make things a little better for the project.

I did a search in youtube to get the video about minetest whith the most views(155,652 right now). This is it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJU-PDp9XbU . This video is from 2011 and shows minetest as something that definitely: 1 - Is not anything like it is today and 2- is not very inviting..

After this video, in the list sorted by number of views, the next english language video has something around 30,000 views. I'm telling about english language videos because I know they reach more people in general, nothing against any language. Also, one of the most watched videos is in my first language (portuguese, you certainly could tell it was not english by now) and it describes minetest as "Minecraft for the poor"... no comments on that.

So, what's my point? Well, of course I'm not complaining about the videos those guys did, there's absolutely nothing wrong, but the thing is: don't we have any youtuber in the community? I think a youtuber that made nice videos about minetest, showing what it really is with honesty, the infinite amount of possibilities, showing that it is an engine that can be the base of a lot of different games, showing that even not having a "full-fledged" game hitherto, it has a lot of them under development by the community and some are already really fun, some really creative, and etc.. well, you got the idea, this person would be doing a lot for the project.

As I said, definitely minetest should reach more people, but it also should show what it really is to solve 2 problems: one is that a lot of people see someone talking about it as a minecraft clone and come here expecting one. This person will usually go away quickly and without contibuting anything useful. The other problem is that a lot of people who actually would be very nice to have in the community, will not even care to check the project when they hear that it's just another minecraft clone, they have more things to do. These guys could be interested after seeing the real potential of the thing.

Well, that's it, just wanted to share these thoughts. Cheers

I have a channel which I posted quite a few popular projects, mostly redstone machines back 2012~2013https://youtu.be/Srei672_5_E. I've had it in my head to do some Minetest videos but I'm going to wait until Minetest is a little more feature-complete. It really has a lot of potential. Maybe some folks should do a high quality joint-project which truly explains Minetest?

A friend of mine did some videos on our server, sadly they are on hold until he can get a better computer.

https://youtu.be/V6fVBzCVXq4

Nathan has been making minetest videos. He does a lot of mod reviews.
https://www.youtube.com/user/BrianHanson2nd

Minetest isn't exactly Youtube-friendly, especially when compared to Minecraft. The sound design in particular is pretty horrible.

PoignardAzur wrote:[...]The sound design in particular is pretty horrible.

I agree, somebody should try to make more immersive sounds sometime(Hopefully before 0.5.0)

Has nobody seriously yet contributed audio samples?

AnxiousInfusion wrote:Has nobody seriously yet contributed audio samples?

I don't think so.

While the default sounds may not be as great, or immersive as Minecraft's they don't make it hard to do Youtube videos, I've been doing Minetest videos for a long while now, and have never had anybody complain about the audio and I've never had an problems with it. Freesound.org might be a place to start looking for some sound effects, however some of the walking type sounds would probably have to be recorded fresh, as I doubt if those would be something existing to use.

I must agree with Nathan that the sound issues pointed here are not exactly a barrier for youtube videos. And I see a bunch of other issues here..

First, you guys shoud not mix up 'bad sound design' with 'bad audio samples' or 'lack of audio samples'. It is too easy to get or even create from scrath sounds for every kind of situation you can imagine.. and also, the samples that come with the default mod are definitely not bad today. The thing of sound design is more about artistic choices than availability of samples.

The thing I agree with you guys is that the engine may be missing some things like support for 'ambient' sounds, but that's it. Support. The sounds themselves should ovbiously come from the designers of the games, to match the atmosphere of the game they are designing. Of course, minetest_game being a game, it will get its sounds, but then, if people hear the sound and say that it is a problem of minetest, I think they are really getting something wrong.

And this is entirely my point. The question is not "do we have videos?" but "do we have people around showing correctly what's the idea behind minetest in the present time?". When you say things like

The sound design in particular is pretty horrible.

you are already misunderstanding things. There is no sound design in minetest. There is sound design is in the (sub)games, and the people responsible for it are the people developing each game. Minetest job is only to allow them to do that.

I think having people with a nice audience showing this would attract not a lot of people, but the right kind of people. Attracting one or two enthusiastic guys to the community can have greater impact than attracting a million players, if all they can do is to complain. (and by 'players who only complain' i don't mean people here in the discussion, please don't get me wrong)

Immersive sounds aren't that difficult to add:

https://github.com/tenplus1/ambience

And sounds like this would be fine, too.
http://opengameart.org/content/rpg-sound-pack

Well, I finally have a YouTube Channel, and here is my first video!

https://youtu.be/X0Wb6I1RfMo?list=PL6pe ... oepe6rwbGx

Surprise! Its a Minetest Let's Play!

benrob0329 wrote:Surprise! Its a Minetest Let's Play!

Video intro: Boom!

Don't do that to my ears! :)