FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I seem to have this issue with a new server I host. It is a survival server and it is survival for everyone but me; no matter what I have tried I can not seem to get out of creative. Does anyone know how to solve this issue? Thank you in advance.

Do you use Unified Inventory?

if you are the admin of the server, you have full access to all abilities.
limiting yourself could be problematic, because you may need that power to moderate the server.

i suggest to register a 2nd account as a normal player.
then you can play survival with that account and still use your admin account to fix problems.

That can't be, if your server is survival, all the players are in survival.
Please tell us what mods are you using, that's probably the reason.

There is no such thing as a “game mode” in Minetest.

There are several settings which are more or less independent from each other.
There is Creative Mode which allows you to place stuff freely.
There is PvP which allows players to attack each other. If PvP disabled, players can NOT attack each other!
You can also toggle damage.
And much more.

But these settings apply to all players, there is no exception. But mods can mess around with Minetest a lot, so mods *might* be the reason for your problem, but I am not sure about that. But yeah, please post the mods you are using, just in case.

Anyways, you can combine these settings as you wish.
For “survival”, you probably want to disable Creative Mode, enable PvP combat and turn on damage.

PvP can only be edited in minetest.conf (I don't know the default setting), the other settings are changable in Minetest before you start the server.

For reference, here are the relevant settings for minetest.conf:
Creative Mode disabled: creative_mode = false
PvP enabled: enable_pvp = true
Damage enabled: enable_damage = true

You don't need to be admin of the server directly if you have set these values *before* the server was started, just edit the minetest.conf (or the in-game checkboxes) before you start the server. But if you want to change these settings in-game, you need the “server” privilege.
However, as far I know, some of these settings also only apply after a server restart, sorry. :-(

For more information about working with servers, look here:
http://wiki.minetest.net/Server

benrob0329 wrote:Do you use Unified Inventory?

I do have unified inventory on there.

Then revoke the "creative" priv, you'll still be able to use giveme for admining.

I did revoke the creative priv, for some odd reason it stays every time. It says after I revoke it: Privs of tmanyo:.......creative........

Admins automatically have all privs, there's no way around it afaik.

It only seems to effect server that are survival from the start. RRH-Economy does the same thing except that its impossible to revoke any privs from my profile. Doesnt seem to effect creative based servers.

It seems you are the server admin. Like rubenwardy said, the admin has all privileges and most of them can NOT be revoked. But Minetest does not have any useful error message for this.
But you can change who's considered admin of the server.
It is very simle, it's based on your player name.

The “name” variable in minetest.conf is also the admin name. The player with this name will be the admin. So you must somehow join the server without this name.
Sadly, this is also used for your regular multiplayer name, it's a silly double meaning of this config variable.

Change the name behind “name = ” in your minetest.conf to something else. You should join with this name once at least to set a password, otherwise everyone who knows the admin name can just join with the admin name and do everything (as far I know).

Then start the server as a seperate process and just join this server with your regular name; now you should have normal privileges like any normal player. To get new privileges, you must join as the admin (so you have grant) and grant your regular player the privileges you want.



Gosh, I just realized how fucked up this whole “admin” model in Minetest actually is. xD

Wuzzy wrote:It seems you are the server admin. Like rubenwardy said, the admin has all privileges and most of them can NOT be revoked.

I was about to write that I think they should all be revokable except for the "privs" privilege itself – then an admin would always be able to re-grant themselves everything.

But thinking about it some more made me realize that the "admin has all privileges all the time" makes sense, and it is instead the privileges themselves which are faulty!

Consider the "fly" privilege: having this privilege allows you to enter fly mode, it does not force you to, you can still choose to walk. Same with "fast" and "noclip".

Now consider the "creative" privilege: it does force you into creative mode, if I understand correctly. The correct behaviour (in my opinion) would be to allow you to enter creative mode, not force you into it. You should still be able to play "uncreatively", but have the privilege to change this. This would require another system to keep track of which player actually was in creative (like flying or noclip), but if it's a mod that does this (Unified Inventory, right?), it should be relatively easy.

As an aside: I'd love for "damage enabled" and "pvp enabled" to be per-player states to, but that's a topic I'm planning to dig into some other time.