A plea for direction.

celeron55
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Re: A plea for direction.

by celeron55 » Mon Feb 29, 2016 23:50

Let's be frustrated together!

PoignardAzur wrote:As far as I am aware, Minetest is an horrible failure at any decent goal I could imagine for it.


That's a bit rough isn't it?

I have personally seen Minetest raise from nothing to likely tens of thousands of users and to an online community with many things happening every day. For multiple years. What are you even comparing it against? Please be realistic. Everything falling down at this instant and never coming back would be more of a norm than literally anything else.

You can define some rather grand goals and say Minetest is a failure at them, but they are your goals. As a user of this free and libre product, you are as responsible of reaching the goals as anyone else.

PoignardAzur wrote:I think the best thing that could happen to this game is serious competition. Right now people who want a good voxel game play minecraft. The people who play minetest want special things only it can offer (free access, easy modding, distance from Microsoft, high performance for slow PCs, etc), and as long at it will be the only game providing those, it will keep stagnating.


I really do not think Minetest would improve in the way you imagine if there was serious competition. You probably misunderstand the dynamic here - the reason why Minetest stagnates is not because the core team or I personally are somehow so proud of what we have that we don't feel any need to improve it. In my opinion Minetest sucks in so many technical aspects that I don't even know where to begin. Making it not suck even in one single aspect is a massive amount of work, and people naturally just want to build upon the old systems that should have been reworked years ago before anything was built on them.

We want to make Minetest better, but we have very limited resources and it's a very non-trivial task. The reason for why there is no competition is that making something like Minetest at any level of quality is hard enough in itself. You can say that we are incompetent or just pricks or whatever, but what's the point? That's not going to make development happen. It will probably cause nothing to happen, or sometimes me to write a piece of text like this because I feel like it.

That having been said, this niche would be better off if there was competition. The way that would work would probably be that Minetest would die off and people would be happily using whatever the competition was... but that won't happen. It wouldn't be a viable business and Minecraft isn't anymore the big thing among the college students who can make things happen given enough motivation.

It's basically a miracle Minetest even exists, let alone is still maintained and even developed, given the circumstances of its creation - but it does. And here we are on the forum that I host for people to discuss things about it. I don't get paid for doing this, and neither does anyone else. jp is right about the lack of funding resulting in a certain kind of dynamic which possibly isn't the best one, but that's how Minetest has always been.

You can talk about commercialization of Minetest all you want, but in addition to being very difficult it's not what I or any other members of the core team came here for. We are not here to provide you with a service, and you are not here to pay for us to provide a service. It's very far-fetched to change this.

It might not feel like it (which is a shame), but we are one community, and all of the core team's problems are your problems as well as all of your problems being the core team's problems.

Remember to show respect to those who develop and maintain all these things, because respect is one of the currencies we use to pay for each other's work here. If there's not enough to keep development happening, the game is already over and will not restart itself. I am a stubborn bastard and will stick around, but some others aren't so much.

Was that grim and dark enough?

Maybe I'll write something more positive next time...

On a more positive note, go read some closed pull requests from the past few weeks. It's not very grim and dark. It might even make you slightly hopeful: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pu ... s%3Aclosed

Also, there's some organizational development happening: A moderated IRC channel that unifies experienced modders, server hosts and core devs. It's doing well so far, but it does not directly affect the (perceived) pull request issue that this thread seems to be somewhat about.
 

PoignardAzur
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Re: A plea for direction.

by PoignardAzur » Tue Mar 01, 2016 09:33

celeron55 wrote:That's a bit rough isn't it?

It's very, very rough. I think the times I think about minetest are correlated with the times I'm in a certain mood (boredom, frustration, thinking about failure...) which makes me resent the game more than it deserves, so I'm probably super biased. With that in mind, I'm still massively annoyed about this game. In my head, minetest is a lot of potential and not much concrete, and has been in this state for years.

celeron55 wrote:You can define some rather grand goals and say Minetest is a failure at them, but they are your goals. As a user of this free and libre product, you are as responsible of reaching the goals as anyone else.

Very true. There's a voice in my head saying "this should be bigger than minecraft right now why isn't it bigger than minecraft!", and it's probably wrong too. And I don't know much about the libre community, so I don't doubt you when you say that a project failing is the norm, and this one is still going.

celeron55 wrote:I really do not think Minetest would improve in the way you imagine if there was serious competition. You probably misunderstand the dynamic here - the reason why Minetest stagnates is not because the core team or I personally are somehow so proud of what we have that we don't feel any need to improve it. In my opinion Minetest sucks in so many technical aspects that I don't even know where to begin. Making it not suck even in one single aspect is a massive amount of work, and people naturally just want to build upon the old systems that should have been reworked years ago before anything was built on them.

I'm aware that the minetest team is still working on this project, and I'm not accusing them of being self-satisfied. It's more a feeling I have when looking at the community itself, with the posts from people wondering why people would prefer minecraft to minetest, or how the only subgames I see are drawf-fortress-style survival games where you must go underground to mine ores, hunt or build plantations for food, and maybe improve your items with enchantments and stuff. But you have a better view of minetest's dynamics than I have, so maybe you're right and competition would not improve creativity there.

celeron55 wrote:You can say that we are incompetent or just pricks or whatever, but what's the point? That's not going to make development happen. It will probably cause nothing to happen, or sometimes me to write a piece of text like this because I feel like it. [...] Remember to show respect to those who develop and maintain all these things, because respect is one of the currencies we use to pay for each other's work here. If there's not enough to keep development happening, the game is already over and will not restart itself. I am a stubborn bastard and will stick around, but some others aren't so much.

Alright, I apologize for my former post. There are a lot of opinions in there I still stand by, and I'm feeling frustration about Minetest, but as you pointed out, the developers are still working on it. You made an okay game, and I'm really annoyed because it's not as great as I'd like it to be, but I'm not blaming you or anyone who developed it. It's still alive, maintained and played after years, so it obviously could be much, much worse.

celeron55 wrote:Was that grim and dark enough?

Eh. It'll do.
 

celeron55
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Re: A plea for direction.

by celeron55 » Tue Mar 01, 2016 14:23

PoignardAzur wrote:Eh. It'll do.


I appreciate your response! Not being Mojang or Microsoft has many sides to it. Let's just deal with it and do what we can get ourselves to be bothered to do. Some people make it sound like everything is falling apart but it's not really the case; there's a lot of room for this project to go up or down. Even if it's lazy and late and badly communicated, people do react to things and try to correct the wrongs and build upon the best parts.
 

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Re: A plea for direction.

by Don » Tue Mar 01, 2016 16:06

I find it interesting that people have such harsh words for the game or the devs. It is a game! You can decide for yourself whether it is worth playing or not. I find it to be a great game. I expect nothing for free so getting so much for free is amazing.
And it is not just a game. It is a community of great people who are more then willing to help others. With a community this big it is surprising that there is so little fighting.
Before giving an opinion on the core team I think people need to ask themselves a few questions
1 - Do you know what the team is doing?
2 - Are you contributing to Minetest as much as they are?
3 - Are you expecting too much from a free game?

The core team is doing a lot of things. If you look at the IRC log, github and the forum you can see that they are busy. They might not work on what you want but they are doing lots.
You can contribute to Minetest. Even if you are not a programmer there are things you can do. Testing and reporting bugs, help build the community, learn to make mods, or even just playing on servers helps.
Minetest is a free game and everyone who works on it does it for free. Everything the developers do should be appreciated. They do not have to do anything. Everything they do is a great thing no matter how small it is.

I get a bit annoyed when people bash the developers. If people continue the developers might get tired of it and quit. If that happens then the game is dead. Constructive criticism is great but insulting the team has negative consequences.
Many of my mods are now a part of Minetest-mods. A place where you know they are maintained!

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Gael de Sailly
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Re: A plea for direction.

by Gael de Sailly » Tue Mar 01, 2016 16:36

The paradox is that we are players that have chosen to play Minetest, and some of them say, in brief, that Minetest is bad. You can complain if you expect improvements, but that's not always the case. If we are some thousands playing the game, it shows that it's still a good game. And there was some "low" periods where the dev team was not efficient, but the latest month I've seen many good things happening. Do not always focus on the problems!
Very busy this year too, so do not expect me to be very active on the forum or in game. But I'm not about to drop Minetest forever :)
 

paramat
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Re: A plea for direction.

by paramat » Thu Mar 03, 2016 03:01

BobbyBonsaimind, i don't mind you asking for more organisation, but these topics here and in Github have titles implying a lack of direction. Minetest has direction, there is the roadmap, starting on c55's blog and expanded in the forum. There is the TODO list in the developer Wiki. These are combined with the interests and talents of whatever devs are around at the time. The combination is more than enough direction. In a way direction arises from the current devs and cannot be decided and then imposed on them.

You have some good ideas for better organisation, i have, so far, added a new tag to MTGame to show information about approvals. Assignment is already done by the @ tags by subject, not developer, as many developers work in multiple areas, and the devs active at any one time is always changing.

Keep in mind that the devs are here for fun, and work on Minetest during their leisure time, often exhausted from a day job, so we don't want things to get too formal or 'professional'. much of the problem is the current lack of devs and the business of their lives, there isn't really a way to solve this, we are limited to those who want to work on Minetest. So dev is slow and the popularity of Minetest means large numbers of issues and pull requests.

Minetest cannot become as flexible as you wish, as that involves a lot of extra work and we are already struggling to prioritise our time. Your mission statement for Minetest seems to perhaps be more what you want it to be than what it actually is, and possibly influenced by your frustration over us not wanting to add the unpopular features you ask for.

I feel that, if you can, try not to get too frustrated over this. This seems similar to when you submitted that pull request for a feature not much needed or wanted or useful, it is not popular with the devs but you became frustrated and angry about it and made an unnecessary fuss. We cannot add every single feature thought up by every player, justified by 'flexibility'. Ideas for better organisation are however welcome.

I am a natural organiser, and often try to get some organisational work started, but often other devs are busy or not around. I can assure you that the few devs still active are working their butts off.
 

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Re: A plea for direction.

by Don » Thu Mar 03, 2016 03:38

WOW! Paramat, all Ican realy say is wow. You are on point and tell the truth.

I want to thank the devs for all they do. It might seem like a thankless job but I want to thank you for all you do. To all devs,thank you for all your hard work. I know you do not have to do anything. Everything is appreciated by me and by most people who like minetest.

I am a bit involved in minetest. I made a few mods for minetest. I have seen the devs care alot about the game. They want to make it the best it can be. I do not know a lot about coding but I do know that the people who do the coding for minetest care about it.

I suggest that anyone who wants to say that the devs are not good enough should prove it by producing code that out shines the devs. write the code that you want added to Minetest instead of complaining that the devs didn't do it. You are complaining that the people who spend their free time making a free game are not doing it good enough for you.

I just felt like ranting a bit. I think that people do spend a lot of time complaining about devs that volunteer their time. The devs owe you nothing. Everything they do is a bonus. Appreciate it and love the game.
Many of my mods are now a part of Minetest-mods. A place where you know they are maintained!

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Re: A plea for direction.

by paramat » Sat Mar 05, 2016 22:03

The ideas for extra labels are good and inspired me to add 'one approval' and 'two approvals', i'm working through all PRs to update them with these, they seem very useful.
I also worked through all MTGame PRs to generally attend to those, will do the same to engine PRs when i have time.
 

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