FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Why download textures from server? For example, I have limited bandwidth and traffic. This is stupid. Can you make this feature optional, please.

True (would like an option to disable downloads, or only disable overriding downloads [so we can use clientside texturepacks]), however the textures aren't that big...
On average, a 16×16 texture is 1 KB.

Any gaming will use a rather significant amount of bandwidth. However Minetest overall has seemed pretty efficient with bandwidth. I once spent many hours playing it with a friend doing all sorts of things and used less than a couple hundred MB of bandwidth (I have a bandwidth tracker for my own tracking). I use far more bandwidth getting my educational video fixes lol.

I don't think server download bandwidth will be an issue in the long run unless there's a highly customized server with a LOT of stuff to download. Also if downloads from the server were able to be disabled it would make any server with mods pointless to connect to since you wouldn't have the same functionality as every other player there.

The upside of having the textures server side is any custom mods textures etc won't need to be installed on the client to view them as the server will send the textures down, plus it also means that we (hopefully) will be able to have individual player textures/skins eventually etc.

I'm not 100% sure but I think client side texture packs which override the server textures is on the to-do list, might be wrong though so don't hold me to that ^_^ which would mean that only textures for non-default mods would be sent, if this isn't on the todo list it would be nice to have.

Plus another thing with server side texture packs is that we can have proper themed servers ^_^

Idea: that if download textures once, save it and use it next time from a disc for each server?

No, because some servers will want to have different textures compared to the reset. Like, grass being white on a server to simulate snow.

If grass changed to snow, simply remove old textures and fetch it again. Or make saving feature as optional :/

During connection check md5 checksum. If checksum is not match, download new textures.

I'd suggest a database of textures, indexed by the texture's sha1 (it is relatively easy to get md5 collisions). Then upon connection, a client only needs to download the list of sha1 hashes. If any of these hashes are missing in the database, these are downloaded. This also avoids the overhead of having the same texture multiple times, ie. once for each server.

Texture caching is not currently implemented because there are more important things to do.