FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Minetest includes multiple games, what is the intention behind each of them? My view as a relative outsider:

• minimal - used for engine testing
• minetest_game - a minimalistic playable game
• survival - player can die
• build - for building awesome castles, ships, cities, whatever

This leads to various questions like

• Does survival have a goal? (like Minecrafts beating the Enderdragon)
• Survival is quite vague. Want to be realistic like RealTest? Competitive like HungryGames?
• Should build be topic-specific or just throw everything you can think of? (scifi,fantasy,urban,wasteland,comic,alien,etc)

Survival and Build wil probably be dropped.

PilzAdam wrote:Survival and Build will probably be dropped.

Why? Do you think both game styles can be provided by minetest_game?

survival and build are currently very similar to each other. There are some details that are different (the bones in build are just decorative nodes, and lava is slightly diffrent). A player can die whenever damage is enabled (usually always as long as its not outright creative). Those two modes mostly offer the option to include/change aspects of the main game that may be undesired under other circumstances (i.e. finding your inventory in bones after dying would be heavily annoying in a build-orientated world, while there's still the ressource-gathering-component seperating that build world from creative mode).

On their own, neither game is complete and really usable as-is. build ought to be extened by moreblocks and homedecor. On most build-orientated servers, that's already the case. There are some further build-orientated mods that might fit in here (beds, papyrus_bed, living room furniture, xfences, xpanes, panes, computer, streets, coloredwood, coloredbricks, coloredglass, gemaelde, scaffolding, ...), and on a server, a form of protection is a must (node_ownership, protector, ...), as well as WorldEdit. It might be a good idea to extend the build-game with at least the first two mods. Or drop a hint in the readme where other useful mods of this kind can be found.

Survival is a diffrent matter. Perhaps mods like drowning, hunger, aggressive mobs, mudslindes etc. might fit in here. I think it's up to players who want to play such a game to decide what they want to have. To me, HungryGames is a mode of game I'm not intrested in at all. But that's only my opinion.

Build as such never ought to be theme-specific. A server may be theme-specific (like Kingarthur server with its medieval theme), or a region/town on a server might very likely be that way (some of the best out there are).