FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

http://c55.me/blog/?p=1491
You should read this :)

AMEN.

I like to compare everything that goes into the engine for how well it suits a gravitation-less space game without ground surface. If everything is either disableable or suitable for such, then it gives much more freedom for people to experiment and create interesting things, even in ground-based worlds.

It’s starting to seem to me that we need to change the Minetest distribution to contain a bunch of different subgames instead of trying to have one main game. New ideas or thumbs ups for this?

I've been annoying various people for two years now as to what is needed for a genuine space game and/or alien worlds :P Chiefly, the ability to change the sky (sun, moon, the background and/or colour). And that's just for a start if you want to offer unique environments/gameplay. As it stands, the engine is hardcoded for minetest_game and variations on that theme, and new features considered through the same optics - there is no weather or caves in space :P

It would help with suggestions/ideas/feature requests if we knew what kind of games we're looking for here.

I really like celeron55's attitude and approach to Minetest and obviously am very happy to see this space-orientated vision. IRL the future of mining is in space, so there is a progression from a sandbox mining game to mining asteroids, other planets, moons etc.
My own feel for the potential of Minetest is a stack of realms above and below, but also lots of deep space, and also 'other dimension / teleportation' realms that can be located behind impassable barriers. There can be different orientations and dimensions of realms, such as vertical 1D (meru), 1D horizontal (slabrealm, slabworld), this leads to the possibility of a 'wall world' vertical 2D realm which i would love to tackle. The vertical realms then become routes between horizontal realms.
I guess this means we can and should be bolder about suggesting space orientated development ;)

I like the idea of stacked realms (tried it) but the pure lua approach even with vmanip, is too slow for servers. We need more options with the mapgen and the ability to reuse it in different places. That would also mean being able to define different skydomes for different areas (minp,maxp). Alternatively if we could run multiple maps from the same server, then we'd only need to define the properties of each map, and have the ability to teleport between maps (on the mod side of things, that could involve rocket ships, portals, etc.). Game-wise, players could harvest materials in space that you can't find on earth, survival would be harsher, and they could bring the rare stuff back to earth or build up a colony in space bringing resources from earth.

Other possibilities aside from space could involve parallel dimensions, or time travel: the same earth, from radically different time periods (carboniferous, jurassic, etc.).

I replied myself on the blog and I agree with temperest.

mauvebic wrote:I like the idea of stacked realms (tried it) but the pure lua approach even with vmanip, is too slow for servers. We need more options with the mapgen and the ability to reuse it in different places.

MGV7 will be amazing because it will have lua-defined biomes and realms generated by core at any altitude, of 3 types: surface, underworld, float lands (this was Hmmmm's intention the last time he expressed it on minetest-dev IRC). Per-realm skydomes would be ideal.

I actually made something to make a space-y type game, anyone can implement it:

I think the development approach for the engine is fine. But splitting minetest itself into subgames (I mean branches with completely different focuses rather than current minetest style playing) would be detrimental to development - overextension of resources, everyone going their own way, lack of focus.

Instead the objective should be to make things as easy as possible for the _modders_. They can create content and new styles of Minetest if it is not painful. I am not opposed to total conversions even (we have this already, hunger games, treasure hunts, pvps), the space idea sounds awesome (different planets with different minerals having unique properties, portals, space ship crafting, Alien mobs, maybe even Alien NPCs, discovering life) there could be a *host* of new possibilities. But the basic playing method (digging for survival and building) should remain the same.

So unless the objective is to build another Irrlicht I do not think there should be splitting of games. Everything should remain under one umbrella system. I write this because the first two comments on the blog post endorse a completely opposite way of development.

Just my opinion, have started playing minetest only recently and am loving it much more than MC. Especially the ease and focus on modding, the culture here is to extend the game unlike in MC where you have to deal with bukkit and tekkit and reverse engineer.

Aditya Raj Bhatt wrote:But splitting minetest itself into subgames (I mean branches with completely different focuses rather than current minetest style playing) would be detrimental to development - overextension of resources, everyone going their own way, lack of focus.

We already tried the splitting some time ago, it did not work at all. It would be better to take some of the existing subgames and use them (hint to my signature ;) ). I think that was the actual meaning of the sentence:

It’s starting to seem to me that we need to change the Minetest distribution to contain a bunch of different subgames instead of trying to have one main game. New ideas or thumbs ups for this?

p.s. Both my thumbs are up.

Custom sky news: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pull/960 Looks like it may be per player too. Thanks celeron55!

paramat wrote:MGV7 will be amazing because it will have lua-defined biomes and realms generated by core at any altitude, of 3 types: surface, underworld, float lands (this was Hmmmm's intention the last time he expressed it on minetest-dev IRC). Per-realm skydomes would be ideal.

Not sure if i understand, do you mean one could have 3 different realms at any height, or any number of realms of the 3 different types at any height? Either way, if we can tweak the flolands enough to be able to shape them into asteroids, that would be cool :-) (Earth - Moon - Mars - Asteroid Field - etc. )

paramat wrote:Custom sky news: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pull/960 Looks like it may be per player too. Thanks celeron55!

That is awesome, ive been working on a carboniferous game for a new server and wanted to set the sky green-ish :-)

mauvebic wrote:Not sure if i understand, do you mean one could have 3 different realms at any height, or any number of realms of the 3 different types at any height?

Ha not too sure myself, i read it a few months ago on IRC dev logs. Hopefully any number of any realm type at any height, since i would certainly want the option of additional surface realms instead of being stuck with floating island type realms high up.

mauvebic wrote:I like the idea of stacked realms (tried it) but the pure lua approach even with vmanip, is too slow for servers.

But have you tested paragenv7 LVM? (Although it is untested and probably buggy) That was written using the new perlin map functions which will speed up generation even more. The earlier moonrealm LVM you tried used the older slower perlin functions.

paramat wrote:Ha not too sure myself, i read it a few months ago on IRC dev logs. Hopefully any number of any realm type at any height, since i would certainly want the option of additional surface realms instead of being stuck with floating island type realms high up.

The more you can configure and customize it the better :-)

paramat wrote:But have you tested paragenv7 LVM? (Although it is untested and probably buggy) That was written using the new perlin map functions which will speed up generation even more. The earlier moonrealm LVM you tried used the older slower perlin functions.

I was actually thinking of trying/tweaking the mgv7 version for my carboniferous game :-)

Cool, i hope those new perlin map functions speed it up a bit. BTW i read that the mapgen for a particular world can be force-changed, for example if you want to use mgv7 in your server world, but i think mgv7 would be at sea level which would not match to your 'flooded Earth' realm.

mauvebic wrote:Game-wise, players could harvest materials in space that you can't find on earth, survival would be harsher, and they could bring the rare stuff back to earth or build up a colony in space bringing resources from earth.

^ If ever there's a crisis of identity or direction for minetest game then perhaps it could be the exploration and mining of various stacked realms, realising the potential of MT's vertical height.
Once i convert my mods to LVM i may well make a 'game' that is a stack of my space mods, call it 'minespace' or something.

Stacked worlds is an idea i had a while back aswell and would utilize the vast amount of free +y space available. However after playing around with my moon mod and paramat's moonrealm mod i too find the lua generated world way too slow. This is a big reason i abandoned the mod as the more added the worse it got, so i left it a very basic world and never released updates.

Further mapgen capabilities would really help move the stacked realm idea forward as stacked realms could be created for multiplay with an objective to get to this/these realm(s). This could spark ideas for game modes, creating new mods and ideas improving the engine physics and logic.

Anything from the gravitational physics mods to further work into biomes - possibly 'world biomes' that can support gases eg oxygen/nitrogen rich world = friendly to the local minetestiens. Yet others could be carbon dioxide rich and harmful without a space suit or artificial minetestien built biomes.

This comes back to the logic and 'world biomes' side of things as trees produce oxygen so saplings with soil from earth would need to be brought to the other worlds to change the atmosphere within the minetestien built biomes.

As for the engine core i really think it could be used for a first person shooter too, this type of gameplay mode will help the development in other areas of minetest vice versa. Definitely open minded for other game modes, the space idea sounds really interesting too.

Well thats been my thoughts while i been gone, im back :)

I certainly can't find anything objectionable in celeron55's post.

I think Minetest's greatest strength is it's engine and the freedom it gives players to create their own content for it. I'm very happy to see his priority is extending those freedoms even further.

As for packing Minetest with some of the more popular games/modpacks. My thinking is that users could download the Minetest engine sans any games. Then go to the games section and pick and choose what they want. Having an official games page or bundling them with the engine download would most likely bring about accusations of favoritism.

About Lua mapgen, you should try mg (with a recent version of Minetest). It is very fast, almost as fast as normal mapgen, so that shows it is possible to create stacked realms with Lua without too much slowness.

celeron55 wrote:
I like to compare everything that goes into the engine for how well it suits a gravitation-less space game without ground surface. If everything is either disableable or suitable for such, then it gives much more freedom for people to experiment and create interesting things, even in ground-based worlds.

mauvebic:
I've been annoying various people for two years now as to what is needed for a genuine space game and/or alien worlds :P Chiefly, the ability to change the sky (sun, moon, the background and/or colour).

Now that would be a nice game. Just seeing me bouncing about because of lesser gravity in that air filled dome on otherwise barren and suffocating Titan. looking at the tiny sun in the sky and watching as Saturn in all his glory rises over the horizon filling half the sky with his rings.

Some of this may be achieved with current mods allready, other features such as skybox change, different celestial bodys such as modifyable sun system, moon like objects in the sky with individual paths and changes of the gravity - I'm not sure.

Ok make it Titan like moon near a Saturn like planet because as I understand the descriptions Saturn does not travel through the Titan sky as the rotation of Titan is locked to its' orbit around Saturn.

Nore wrote:About Lua mapgen, you should try mg (with a recent version of Minetest). It is very fast, almost as fast as normal mapgen, so that shows it is possible to create stacked realms with Lua without too much slowness.

Nore, i looked at your code, seems you are not using the new faster perlin map functions? With those mg could be even faster.

I don't use them, indeed. However, it would need to totally change the code to use them... It is fast enough for now, so I will leave it like that until I need it to be faster.

I still think the best route would be to harness the full power of the engine's mapgen to be able to use it as many times, places and capacities possible. In a multi-realm world, you want the other realms to generate as fast as the ground level. If i understood the blog post correctly, that seems to be in the general direction of where he wants minetest to go.