FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I am not sure what the gaming community would call this idea but I would think in theory it would be possible.

Shared invetory across servers.

The idea comes from the few days I have got to play starbound.
In starbound and I think terraria, your inventory stays the same regardless of singleplayer or multiplayer, even from server to server.

Now just a guess but I bet with a quick tweaking and moving player data outside of the world folder, worlds on the same physical system could indeed achieve this.

But could a mod achieve this?
But I am guessing regardless, there would have to be a trusted central authority and trusted servers for this to work at large.

Just an idea to think about.

This will not work.. Not every server have the same mods, blocks etc.. so.. There will be lot of unknown blocks, it can allow cheating when you will have the same inv on some creative server and aslo on survival one (you will make your INV full of blocks on creative and use it in survival).. I think this idea have no chance to implementing.

Pitriss wrote:This will not work.. Not every server have the same mods, blocks etc.. so.. There will be lot of unknown blocks, it can allow cheating when you will have the same inv on some creative server and aslo on survival one (you will make your INV full of blocks on creative and use it in survival).. I think this idea have no chance to implementing.

Naturally you would never do this for a creative server. That is just common sense.
As far as unknown blocks...Not sure what to do about that. But would be as simple as requireing all servers to have the same mods. Or the user would just have to log back into the orginal server to put those blocks in a chest.


And if anyway this is offensive or just plain jane sounds horrible. I am tired.... some how ended up with all the neighboorhood kids at my house.

The idea is faced with the challenges mentioned, but there is most certainly h value this idea as a feature and there are some avenues worth exploring...In the end it may be impractical simply because people create their servers in order to have greater (absolute?) control over a game world or community...

For starters, I have promoted the idea of expanding Sokomine's Travelnet mod to include interworld portals... This is a very gentle form of "carry-over status" whereby first the world admin has to opt-in adding a mod to enable the feature...Then, provisions can be made that allow the admin to set rules for the incoming requests...

1) Which referrers (source worlds) are allowed...
2) Where can/can't booths be placed
- designated include/exclude areas,
- owned areas
3) Who can/can't place portals (appropriate privs)
4) Portal Placement Quota (per authorized person)
5) Portal use quota (jumps per time period)

stuff like that

True, inventory is a bit trickier, but most of those same controls might be useful as well as some others...

6) exchange rate between worlds
7) ceilings per item
8) overall ceiling for all items
9) item ratios
10) schedule (list) of allowable items (would benefit from a universal/unified inventory standard that might be defined in conjunction with a mod)

OR the character could be required to use credits from in-game inventory to pay import duty of a sort on the inbound inventory

Going from a different angle...perhaps one should simply use the same character but view the worlds as alternate realities in which one has different inventories appropriate to each world...

My guess is that a well evolved combination of all the above may eventually make a really nice interworld character experience possible and become a standard in many games far beyond Minetest alone...

kizeren wrote:As far as unknown blocks...Not sure what to do about that. But would be as simple as requireing all servers to have the same mods.

That would be so boring. Not to mention why do u think people make their own servers and add their own mods? Because everybody likes different mods.

nolan wrote:

kizeren wrote:As far as unknown blocks...Not sure what to do about that. But would be as simple as requireing all servers to have the same mods.

That would be so boring. Not to mention why do u think people make their own servers and add their own mods? Because everybody likes different mods.

Yes I do agree would be boring. However this is just an idea. After testing a theory or two on how to make this work, I have come to realize the Minetest keeps all player data loaded into memory. So for now it seems, even with lua, would be impossible to do unless the game itself is changed.

However the different mods really isn't the issue. We would first have to make the games talk to themselves to go any further. Then once we accomplish that then we could worry about mods and such.

These problems can be overcome if the inventory sharing is only shared between servers that are hosted by one person. For example, Redcrab runs multiple servers, so he could share the inventory across them. Also between servers that have decided to work together.

As for unknown blocks, when they log in to a server without those blocks, the unknown blocks are removed from their inventory and stored separately. When they log into a server that supports those blocks, those blocks are readded to their inventory.

As for the code, each server need to be modified inorder to get items from a central server instead of their memory. A central server will need to be created to do this. The clients will not have to be modified.

You can access the player inventory when the player is logged in, and Lua can connect to the internet when Minetest is run on linux.

This I suppose could be possible if the servers you want to have this shared inventory all had the same mod. There could be something a bit like servers.minetest.net where it got broadcasted there for the playername maybe.

This could be very complicated and hard to make possibly.
And most servers would not use it as people could just create their own server, use /giveme and then go to another serve with lots of stuff.

I believe this would be possible. But we need a ant-cheat system in games.

I dont like centralized systems.

PilzAdam wrote:I dont like centralized systems.

Never meant for it to seem or to end up being like centralized systems.


However let me further explain my idea some. And I warn you this maybe a horrible explination.

From playing MC and its mods alot. Well Voxel + Java......lag hell. As to why this is that is not the problem.

What I have noticed lately in minetest is lag. Yes most is from join/part lag. However I have noticed even on some very popular server the land generation is becoming slower with the more mods you add. While my desktop is not state of the art by any means. Dual AMD 1ghz processors, 3GB ram, Arch Linux. It runs MT pretty good, yea graphics glitch out ever now and then.


So with that being said.

Being able to "distribute" the load of minetest across multiple server if you will. No one person would have full control over any of the systems but thier own. The games could directly send information back and fourth as needed. No need to actually leave the game to join another server, just walk "out of bounds" if you will and another server will pick up the chunks from there. Node/sever goes down no biggie still have your inventory. Could even have special chests that will keep so much safe from multiple servers going off line. Similar to the wifi chests we have but across servers. I see many benefits to something like this plus drawbacks.

Yea as many stated in irc. This would never work due to creative....common sense tells you not to allow creative servers.

CraigyDavi wrote:This could be very complicated and hard to make possibly.
And most servers would not use it as people could just create their own server, use /giveme and then go to another serve with lots of stuff.

If the game made it far enough to work in a distrubuted type setup. This could easily be solved by disallowing anonymous server to join or making this setup with multiple passwords. One to connect to a server and for the server to connect back to yours.

The list could go on and on for bad good stuff. But if there is one thing I have seen is that when the modders put thier minds and time into a project the problems that some so happily point out will become minor annoyances that they will squash with ease.

I could actually see this opening up new and exciting opportunities.

But all in all just a novel idea. That is all I ever intended it to be.

This is a very debatable idea. However it sounds like too much work. All the people that already play on certain servers.. what would happen to their inventories? It's just too complicated sounding, and I have been perfectly fine with starting out scratch and working myself too where I am now.

PilzAdam wrote:I dont like centralized systems.

It should not be centralized across the whole of Minetest, instead groups of servers should share inventory data together.

1) Mesh Network
This is good for decentralizing, and if one server is offline, the others wont be.

2) Server
This is fairly centralized, but is only for a group of servers that have decided to share data together

3) Centralized server for all minetest servers
Bad. Bad. Bad.

nolan wrote:This is a very debatable idea. However it sounds like too much work. All the people that already play on certain servers.. what would happen to their inventories? It's just too complicated sounding, and I have been perfectly fine with starting out scratch and working myself too where I am now.

Not too complicated, a server would just need to get the inventory from a remote server rather than from a local file. Or it could be done in a serialization system like suggested above (1).

I'm very neutral to this idea. One thing I didn't notice as a possible solution to transfer inventories between servers is the use of a currency. An example:

When you leave a server you can sell your inventory for minetestcoins. When you enter a server you can buy additional inventory for minetestcoins.

That should take care of the unknown items. Also servers can choose to participate in the system.

There are of course a lot of rules possible to get a fair system working. I bet there are a lot of people loving to make those ;-)