FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Modders: Give feedback to the core developers (including me)

• Modders mean those who make subgames or individual mods.
• The engine's purpose is largely to provide a good platform for the content that runs on it, be it subgames or individual mods, and one of the first steps in figuring out what features to add is to hear about what modders would imagine having use for.

From celeron's roadmap.

If no one else does I'd like to start:
For modding I don't know of many features to be added, instead it would offer much more freedom if more engine side definitions and behaviors could be changed. As an example, at the moment it is only possible with ugly hacks to determine when a player ate something. An option to disable drowning would be nice, overriding all liquids to "drowning = 0" feels wrong and does not work for mods loaded afterwards. For almost everything an option to disable it would be usefull, both for subgames and for server. A server on small hardware could just disable mapgen, one thats gets spamed often could disable doping of items.
Being able to tweak everything might not be obviously useful for every detail, but in special cases someone will find a perfect use for it. For my subgame it would be perfect if I could set the number of items the middle click takes/places to nine. The thing is, the more variety the engine offers the more different mods and subgames there will be.
Especially for node definitions I think that every small extra option results in an exponential more freedom for modders.

For subgames there is an issue the modders them selfs have to address. All the "old" mods are written for minetest_game. And with the first release that will contain serveral subgames many mods will occur which will only work for some special games.
I think there should be some kind of standardization and consensus on how to name mods in the subgame (e.g. only use "default" when it share many content with the "default" of minetest_game), and whether minetest_game should be the reference or something else.

@celeron
"The other logical extension [beside VAE] is making things buildable in finer detail"
In fact, when the VAE would be scalable then it could be possible to do that. You could create a voxel area that is the total size of one node but contains 8x8x8 nodes in itself. Or did I misunderstood the concept?

Casimir wrote:@celeron
"The other logical extension [beside VAE] is making things buildable in finer detail"
In fact, when the VAE would be scalable then it could be possible to do that. You could create a voxel area that is the total size of one node but contains 8x8x8 nodes in itself. Or did I misunderstood the concept?

I don't intend to enable scaling of VAEs, and what you said would be insanely resource hungry if it was possible. Well, I guess some people will insist on using it anyway, whatever. But doing that will for sure create problems that won't be solved.

Thanks Casimir for starting.

When I read celeron55's post something I encountered came back into my mind. Afaik ABM's keep going once put on. If that's really true (not my lack of knowledge), I would like to see the possibilities to shut them off and on later in the game, after meeting a condition, paired with the computers internal clock or connected with the minetest-time.


Edit: Typo.

Topywo wrote:Thanks Casimir for starting.

When I read celeron55's post something I encountered came back into my mind. Afaik ABM's keep going once put on. If that's really true (not my lack of knowledge), I would like to see the possibilities to shut them off and on later in the game, after meeting a condition, paired with the computers internal clock or connected with the minetest-time.


Edit: Typo.

+1000
That would be awesome!

Yes, it is true that abm's continue to execute as long as the node is in existence. However, it is possible to have a slightly hacky way around it. Either have the abm start with a logic statement asking if a condition is met, and break otherwise, or just replace the node at the end of the abm to shut it off completely.

HeroOfTheWinds wrote:Yes, it is true that abm's continue to execute as long as the node is in existence. However, it is possible to have a slightly hacky way around it. Either have the abm start with a logic statement asking if a condition is met, and break otherwise, or just replace the node at the end of the abm to shut it off completely.

Okay, thanks, I wasn't 100% sure. But then after starting the ABM will be 'unstoppable'. Shutting the ABM off by replacing the node is indeed very helpful. After paining my brain I used it in the sea-modpack.

So theoretically you could start a new ABM by packing your mod with ABM's and different conditions, combined with replacing the 'triggers'.

It would take about 5 minutes to fix this food eat thing you suggest. I can do it tomorrow.

rubenwardy wrote:It would take about 5 minutes to fix this food eat thing you suggest. I can do it tomorrow.

That would be nice.

Topywo wrote:I would like to see the possibilities to shut them (edit:ABM's) off and on later in the game, after meeting a condition, paired with the computers internal clock or connected with the minetest-time.

Some more ABM related wishes and again I'm not sure if it's a lack of knowledge or really not possible atm:

- If I would have been able to, I would have used sometimes negative comparisons for the neighbors, something like:
neighbors = ! {"group:cracky} or neigbors = not {"default:glass"} or
notneighbours = { }

- AfaIk neighbors work for every 1 node around the specified node. Is it possibble to:
1. extend the range (with 1, 2 or whatever a modder would need)
2. give it more detail, like x neighbors, y neighbors and z neighbors (and a possibility to extend the range)


I think that there are workarounds possible for those wishes, like HeroOfTheWinds mentioned earlier, but they result for me in too much code.



Edit: Typo and something I thought of later.

Per celeron55's list, I urgently would like to see someone implement the threading model for lua based mapgens. The current approach lags too much once you get more than a few people moving in different directions on games that use lua mapgen.

I would like to see an option that would make it so name tags do not show through nodes, that would make it possible for people to hide.

BrandonReese wrote:I would like to see an option that would make it so name tags do not show through nodes, that would make it possible for people to hide.

No, I wouldn't like that :P But some kind of "hide my online status" would be interesting ;)

webdesigner97 wrote:

BrandonReese wrote:I would like to see an option that would make it so name tags do not show through nodes, that would make it possible for people to hide.

No, I wouldn't like that :P But some kind of "hide my online status" would be interesting ;)

That's why it would be an option. I think it should be a server option. It's necessary for survival pvp servers.

BrandonReese wrote:

webdesigner97 wrote:

BrandonReese wrote:I would like to see an option that would make it so name tags do not show through nodes, that would make it possible for people to hide.

No, I wouldn't like that :P But some kind of "hide my online status" would be interesting ;)

That's why it would be an option. I think it should be a server option. It's necessary for survival pvp servers.

I think you can disable name tags completely in minetest.conf...

BrandonReese wrote:I would like to see an option that would make it so name tags do not show through nodes, that would make it possible for people to hide.

Ah, I see a little game of "hide and seek" here or add a customized version of the banhammer and some sort of safe-area mod and you get some "catch me if you can" or "clippo" or whatever name these simple games have.
That might be even fun to use in some school project to have some first training of moving the character in the game.

Finally! Thank you.
Now that this wish was granted I'm 100% satisfied.

Casimir wrote:Finally! Thank you.
Now that this wish was granted I'm 100% satisfied.

You are welcome. It didn't take that long, as expected.

minetest.register_on_dieplayer ought to pass on what exactly killed the player.

The already suggested option to disable/rewrite an existing abm would also be nice.

As far as mods are concerned, most of them need the actual nodes/craftitems etc. from minetest_game. New things are crafted from exsisting ones - there has to be some common base (not each mod wants to spawn its own materials). It helps if this base is larger (flowers, dye, wool, vessels, buckets, stairs, ..). Perhaps new subgames ought to supply compatibility mods for such situations.

I spent a lot of time to add showformspec_callback(in lua actually) and there are some ways like it made stu but this method need to name all entities.
Entity show formspec callback would be a nice feature for Helicopter, Cars, NPC and Meshnode mods.

Also get_id() function will make easy to create entity inventory.

webdesigner97 wrote:I think you can disable name tags completely in minetest.conf...

No, you can only hide them if they are far away.

Calinou wrote:

webdesigner97 wrote:I think you can disable name tags completely in minetest.conf...

No, you can only hide them if they are far away.

But how is far away defined?

I think it is ~50 blocks.

Amaz wrote:I think it is ~50 blocks.

The sounds like low hanging fruit that could (and should) be easily fixed.

A different issue: with the alternative minetest games it isn't clear what map generation each is compatible with. It would be a good with if the game could specify which mapgen it is compatible with and the new world creator dialogs showed only those generators in the drop down selector.

spillz wrote:

Amaz wrote:I think it is ~50 blocks.

The sounds like low hanging fruit that could (and should) be easily fixed.

A different issue: with the alternative minetest games it isn't clear what map generation each is compatible with. It would be a good with if the game could specify which mapgen it is compatible with and the new world creator dialogs showed only those generators in the drop down selector.

I believe lua mapgens can override your selection in the create dialog

Pavel_S wrote:Also get_id() function will make easy to create entity inventory.

Good idea. When writing my traders, I found it annyoing that I had to come up with my own uniq_id function for them. Reliable uniq id's for entities would be helpful. Such things are better done in a library than in each mod individually.

BrandonReese wrote:

spillz wrote:

Amaz wrote:I think it is ~50 blocks.

The sounds like low hanging fruit that could (and should) be easily fixed.

A different issue: with the alternative minetest games it isn't clear what map generation each is compatible with. It would be a good with if the game could specify which mapgen it is compatible with and the new world creator dialogs showed only those generators in the drop down selector.

I believe lua mapgens can override your selection in the create dialog

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

minetest.set_mapgen_params({mgname="singlenode", flags="nolight"})


But that's not really a solution. The game shouldn't be displaying options that either have no effect or are incompatible.

I think being able to directly control player velocity would be nice. (portal anyone?)

Evergreen wrote:I think being able to directly control player velocity would be nice. (portal anyone?)

JetPack, wind pushing?

Pavel_S wrote:

Evergreen wrote:I think being able to directly control player velocity would be nice. (portal anyone?)

JetPack, wind pushing?

Water pushing also