FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hello there,

I wonder why some "mods" as "[Mod] exchange / replace nodes with one click (replace)" is found in "Modding General" section of the forum instead of being in the "Mod releases" section. Why not move?

Thanks

The owner did not request that they be moved. Either they are not finished or the owner forgot. Or it failed the moving criteria (wrong title, no download, etc).

In this particular case: Forgot to ask for the move. I place my mods in modding general, maintain them when needed (and when I have time - thankfully, several other people already contributed), extend them when new ideas show up - but almost never remember to ask for the move of the thread. The diffrent categories of the forum do not have much meaning for me as I always read the new posts regardless where they are - and otherwise curse about the forum's search function or consult my bookmark list.

The replacer is definitely a mod that can be used on servers as well as on singleplayer. In fact, I expect it to be installed on servers where I want to built - because it makes handling of stairsplus-nodes so much easier.

Apart from that, several mods need new pictures. I still have them on disk, but the first upload service I used went down - and then the second one did as well. Which is very annoying as it is quite some work to locate the right pictures, upload them again and adjust the path in the posting. For some mods, I've used the MMDB as storage for the images. Perhaps the Minetest wiki might do as well. Normal image hosters usually don't work because they require JavaScript - which I won't enable for them.

Currently, I'm trying to add a mod list based on category to the Minetest wiki. So far, I've only managed pages 15-19 (relatively old mods in modding general). The process definitely needs optimization.

Hello there,

yes, it is hard to find mods in 3 sections. A database with the updated dates and the version of "minetest" would be nice.

balthazariv wrote:yes, it is hard to find mods in 3 sections.

It's even hard if you know roughly what you're looking for, who wrote it, and how the mod is named. Sometimes google or github may help.

balthazariv wrote: A database with the updated dates and the version of "minetest" would be nice.

Most mods are less dependant on the version of Minetest than one might think. Some are outdated simply because the engine (or the default game) now either include the functionality the mod provided, or made it otherwise less needed. So don't let an old date stop you from using a mod you're intrested in. They don't attract rust :)

Hello,

Sokomine wrote:It's even hard if you know roughly what you're looking for, who wrote it, and how the mod is named.

Adding "List all mods posted by this user" with the values ​​in the complete list of members could help in the search.

balthazariv wrote:Adding "List all mods posted by this user" with the values ​​in the complete list of members could help in the search.

There's supposed to be such a link in the user's profile - unfortionately only if you use the default theme. As that's too bright for me, I don't have that link :-(

yeah found the solution!

i know now how to find all mods of a user in the minetest bord:
view all my mods!

Side Note: The migrating of the old Forum to phpbb has broke the search index. so only mods displayed wich titlepost is createted or edited after that.
solution: just click the edit button and the submit button to refresch search index



eg:
view all of Sokomines Mods
view all of BlockMens Mods

Hello,
This is not really complete.

Your test with the name Sokomine here
Testing with the view profile Sokomine then "List all mods posted by this user" here
And Sokomine that his mods list : here

It does not have the same results.

Seems like the forum does not search in the full topic-history, which is a bit annoying.

I see that only the mods placed in the "Mod Releases" section appear in "List all mods posted by this user" to view the profile. Those in the other sections are ignored.

Krock wrote:Seems like the forum does not search in the full topic-history, which is a bit annoying.

yes, all topics from the old board wich are migrated, are not in the search index.
they must just edited and saved again, than they are indexed.

balthazariv wrote:I see that only the mods placed in the "Mod Releases" section appear in "List all mods posted by this user" to view the profile. Those in the other sections are ignored.

where have you that link in the user Profile?
i see there nothing.

In the special functions

I does not have that special functions...

is somewhere a checkbox to activate them first?

I don't know.
It's been like that since my registration.
I just watched but I have not found.

You need the Minetest theme.

rubenwardy wrote:You need the Minetest theme.

do you make jokes? theme is design only, not functionality.

edit: WTF your right!

dont know whats broken here... who is the admin of this Board?

but i think ill never use the minetest theme, bacause its too bright, too less contrast and its missing features.

You can find it in User Control Panel \ Board Preferences \ Edit global settings \
My board style.

And now you can select "Minetest theme" or "Prosilver".

balthazariv wrote:You can find it in User Control Panel \ Board Preferences \ Edit global settings \
My board style.

And now you can select "Minetest theme" or "Prosilver".

yes, i know

addi wrote:but i think ill never use the minetest theme, bacause its too bright, too less contrast and its missing features.

addi wrote:do you make jokes? theme is design only, not functionality.
edit: WTF your right!
dont know whats broken here... who is the admin of this Board?
but i think ill never use the minetest theme, bacause its too bright, too less contrast and its missing features.

Celeron55 added the link to the Minetest theme upon complaints about the search function of the board. He said he wasn't willing to maintain more than one board style :-(

sad :-(

I'm in favor of organizing list(s) of mods on the wiki rather than using forum sections. Wikis are much better for that sort of thing. Each mod can certainly link to a forum thread for purposes of discussion, if the wiki discussion page isn't up to the task.

prestidigitator wrote:I'm in favor of organizing list(s) of mods on the wiki rather than using forum sections. Wikis are much better for that sort of thing. Each mod can certainly link to a forum thread for purposes of discussion, if the wiki discussion page isn't up to the task.

I've started that list of categories and the first entries because I think the same. When I search for a mod, I roughly know what I want - sometimes even the mod names - but actually finding them in the forum is very difficult.

The list of the categories didn't progress any further yet due to the amount of work it is. There are a lot of mods out there! Creating each entry manually does take a bit of time as it has to involve a surface check weather the mod is still current and can be downloaded. After that, it's cut&paste to get the wiki entry. That cut&paste process needs optimization.

MMDB would be better than the wiki if it actually worked and was improved to at least have the functionality of "Minetest Extensions". (Minetest Extensions is the project that MMDB was based on / inspired by. It is in PHP rather than Python. I wrote it to learn about SQL, so it had an ugly code style.)

rubenwardy wrote:MMDB would be better than the wiki if it actually worked and was improved to at least have the functionality of "Minetest Extensions". (Minetest Extensions is the project that MMDB was based on / inspired by. It is in PHP rather than Python.

I've wished for automatic entries in MMDB as well for quite some time now. Even then, there will be one problem remaining: The sheer quantitude of mods. MMDB isn't designed to handle hundreds of mods - at least not the way it's designed right now. As long as mods have to be entered manually, very few will show up there, and players still have a chance of scrolling through. With all mods listed, there'll be a need for categories.

The current review system is of limited use. Few people write reviews. Perhaps listing which *games* use a particular mod might be more helpful. That could be done automaticly to a degree.

I would like to develop MMDB further, but I can't do that until iqualfragile makes his fixes. I could just do it anyway, but there would be a lot of conflicts to resolve if we change it independently.

Apparently it's down now, so I can't check. But last time I did, MMDB allowed proprietary licenses. I think this is a bad policy. It makes recommending Minetest problematic for those of us who advocate free/libre software, because while Minetest itself might be libre, it would be happy to recommend non-libre software if it were uploaded to there. That no one seems to care about this problem[1] kind of makes me glad that MMDB is failing to catch on.

I seem to recall that MMDB also fails to distinguish between the license of the software (Lua code) and the license of the textures.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/iqualfragile/mmdb ... explicitly

New people who are inexperienced regarding Minetest and just want to use it don't care about the liscence as long as they can use the mod. That ought to be no problem with any mod in the forum or database. As soon as someone gains intrest in modding and wants to change a particular mod, it's not beyound reason to assume that people in such a case might read the forum thread.

Sokomine wrote:

rubenwardy wrote:MMDB would be better than the wiki if it actually worked and was improved to at least have the functionality of "Minetest Extensions". (Minetest Extensions is the project that MMDB was based on / inspired by. It is in PHP rather than Python.

I've wished for automatic entries in MMDB as well for quite some time now. Even then, there will be one problem remaining: The sheer quantitude of mods. MMDB isn't designed to handle hundreds of mods - at least not the way it's designed right now. As long as mods have to be entered manually, very few will show up there, and players still have a chance of scrolling through. With all mods listed, there'll be a need for categories.

The current review system is of limited use. Few people write reviews. Perhaps listing which *games* use a particular mod might be more helpful. That could be done automaticly to a degree.

Since we're bringing up MMDB, I should probably mention something I tried working on before:

• https://github.com/ExcaliburZero/minetest-mod-recorder
• https://github.com/ExcaliburZero/minetest-mod-recorder/tree/gh-pages

My idea was to use a python script to create a database file of sorts to store some basic info on mods, and then categorize them by the type of mod they were. Then another script would generate an html file out of the database file. While the project it's self may not be of much use, the conecpts behind it may help.

First, the system involved a person, or persons adding in the mods, thus freeing the restiction of only having the creator of the mod being able to add their mod.

Second, exact guidelines for the categorization of mods became a bit difficult to get straightened out, but bellow are the guidelines that were created for the project. The guidelines sytem the project used allowed mods to be classified under multiple categories, thus all that were applicable to the mod. While the individual guidelines could likely use some tweaking, I'd reccomend loking over them to see if it can help with the creation of a better categorization system.

• https://github.com/ExcaliburZero/minetest-mod-recorder/blob/master/categorization_standards.md

Third, with some mods there are a bit unusal circumstances which make entering them into a system a bit difficult. While many mods depend on "default", not all of the mods that do so list such in the "depeds.txt" file, which could make determining the exact dependiencies of a mod a little more time consuming, as one would need to make sure that the mod in question doesn't truely depend on "default". Also, some mods use GitHub to store the code of the mod, which makes having some type of GitHub connectivity a good thing to add, however one should note that many mods do not use GitHub, and a few use other git repo storage sites like Gitorious.

Fourth, for mods, when it comes to licensing it can get a bit complicated. While some mods use on license outright for the entire mod, others have on license for the code, one for the textures, one fo the models, etc.. So it may not be a good idea to try to get and display the license of a mod, as there is not always just one license for a mod.

I don't know how much this info will help this discussion, but hopefully it might contribute a bit to the discussion.

Added to multiple categories? What, like wiki category tags or something? :-P