FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

It would be great if Minetest had splitscreen support via controllers, support for custom OpenGL shaders, and possibly terrain smoothing which would make the world look a little more organic.

1) Just start Minetest two times and arrange them in a "splitscreen" with your window manager. (You would need support for 2 keyboards + mouse too, but that is possible, then each controler can take over one set of keyboard + mouse.)

2) Ehm... there are shaders, just modify them to your needs. (this is open source, remember?)

3) Why do you come to a game that has a world consisting of cubes as the basic concept and then propose a non cubic world? Doesnt make sense to me.

3) Because people old and new keep asking for it.

I do not think it would be a good idea to to make a non cubic world. If you want that, make a mod for it.

Evergreen wrote:I do not think it would be a good idea to to make a non cubic world. If you want that, make a mod for it.

But that's the whole point :P Adding angle and slope support for nodeboxes doesn't force anyone to use them, it's just there for those that do want it :-)

mauvebic wrote:3) Because people old and new keep asking for it.

That doesnt answer my question at all. Why dont people go to other games, where their vision doesnt collide with the basic idea?

Coming to Minetest and asking for a non blocky world is like going to Battlefield 3 and saying: "Meh, I dont like that violence, cant Dice just remove the weapons? The landscape is beatiful...".

PilzAdam wrote:

mauvebic wrote:3) Because people old and new keep asking for it.

That doesnt answer my question at all. Why dont people go to other games, where their vision doesnt collide with the basic idea?

Coming to Minetest and asking for a non blocky world is like going to Battlefield 3 and saying: "Meh, I dont like that violence, cant Dice just remove the weapons? The landscape is beatiful...".

You are so correct there.

Im sorry but for every feature that's proposed you either go:

A) That doesn't fit the concept of a voxel-based game
or
B) It wouldn't work on older hardware.

Then everybody sits around and wonders why Minetest can't hold onto it's players or attract as many new ones.

Minetest has a lot of potential that's held back by a few people with a strict view of what it should be. </2cents>

[edit] Why dont you join darkrose instead and work on minetest classic?

mauvebic wrote:Im sorry but for every feature that's proposed you either go:

A) That doesn't fit the concept of a voxel-based game
or
B) It wouldn't work on older hardware.

Then everybody sits around and wonders why Minetest can't hold onto it's players or attract as many new ones.

Minetest has a lot of potential that's held back by a few people with a strict view of what it should be. </2cents>

+1 Great idea. My idea is that there be two versions of minetest, both of them being cross compatible. One is for people with slow computers, the other is all the fancy effects and stuff that slow computers couldn't handle.

You don't really need seperate versions, like I said, there's Minetest Classic for those who prefer a basic experience. The rest can be handled through configs, after all, even my P4 can play certain new games so long as I set everything to their lowest values.

There is no need for separate versions. If you want to see major changes, just fork the game and work on your desires yourself. To be honest, most of your ideas will be turned down by the core team. I haven't been around much lately, but from what I've seen a lot of people get denied very easily.

InfinityProject wrote:If you want to see major changes

Thats major for you?

InfinityProject wrote:just fork the game

If I got a quarter every time someone said that, I'd have a server farm.

InfinityProject wrote:To be honest, most of your ideas will be turned down by the core team.

I know, but as you can see, im not the only one having them.

InfinityProject wrote:I haven't been around much lately, but from what I've seen a lot of people get denied very easily.

But then you get mandelboxes instead which make about as much sense, make a mod out of that.

We've all seen the pulls, it doesn't stop people from discussing ideas. Watching a Developer rip into a newbie is a particularly nice touch though.

Welcome to Minetest wburton72

I'm just saying major changes in general. I don't see these as too big.

Anyways, I really didn't want to get into this again, I was just surprised by the condescending response to wburton72's suggestions.

If we had terrain smoothing, we wouldn't be competing with MC anymore. Then we would not be a open source voxel engine.

wburton72 wrote:splitscreen support via controllers

This is actually a nice idea. Not everyone has multiple computers on a home network. It'd give it that fun oldschool videogame feel. Hell, even a lot of videogames don't even let you do that anymore. Plus it'd be a fun way to introduce Minetest to new people.

wburton72 wrote:support for custom OpenGL shaders

There are some custom shaders out there somewhere. I haven't looked into it myself. Hopefully others can be more helpful in that area.

wburton72 wrote:terrain smoothing which would make the world look a little more organic

Could you elaborate on this? I'm not sure if you just mean flatter more gentle terrain, or if you want sloped blocks like others seem to be assuming.

Thermal_Shock wrote:

wburton72 wrote:splitscreen support via controllers

This is actually a nice idea. Not everyone has multiple computers on a home network. It'd give it that fun oldschool videogame feel. Hell, even a lot of videogames don't even let you do that anymore. Plus it'd be a fun way to introduce Minetest to new people.

wburton72 wrote:support for custom OpenGL shaders

There are some custom shaders out there somewhere. I haven't looked into it myself. Hopefully others can be more helpful in that area.

wburton72 wrote:terrain smoothing which would make the world look a little more organic

Could you elaborate on this? I'm not sure if you just mean flatter more gentle terrain, or if you want sloped blocks like others seem to be assuming.

Just look at earlier posts in the topic.

Evergreen wrote:Just look at earlier posts in the topic.

In reference to what specifically?

InfinityProject wrote: just fork the game and work on your desires yourself.

Sorry, I'm too busy conducting rocket-surgery.

Thermal_Shock wrote:

Evergreen wrote:Just look at earlier posts in the topic.

In reference to what specifically?

Okay, ind address to the shaders. For example, hybrid dog has his own custom shaders. It is just a matter of changing the available shaders to your liking.

Evergreen wrote:Okay, ind address to the shaders. For example, hybrid dog has his own custom shaders. It is just a matter of changing the available shaders to your liking.

Hybrid dogs shaders weren't mentioned in any of the previous posts. Preferably one of us could have tossed out a link to the poor noob to help him out a little.

I should note that the only thing the forum search provided for me was this topic of a texture pack by Hybrid dog. From there I found his Github page. I don't see anything obvious that suggests shaders.

wburton72 wrote: [ ... ] and possibly terrain smoothing which would make the world look a little more organic.

You say 'possibly' and 'a little more' so perhaps you mean something subtle?

I feel a small degree of 'smoothing' can be suitable for the Minetest, i have been working on this in my slabrealm mod http://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?pid=85502#p85502 which creates a new realm in the atmosphere with a layer of half-voxel slabs for the less extreme terrain. Underground, caves and high rocky mountains are left full-voxel. The slabs enable walking without jumping over the less extreme terrain. The generation method is very simple and only requires a very slight increase in calculation, not a doubling as you might suspect.

I can assure you that during testing i spent hours exploring slab terrain and after a while you start to appreciate the voxels more because you have had a break from them, some variety makes you appreciate both types of terrain more, i certainly would not want to see everything smoothed to slabs.

Watching MC videos i've noticed how some add slabs to a landscape because they get fed up with constant jumping. Slabs could have a place on smooth plains and deserts to ease walking. Also, smooth flattish cube-voxel terrain tends to lose some definition which slabs bring back by adding extra contour lines.

"Marching cubes" could do it, but I don't know how that would effect anything else; I am not a coder.

http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/

I opened a bounty on controller support as well as splitscreen. See here

If, for some reason, somebody decided to contribute to the pot- 't might just become mo' attractive to complete.

Thanks for the replies!

For multiple mice, raw input could be used under windows, differentiating between different inputs by the device id, see e.g. http://www.jstookey.com/arcade/rawmouse/. Afaik, X window system supports multiple mice out of the box, just needs to be configured correctly.

marching cubes

Someone's written an engine which uses marching cubes to draw the voxels:
http://procworld.blogspot.de/2013/05/going-off-grid.html
http://procworld.blogspot.de/2013/01/dont-be-square.html
Looks great, doesn't it? :)

Of course, the method used is a bit more complex than the standard marching cubes algorithm...
http://procworld.blogspot.de/2010/11/from-voxels-to-polygons.html

Exilyth wrote:For multiple mice, raw input could be used under windows, differentiating between different inputs by the device id, see e.g. http://www.jstookey.com/arcade/rawmouse/. Afaik, X window system supports multiple mice out of the box, just needs to be configured correctly.

marching cubes

Someone's written an engine which uses marching cubes to draw the voxels:
http://procworld.blogspot.de/2013/05/going-off-grid.html
http://procworld.blogspot.de/2013/01/dont-be-square.html
Looks great, doesn't it? :)

Of course, the method used is a bit more complex than the standard marching cubes algorithm...
http://procworld.blogspot.de/2010/11/from-voxels-to-polygons.html

is there a ubuntu alternative?
-[edit]-
found it http://alec.mooo.com/mpx.html but the mice don't work perfectly but worth a shot