FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hi.

I have seen a video of a Minetest newbie who accidently and without noticing hit the F4 key during the game session (I knew it because it was shown on his screen) and became confused since the world around him did not get (render) updates anymore. He became confused by this and thought this is a bug in Minetest. He then restarted the world and everything went to normal.

I don’t know where to find this video again but I think you get the idea.

This can be confusing and frustating for newbies. They may get frustrated because they think they see an unloaded area which never loads. They get confused because they can walk into the seemingly unloaded areas.

Probably some other newbies got confused by this, too. In my early Minetest days, it occoured to me, too.

This feature is only really useful for developers; for normal players it is most the time the opposite of useful. ;-)

I therefore suggest to remove this key-binding (not the feature!) by default and it should only work if it has been explicitly enabled in the settings. If not, pressing F4 should do nothing.

I suggest this in the name of newbie-friendlyness.

Or maybe make the "Camera update disabled" message permanent (same could apply to the "Full view range" option).

Well, if you hit random keys on your keyboard then random things will happen.

I say keep it. When you have a lot of lag this would be helpful if you are only playing with the already rendered area.

PilzAdam wrote:Well, if you hit random keys on your keyboard then random things will happen.

Reading comprehension is not very strong with this one.

Wuzzy wrote:and without noticing hit the F4 key during the game session

He didn't "hit random keys". He accidentally pressed F4. The game should forgive those little mistakes. The game should not, i.e., destroy your world just because you pressed a wrong key. This is not the same, but you get the point, right?

Calinou wrote:Or maybe make the "Camera update disabled" message permanent (same could apply to the "Full view range" option).

This is a nice suggestion, too.

Calinou wrote:Or maybe make the "Camera update disabled" message permanent (same could apply to the "Full view range" option).

Nah becasue that would ruin let's plays. THough maybe Minetest could have an ingame options menu that changes those things to on and off.

Another thing is, as I first stumpled upon the “camera update” stuff, I had no clue what “camera update” was supposed to mean. I hit F4 on purpose, I read the text and I thought “Hmm, this apparently does nothing. And I don’t know what ‘camera update disabled’ means. It’s best to keep it enabled.”. So I enabled it again. Later I discovered the purpose of this feature more or less by chance—I don’t know how exactly but it was definately not due to the non-helpful description.

When I think about it, “camera update” is also rather vague; it could mean basicly anything. It could be interpreted as camera position update, as LOD update (?), as viewing distance update, as whatever update. Clearly something about the camera gets updated but the text doesn’t say what exactly.

So the option should be reworded, too.

Calinou wrote:Or maybe make the "Camera update disabled" message permanent (same could apply to the "Full view range" option).

This is just a pseudo-compromise and I stick with my suggestion to disable the keybinding by default.
Again: This feature is never needed by people who just want to play Minetest. Even worse, from a newbie-point of view, it just breaks the game.

For all the people who need this feature/key binding the only thing they would have to do is to re-enable it. Or even better, just disable it by default in the release builds.

I think release builds should generally be kept clean from debug stuff (by default) but that’s a different beast.

Hybrid Dog wrote:

jojoa1997 wrote:

Calinou wrote:Or maybe make the "Camera update disabled" message permanent (same could apply to the "Full view range" option).

Nah becasue that would ruin let's plays. THough maybe Minetest could have an ingame options menu that changes those things to on and off.

I don't think minetest is made for let's plays for people who don't know enough about it.

Forget what i said about let's plays.

IMHO it should be disabled by defautl, or get a more descriptive description.

Maybe something like "diasble drawing of updated blocks" or so.