Please make Minetest more logical in the future.

[angjinhang]

Hi everyone. I have played Minetest 0.4.9 for a couple of days and found out that something is illogical and should be fixed. I know that something should be 'illogical' in order to be called as a game, but these things are a little too much...

1. In multiplayer mode, two players should bump into each other but not just 'pass through' them. This looks like ghost.

2. When a player is holding a torch, he or she should not be able to dig, and the torch should shine, too, as the torch's light source is fire, it is impossible to prevent the fire from glowing.

3. Something that is fully floating in the air (such as a half-cut tree) should fall down but not stay floating in the air, as most of the things in the game are subject to gravity.

4. Items in water should fall a lot slower than on normal land, as the player falls down very very slowly, too.

5. According to the nodes, they should change when destroyed, such as glass should turn into glass fragments.

6. When blocks in water are destroyed, water should fill in immediately but not slowly flowing up. Freakin' illogical as water never fills up empty space that slow.

7. When a player walks through a torch, he or she should get burned a little, and torches can be used as a weapon.

8. Trees should grow slowly instead of 'zoom' into a big tree in a blink.

And that's all I found. Hope it can get fixed!

[Krock]

1) Horray! Pushing guys over a cliff!
2) Shining portable things are extremely "hacky" and require server and client speed
3) A realistic gravity and stability is hard to simulate, try gravel and sand
4) Ehm yes...
5) No, we love the current glass -> glass and stone -> cobble digs, you don't break glass, you only take it away (cracky images are wrong at that place)
6) Depends on server speed (but don't you think, it's unrealistic how soo much water can flow out of 1 node?) ^^
7) Torches have a too easy crafting recipe, not a good weapon
8) I like the current 'plopping' effect... nothing's gonna change (I hope)

[Pitriss]

Hi everyone. I have played Minetest 0.4.9 for a couple of days and found out that something is illogical and should be fixed. I know that something should be 'illogical' in order to be called as a game, but these things are a little too much...

1. In multiplayer mode, two players should bump into each other but not just 'pass through' them. This looks like ghost.

2. When a player is holding a torch, he or she should not be able to dig, and the torch should shine, too, as the torch's light source is fire, it is impossible to prevent the fire from glowing.

3. Something that is fully floating in the air (such as a half-cut tree) should fall down but not stay floating in the air, as most of the things in the game are subject to gravity.

4. Items in water should fall a lot slower than on normal land, as the player falls down very very slowly, too.

5. According to the nodes, they should change when destroyed, such as glass should turn into glass fragments.

6. When blocks in water are destroyed, water should fill in immediately but not slowly flowing up. Freakin' illogical as water never fills up empty space that slow.

7. When a player walks through a torch, he or she should get burned a little, and torches can be used as a weapon.

8. Trees should grow slowly instead of 'zoom' into a big tree in a blink.

And that's all I found. Hope it can get fixed!

If you want more realistic, gravity based game, pay for http://www.buildaworld.net/.

To be honest, I love Minetest just as is, with "ghosty" players, without gravity (yeah my tower will not fall when I want to rebuild bottom part) and with slow water just to be playable on slower machines..

[angjinhang]

Awww. Never pay for a game, that's what my friends and I always agree. But I think that something Minetest should change for minimal bandwidth usage. Actually client speed isn't a big issue. I can have Minetest running smoothly on my laptop bought in 2006.

For bandwidth, Minetest should try to build as much things as it can on the client side. Just a simple string below 1 kb can do more things if it is being used efficiently. Like for mobs, the minimal bandwidth that is used is just below 0.5kb every second[1], and it won't lag much.

Yes, slower animations work well on old computers, but it makes a strange look.

Oops I missed out it. Infinite water is really strange. I have imagined that if I put water on top of my room, then my room will be filled with water.

Gravel and sand really fall down (the main reason I hate mining because gravel fall down a lot and disturb the mining progress...

Yep i rechecked the recipe and it is really too simple, but in real life you can use it to murder someone.

Oh the cracky images. They really sucks. Just don't understand why cracked tree trunks can recover in a blink of my eye. But looks like they are no more suitable animations for this...

[1] This is only my imagination. Correct me if I am wrong.

[aldobr]

Most of the things you want are very computer intensive and requires a lot of code to make work. Its simply not worth it (there are mods that do some of the things you want, but i believe that if all were activated together, game would become unplayable).

Its easy to ask for something without grasping the technical concepts.

For one, i believe forcing the tree to fall when cut would be incredible costly in terms of cpu processing. It would need an ABM for checking if the node is over empty air, plus logic to make everything come down together... etc.

Its not impossible, just not a priority, considering other more important factors...

[Topywo]

4. Items in water should fall a lot slower than on normal land, as the player falls down very very slowly, too.

In minetest.conf.example I see this:
# Physics stuff

#movement_liquid_fluidity = 1
#movement_liquid_fluidity_smooth = 0.5
#movement_liquid_sink = 10

Maybe putting those and changing them in your minetest.conf can help you.

[rubenwardy]

You want a voxel game to be "more logical"?

[kaeza]

1. In multiplayer mode, two players should bump into each other but not just 'pass through' them. This looks like ghost.

Pool's closed.

[hoodedice]

Hi everyone. I have played Minetest 0.4.9 for a couple of days and found out that something is illogical and should be fixed. I know that something should be 'illogical' in order to be called as a game, but these things are a little too much...

1. In multiplayer mode, two players should bump into each other but not just 'pass through' them. This looks like ghost.

2. When a player is holding a torch, he or she should not be able to dig, and the torch should shine, too, as the torch's light source is fire, it is impossible to prevent the fire from glowing.

3. Something that is fully floating in the air (such as a half-cut tree) should fall down but not stay floating in the air, as most of the things in the game are subject to gravity.

4. Items in water should fall a lot slower than on normal land, as the player falls down very very slowly, too.

5. According to the nodes, they should change when destroyed, such as glass should turn into glass fragments.

6. When blocks in water are destroyed, water should fill in immediately but not slowly flowing up. Freakin' illogical as water never fills up empty space that slow.

7. When a player walks through a torch, he or she should get burned a little, and torches can be used as a weapon.

8. Trees should grow slowly instead of 'zoom' into a big tree in a blink.

And that's all I found. Hope it can get fixed!

If you find any game, ANY game, that has all the above features, yet runs playably at 15 fps or more on a dual-core laptop with intel graphics... I'll give you $10. Siriusly.

Minetest aims to be playable on crappy rigs. If you want those features, mod em!

[proller]

6. liquid_finite = 1

[webdesigner97]

Hi everyone. I have played Minetest 0.4.9 for a couple of days and found out that something is illogical and should be fixed. I know that something should be 'illogical' in order to be called as a game, but these things are a little too much...

1. In multiplayer mode, two players should bump into each other but not just 'pass through' them. This looks like ghost.

2. When a player is holding a torch, he or she should not be able to dig, and the torch should shine, too, as the torch's light source is fire, it is impossible to prevent the fire from glowing.

3. Something that is fully floating in the air (such as a half-cut tree) should fall down but not stay floating in the air, as most of the things in the game are subject to gravity.

4. Items in water should fall a lot slower than on normal land, as the player falls down very very slowly, too.

5. According to the nodes, they should change when destroyed, such as glass should turn into glass fragments.

6. When blocks in water are destroyed, water should fill in immediately but not slowly flowing up. Freakin' illogical as water never fills up empty space that slow.

7. When a player walks through a torch, he or she should get burned a little, and torches can be used as a weapon.

8. Trees should grow slowly instead of 'zoom' into a big tree in a blink.

And that's all I found. Hope it can get fixed!

If you want more realistic, gravity based game, pay for http://www.buildaworld.net/.

To be honest, I love Minetest just as is, with "ghosty" players, without gravity (yeah my tower will not fall when I want to rebuild bottom part) and with slow water just to be playable on slower machines..

This is something I always wanted, because I really live (virtual)(non-griefing) demolition of stuff.

[hoodedice]

Indeed. And that's why we didn't add them into the game. Because it would be laggy.

[sfan5]

...Because it would be laggy.

Shaders are laggy, too, so there's a setting for it.

You mean like writing the shader in C++?

[rubenwardy]

...Because it would be laggy.

Shaders are laggy, too, so there's a setting for it. If you write the code into c++, it would lag less and if you add a setting for it, the lag wouldn't need to be enabled.

Shaders don't lag, they lower the frame rate. This distinction is quite important.

[PilzAdam]

The term "logical" is quite misleading, what you want to say is "realistic".
Games can have their own logic, that doesnt need to be the same as the real world has.

[hoodedice]

Well, shaders and mobs are completely seperate and distinct, and you really cannot compare them to one another. Shaders lag (lower fps) when you don't have a proper graphics card, or when there is a CPU vs GPU bottleneck. Mobs don't rely on GPU computing power, so to increase mob speed, you need either a faster computing processor or better code. Now you may ask, how can this code be optimized? Well, again there are two ways - Just optimizing it, or using a more lower-level language, like C++. Again, look at all the things OP has mentioned:

1. This is currently not possible as everything related to the actual representation of the player in the in-game world is VERY hacky. Everything from 3dskins, the 3D model, the camera, BlockMen's 3rd person camera, is hacky and causes low fps because the underlying code is not well-optimized. At this rate, adding collision boxes will further increase server lag. Plus, this will also decrease fps count for the extra physics computations. Also, "Pool's closed" (Thank you kaeza).

2. There is indeed a mod for this, but it is very hacky. The problems ranged from multiple light sources being placed due to the infamous entity dupe. This was fixed, both on the mod and core engine sides. However, "not possible to dig" is not a very important feature, and is one that can be overlooked.

3. Download and run the nuke mod on a test world. BEWARE, it may destroy your world if you run it in a wrong way. Now, see the amount of time that passes between the nuke drop and the destruction to occur and the explosion sound. The time lag is very visible. Why? Because, first random nukes are spawned, dropped, then a sorta complex calculation is carried out ( I haven't seen the code, but I guess the program generates a sphere of random radius between a set of values and removes each block that is within that sphere, and then plays a sound). Again, any mod that places, or removes, or modifies a large group of blocks at the same time is bound to be laggy, because it is a big process. Now, consider you made a 15-storey building. Let's assume, it has 1000 blocks per storey, so 15000 blocks in total. Let's remove the first storey. So, we now have 14000 blocks hanging in mid-air. Now, each of these block has to travel maybe, 200 blocks to reach down. So we are moving 14000 blocks down 200 metres. Imagine how complex the calculation will become. And if the removal isn't neat, if there are jagged edges in the rows of blocks on the first storey, each block is now moving a different distance to come to rest. If you add weight-based destruction to it, then the added calculation for the stress on each block caused by all the upper blocks will be an added calculation.
However, like I've said before in a different context on a different post, this doesn't mean that this hasn't been done before. Everything is possible, except the results won't be how you might want it. In Ace of Spades, blocks have been given gravity, except that in this case, the blocks without support with form a new node with a mesh resembling their orientation, but not exactly look like them. This mesh will fall to the ground and break. In this case, all the resultant blocks are lost.

4. Items in any sort of fluid mass are unaffected by gravity (in-game). They all fall down fast. However, the player is not an item, so we have a custom descent rate for the guy. I think this can be done without much operating overhead, however it will make the game much more less-realistic, ironically, because in real life, any solid item will sink much faster than you in water.

5. This can also be done without much overhead. However, this might not be in the scope of gameplay for minetest_game. I suggest you mod it.

6. Switch on finite water, set to 0.2 in minetest.conf

7. Again possible. Mod it!

8. Mod it!


Most of the stuff which OP highlighted are easily moddable. However, the role of minetest (engine) is to provide a common core on which more games can be built. Features won't be added to said engine unless it is very necessary to do so. Because this core is common, every minetest subgame (Oh no I used the word!) relies on it and if it becomes laggy, every subgame will become laggy too, even if they don't ship with laggy mods. Minetest is a DIYOWF (Do It Yourself Or With Friends) game. Every open-source game is like such. If you really harken for realism, you really shouldn't be playing this anyway =D Flightgear or Rigs of Rods, or even Speed Dreams may be good for you.

[onpon4]

Actually, I can think of only one change for realism I would be in favor of: make the player float, rather than sink, in the water. Realistic for most humans (unless you're particularly muscular and skinny, you will naturally float), but I think it would be better in particular because swimming is annoying when you have to hold down the space bar perpetually, and there just aren't any occasions where you want to walk on the sea floor.

[Enke]

The only thing I can say about the suggestions are: If you can code them, go right ahead.

Actually, I can think of only one change for realism I would be in favor of: make the player float, rather than sink, in the water. Realistic for most humans (unless you're particularly muscular and skinny, you will naturally float), but I think it would be better in particular because swimming is annoying when you have to hold down the space bar perpetually, and there just aren't any occasions where you want to walk on the sea floor.

Yeah. Maybe we could have a feature where you select whether you are inclined to float or sink when you swim. Being naturally skinny, I sink like a rock, so swimming always felt right for me, but I can see where you are coming from.

[hoodedice]

Actually, I can think of only one change for realism I would be in favor of: make the player float, rather than sink, in the water. Realistic for most humans (unless you're particularly muscular and skinny, you will naturally float), but I think it would be better in particular because swimming is annoying when you have to hold down the space bar perpetually, and there just aren't any occasions where you want to walk on the sea floor.

Grats - 400th post =D

[Enke]

I don't think it's really different to calculate falling node structures.

Well, even if it wasn't terribly laggy, imagine this on a server with several players, nodes being broken, commands being used, etc.. It would become so unbearably bad that it just doesn't make sense to implement it, especially with the devs' focus on speed.

[hoodedice]

USE THE NUKE MOD. Then come back and tell me how easy it is to calculate.

Sorry to be rude, but, we do have limitations here. Try out the nuke mod, and you'll find out why calculation for node manip is so hard. With the LuaVoxelManip, doing this has been sped up, however, I have not tested this with any form of node manip other than the mapgen. The results of the mapgen outcome are well-known. However, no one has of yet used it in a mod.

[Sokomine]

It would also - apart from the speed issue - be pretty difficult to determine weather a node ought to fall down or not. You wouldn't want the roof of your house collapse on you. They usually don't do that. And taking static into account might be extremly intresting on one level but also rather less helpful for the gameplay.

[twoelk]

I don't think it's really different to calculate falling node structures.

everything might be possible, it just might be more performance expensive than it's worth. The problem wouldn't be the calculation of the movement and graphic display of the falling of a single block but rather the shear amount of single individuall instances, each a little different, this could quickly add up to.

As a comment to the tree problem, I guess minetest would need to store information about each tree as individual object in some big table, to decide for example when it grows which parts belong to the growing tree and not its neighbour so the tree nodes of this tree and only this tree can be deleted and replaced by a somewhat larger model.

[GingerHunter797]

Hi everyone. I have played Minetest 0.4.9 for a couple of days and found out that something is illogical and should be fixed. I know that something should be 'illogical' in order to be called as a game, but these things are a little too much...

1. In multiplayer mode, two players should bump into each other but not just 'pass through' them. This looks like ghost.

2. When a player is holding a torch, he or she should not be able to dig, and the torch should shine, too, as the torch's light source is fire, it is impossible to prevent the fire from glowing.

3. Something that is fully floating in the air (such as a half-cut tree) should fall down but not stay floating in the air, as most of the things in the game are subject to gravity.

4. Items in water should fall a lot slower than on normal land, as the player falls down very very slowly, too.

5. According to the nodes, they should change when destroyed, such as glass should turn into glass fragments.

6. When blocks in water are destroyed, water should fill in immediately but not slowly flowing up. Freakin' illogical as water never fills up empty space that slow.

7. When a player walks through a torch, he or she should get burned a little, and torches can be used as a weapon.

8. Trees should grow slowly instead of 'zoom' into a big tree in a blink.

And that's all I found. Hope it can get fixed!

If you want more realistic, gravity based game, pay for http://www.buildaworld.net/.

To be honest, I love Minetest just as is, with "ghosty" players, without gravity (yeah my tower will not fall when I want to rebuild bottom part) and with slow water just to be playable on slower machines..

I just watched the video on the website and the game looks awesome! But good luck trying to play it on a medium spec PC...

[Forgelander]

They could add more realism, but not like this.

[flake]

neewbie here, with no programming skills. But i really like the concept op Minetest and am having fun playing it.


3: Concerning the trees. Would it be possible to only make the bottom tree block out of wood one can chop? The wooden blocks above should be protected. When one chops the bottom block, it triggers a short (computationally light) proces of the tree falling and changing the remaining wood blocks to also destructable.

[hoodedice]

neewbie here, with no programming skills. But i really like the concept op Minetest and am having fun playing it.


3: Concerning the trees. Would it be possible to only make the bottom tree block out of wood one can chop? The wooden blocks above should be protected. When one chops the bottom block, it triggers a short (computationally light) proces of the tree falling and changing the remaining wood blocks to also destructable.

That is possible and has been partly implemented in DanDucombe's RealTest game. Also, welcome to Minetest!

[CitroPotter]

making minetest more logical would be to make it more Minecrafty.

[Sokomine]

While there is no protection for the rest of the tree, at least a timber mod exists. With that installed, you only have to cut the bottom tree trunk. The rest will drop down automaticly.

[BrunoMine]

There are many players minetest worldwide (I'm an example). We should not ignore the ideas of anyone. Minetest should have more gameplay options.

  The trees should fall as well as sand. The leaves of the tree should be gradually breaking up (simulating the wind). This should be optional, however should be part of the game.