FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I am unsure if this is the right place for my question, so I apologize if I have broken any rules; it was unintentional. I was trying for the first time to install a map in Minetest and the Wiki said to put it in the "worlds" folder. However, I do not have any such folder. If someone could assist me in this matter, it would be greatly appreciated. I have included a screenshot in the attachment of what the Minetest folders look like on my Mac OS X (Snow Leopard build). Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Aryandil wrote:I am unsure if this is the right place for my question, so I apologize if I have broken any rules; it was unintentional. I was trying for the first time to install a map in Minetest and the Wiki said to put it in the "worlds" folder. However, I do not have any such folder. If someone could assist me in this matter, it would be greatly appreciated. I have included a screenshot in the attachment of what the Minetest folders look like on my Mac OS X (Snow Leopard build). Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Yes, create a starter world and exit.
The worlds folder shall be there now.

Minetest needs to run once to write some files and folders.

I'm sorry; that didn't work. Besides, I have created more than five worlds in two different games; according to what you said, then the worlds folder should have popped up by now. But it hasn't.

YIKES!

maybe search for the name of the world you created and trace it's path to the world dir?

This thread states that you may have to create these folders to put mods and subgames into -
"~/Library/Application Support/minetest/mods/"
"~/Library/Application Support/minetest/games/"
so I presume you may also have to precreate a worlds folder as such
"~/Library/Application Support/minetest/worlds/"

or maybe search for a hidden ".minetest" folder in your user space. Note the dot in front of the name.

I just tried that, creating a worlds folder. (There are mods folders within each game folder, all with their own mods, but I created another one just in case. Thankfully nothing broke.) Anyway, it didn't work. I created two new worlds and they still aren't showing up.

Here's another screenshot attached.

I guess I should have studied your first screenshot more carefully. I must admit that I don't use a Mac OS installation, so hopefully Morn or some other Mac user will give more insight.

Normally all Minetest related files and folders are installed in some folder (or several) that is exclusive for minetest to use. Having a folder of its own helps to keep the program from clashing with others. Nevertheless judging from your screenshot it should have worked :-(

So if I understand correctly you have created some worlds, have exited them and reopened them?
If you have really successfully reopened an existing world then they certainly must be somewhere on your system.
So search for the name of your world as this will be the name of the world folder or search for a file called "map.sqlite", as that may be the name of the map database if you use the default database type.

Below is the structure Minetest uses for a run-in-place installation



The folders with custom content such as games/, mods/, textures/ and worlds/ may have twins of the same name somewhere else in your system. Maybe in some userdata-hidden-shared folder or whatever your system defaults to for content that is modified by the user such as personal settings or game saves. (That "share" folder on your screenshots would be the next thing I would investigate)

You may want to study the table about the Folder structure according to CMakeLists.txt to find more hints or as it may not be up to date, study the code here

hope any of this helps. Please post watever works, so it may help others

In Linux (and probably MacOS), Minetest data (games, mods, worlds, etc.) that isn't installed as part of the game package goes in a directory called ".minetest" within the user's home directory. An abbreviated path to this directory is "~/.minetest" or "$HOME/.minetest", which is usually located at "/home/<username>/.minetest" (in Linux; not sure about MacOS, but the abbreviated versions should still work). Note that you might not see this directory with a normal directory listing or viewing your home directory with default file browsing settings. This is because files and directories starting with a dot are "hidden". You need to use non-default options to view hidden files and directories. A file browser usually has a, "display hidden files," view option. On the command line you'd use, "ls -a". In either case you should be able to change directories into it by entering the explicit path mentioned above (for example "cd ~/.minetest").

This may not apply to Minetest packages that are prepared to, "run in place," rather than being installed in the usual place in the OS, but the screenshot in the OP seems to indicate the game was indeed installed rather than just unpacked and run.

As Twoelk wrote, the world path on OS X is normally "~/Library/Application Support/minetest/worlds/" (where '~' stands for your user's home directory).

I don't think the Snow Leopard build is any different in that regard.

It does irritate me a little that the folder structure in the screenshot seems to be showing the folders builtin, client, fonts, games, locale, mods, textures, worlds alongside the minetest executable within the bin folder. That just doesn't look right.

Please considere rebuilding the folder structure as shown in the folder tree. So that the Minetest executable may go down one level in the folder tree and search there for a worlds folder parallel to the bin folder.

I think in neoascetic's nightly OS X builds the folder structure has been fixed, and those builds are probably the only ones that will be done in the future. The Snow Leopard build used by the OP is older.