cy wrote:Less ugly, useless junk. Mostly this is a server admin choice thing, but there are a lot of useless, ugly mods, some enabled by default. Poison ivy. Dryplants. Ferns. Molehills. Woodsoils. Young trees. (gee is this all in the plantlife modpack?) Some are downright infuriating, like "trunks" that make running past a tree impossible, and how "bamboo" can't be easily
I can agree with most of what you wrote in other parts (i.e. turning movement and animation over to the client for making it look more smoothly), but this here I can't agree with. These mods make the landscape beautiful! It's great to walk through a world that's not empty but has nature crawling all around. I love the mods you just discarded. And, by the way, they're not part of mtg either.
cy wrote:Technic. Minetest lost a ton of appeal for me when technic crashed and burned. We need more automated stuff, more chain reactions and time savers. People say if you don't want a challenge then go on a creative server, but there's something amazing about simulating that stuff and seeing your work proceed logically, instead of picking out the thing you want on a random menu.
If technic is installed, people tend to invest a lot in building up technic chains close to spawn so that they'll stay loaded and provide the player with the fruits of his/her work. Unfortionately, that's all very expensive for the server to do, and players will eventually experience lags. I was thinking about combining multiple machines into one that could stay loaded and would require less frequent and less complex updates/environment changes, but I didn't get around to that yet. You might also want to take a look at rnd's machines as those are designed to be far more server-friendly.
shaalazin wrote:But, right now, this is an engine; and nowhere near close to a game; with or without the many mods.
I'm not sure if what you consider to be a "game" is even a desirable goal for MT as a whole. People tend to have diffrent views on what they like and expect from it. Where MT is great in particular is that it's a sandbox in more than one way: You can build structures in it, you can build your own mods and thus change the world, and you can even design your own game. It's more like a canvas on which you can paint. Nobody's there to tell you that you have to do this-and-that now. You're free to do what you like.
shaalazin wrote:1: Game should have graphics and sounds all made by a dedicated team of people. That way they all share the same style. Or, at the very least, there should be some sort of content guidelines imposed on mods; if you're going to depend on modders to build the game aspect for you.
Textures that fit together are a valid point. But then, there aren't that many artists around. Maybe developing a texture pack that encompasses all the mods that ought to be included in what you call a game could help here.
shaalazin wrote:There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't have just as many or more mobs, blocks, block types, horses, biomes, and everything else as Minecraft does by now.
There's a vast amount of mods out there. Larger servers tend to have thousands of blocks in many shapes. But, again: You have to pick yourshelf that what you like to play with. Or join a server where the server owner made a choice as to which mods ought to make up his/her world.
shaalazin wrote:If Minetest is to become popular and go somewhere, it needs an actual game built on its engine that a lot of people will actually want to play. You've made a great proof of concept with the engine itself. If only the idea of creating a game for this engine could be sold to the Internet as a GPL respecting and easily modifiable, alternative to Minecraft on some crowd funding site. Then a real game, a complete package, could take shape and really go somewhere.
Hm, so perhaps focussing on putting up a game based on survival might be something helping a lot of players. We don't need to take builders by the hand - they're creative people and don't need a story telling them what to do next. They will need some tools (unified_inventory, screwdriver, my replacer mod, WorldEdit, ..) to work with, but that's it. Surivival, on the other hand, really needs extended food source mods (more farming), hostile mobs, drowning, hunger, achievement system, armour, skills...come to think of it, AdventureTest gets pretty close to that, although it's not easy to survive there.
Robsoie wrote:Maybe that's what is lacking from Minetest official releases : a Survival mode that is actually a survival mode, as minetest_game as a Creative mode is really good, but to get a decent survival mode you have to hunt for mods
I think you're right at that. Something pre-packed, easy-to-grab for those that want a survival experience and some guidance as to what to do next.
shaalazin wrote:And, when I tried, half the mods I wanted to play with didn't open up or work in the newest version.
That's very odd. Most mods ought to work with the current engine. Which ones did you try?
rubenwardy wrote:1 game to be a base for modding, called Minetest Foundation or Minetest Base
1 game to rule them all. To have real, good gameplay
Sounds like a plan! There really ought to be an easy-to-grab version of MT which is more focussed on survival and has some mods integrated so that new, inexperienced players don't have to hunt the forum for mods.
shaalazin wrote:I could maybe try to help. I don't know anything about programming, but I do some graphic editing with GIMP from time to time. Maybe I could help with graphics on some level. I don't know.
I've never been able to learn programming. How hard is it to learn?
Not hard for some of us. But: We do have some very impressive and useful mods already. People who know how to program do turn their ideas into mods. Why don't you focuss on that other part you've been focussing on in this thread already? That part about making graphics and design look more like it fits together? It's an important point to you - and you said you know a bit of graphics. Sounds like a volunteer to me :-)