![Image](http://hdastwb.heliohost.org/ghostin'.png)
Adding ghosts was surprisingly easy to do; servers don't actually seem to care if dead players are floating around, so pretty much all of the necessary changes are client-side. All that I needed to do was to comment out the code that launches the respawn screen and add a whole bunch of "or hp <= 0"s to the code to trick it into thinking that dead players have free_move on and most of the HUD off. I also made some tweaks to the minimal game in order to show ghost players with a semi-transparent ghost-gray texture; minetest_game (or, rather, the common default mod) shows the player laying on their back when they are dead, which looks kind of odd when they are floating around.
Anyway, my branch can be found here:
https://github.com/hdastwb/minetest/tree/ghost
source here:
https://github.com/hdastwb/minetest/archive/ghost.zip
and, for the impatient, Windows build here:
http://hdastwb.heliohost.org/minetest-ghost.zip
In this version, one can easily leave "ghost mode" by merely pressing ESC and triggering a normal respawn. However, the ability to go back out of ghost mode could be turned over to mods, thus hardcore survival games could require that a player go through a ghost portal or have the other players perform a complicated ceremony to bring them back into the mortal plane.
There are also some more interesting things that could be done with rendering ghosts. I think that a neat effect would be to not draw dead players, but slightly desaturate the area around them and majorly desaturate the view of players that are in contact with them. Ghosts could also appear as glowy orbs in screenshots (or maybe cubes might fit our artistic style more) and put out torches that they come in contact with.
Anyway, what do you guys think?