electronics, etc.

PRESS RELEASE 2017-09-13

Minetest 0.5 has begun development!
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The open source modding and community focused multiplayer block sandbox engine Minetest (https://minetest.net) has merged the first big changes in its 0.5-dev branch on GitHub (https://github.com/minetest/minetest).

Breaking changes include a move from the C++03 language standard to full C++11, continued testing and expansion of client-side modding APIs and clean up of accumulated compatibility code for faster future development.

Minetest 0.0.1 was originally released in October 2010, making this the 7th year of development. Minetest takes cross-platform compatibility seriously and hadn’t yet moved to C++11 due to missing official support from Debian GNU/Linux. Following release of Debian 8, Minetest moves to C++11, with all features of the language standard taken into use.

The tagline of Minetest at this point is “Wait, is it an engine or a game?”, and we have no answer. Reaching the founder Perttu “celeron55″ Ahola for an answer results in weird horn and fart noises.

Minetest consists of a native core written in C++, on top of which content is written in Lua and published as independent releases. Minetest can be played and developed for fun, and welcomes contributors to all of its components.

The Minetest community can be found on the official' Minetest discussion board at forum.minetest.org (https://forum.minetest.org/), and a changelog of the continuing 0.5 changes can be found on the Minetest developer wiki (http://dev.minetest.net/Changelog#0.4.16_.E2.86.92_0.5.x_.2830_Aug.29).

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celeron55

Also on minds.com: https://www.minds.com/blog/view/754774999667056642

My previous video was about Minetest also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeTjR5-IabY

Watershed, some other mods and some glue:

https://forum.minetest.org/viewtopic.php?p=151128#p151128

https://forum.minetest.org/viewtopic.php?p=134376#p134376

Minetest 0.4.10 was released yesterday. It’s been half a year since the previous release, 0.4.9 and thus this one contains a lot of stuff compared to it.

This release also marks the first stable(ish…) (well, more stable than the non-stable ones anyway) version of the official Android port of Minetest.

The subgames

We were supposed to be putting multiple subgames in this release while keeping minetest_game frozen, but that didn’t happen.

I set out to figure out the situation with subgames a few days ago. By testing the games, it seemed to me that Carbone had a lot to it compared to minetest_next. Also, I really like nodetopia, which sadly currently is too broken, according to the author. Most other subgames seem to be in a similar state.

Most of the community really wanted minetest_next to be included and I wanted to know more about it as I didn’t really see exactly what its point is. This produced these two documents. I wanted to know about gameplay direction, but couldn’t pull it out of them. It turns out _next was actually an undead version of _game which hadn’t changed practically at all – it really has a lot of momentum. Given that minetest_next had to be selected, Carbone didn’t make much sense as it is basically the same thing polished a bit and with extra mods. So, here we are, with _game continuing to be included and continuing development.

The future of subgames

As for subgames, I would *really* encourage you to make smaller polished ones, with interesting goals, limitations and which take new players well into account. With minetest_game continuing development and not being able to take it out, bundling a subgame largely based on it simply does not make sense.

Meanwhile, go download and try out Carbone, it does do many things better than minetest_next/game. You may also want to be following nodetest/voxelgarden. And all the other things happening here.

The release announcement and download links

Check out the 0.4.10 release announcement on the forums.

Download it on the download page.

Read random IRC discussion after release in the logs.

Oh, also, go check jeb’s recent comment on reddit!

Non-content follows:

So, my day went like this: First I woke up and was thinking of writing a certain kind of subgame, and started doing that based on another one. Then I decided that the idea I had wasn’t complete enough, discarded that mini-project and decided that integrating mapgen v5 with current master would make sense.

I barely did that and begun flying around in a world generated by it. It seemed that implementing mgv7 biomes on it would be a next step, but a boring one. Then I thought a bit and came to the conclusion that some of paramat’s mods must be capable of the things that I like in v5, and quickly ended up flying around in a Watershed-generated world. It was just as glorious as always and I experimented a bit with recording flying with constant speed in it.

Nothing seemed to go wrong, so I iterated some hours on a hack that controls the height of flight and finally let it run for a final pass. It had a lot of water. I was like “Fuck it; let me just get some music!” and surprisingly quickly ended up with something licensed under CC BY-SA that I really wanted to use.

It took a fair amount of arranging and cutting to get it match the video. The end result of this is what you see above.