electronics, etc.

Here is a development build for Windows of what I have recently done:

minetest-0.3.dev-20111104-win32.zip

- Fixed: Frustum culling (previous versions have rendered too much stuff that is not actually visible (about 180 degrees, while should have been more like 100.))
- Added: Occlusion culling
- Added: “3d clouds” on/off checkbox in main menu
- Added: “opaque water” on/off checkbox
- Fixed: some random minor stuff
- Modified: Mipmapping turned off (This makes far-away textures a bit noisier but better looking)

The frustum culling fix and added occlusion culling make quite a large performance improvement.

This will be probably released as 0.3.1 if nobody reports significant problems in a few days. So make sure to test it well!

The profiler display in Minetest

You can press F2 to bring up a profiler display with a bunch of random statistics about rendering and in a local game about the server. Also, F1, F3 and F4 are useful in debugging and benchmarking.

The current development version has gone through quite a lot of testing and now it is time to release it as stable. It really is stable now, unlike the previous stable, which really isn’t stable even today. There are problems, of course, but they are known, minor and have workarounds.

Here is an image to make you interested!

Minetest-c55

This has practically nothing new compared to the previous development build. Here is the changelog:

0.3.0: (released on 2011-11-01)
- Some small fixes
0.3.dev-20111021:
- Modify dungeon masters to only try to shoot players
- Fix object duplication bug at block load/unload
- Improve network layer
0.3.dev-20111016:
- Locked chest
- Server user limit setting (max_users)
- Wielded tool is shown in HUD
- View bobbing
- Saplings that drop from leaf blocks and when placed on ground will grow to trees
- Optimized map saving (does not re-save everything all the time)
- New mob system and new mob: dungeon master
- Death/respawn screen

Compared to the previous stable (0.2.20110922), it contains lots of new things.

Additionally, in this Windows package, the textures have been mostly replaced by Cisoun’s texture pack. Linux users can install it separately, if they wish.

For Windows (XP/Vista/7), download it here: minetest-0.3.0-win32.zip

For other platforms, here is the download page.

JS Bombers - Click to play

I thought I’d learn some Javascript, and figured I should make something useful and fun to keep the motivation up. So I started doing that by actually creating a game!

It is a browser based real-time multiplayer mini clone of the Finnish classic game Mine Bombers.

Your goal is to collect more valuables than your opponent by digging and dropping bombs. You can also kill your opponent if you can’t keep up with grabbing the treasures. 8)

So, use your preferred instant messaging service to challenge your friends! (really, you need a friend to play this with)

Here it is: http://jsbombers.mine.bz/

Don’t be afraid if the lobby is empty. It is just the single game, what did you expect? :-) I said you need a friend to play it with! If in doubt, you can leave the game open and check back once in a while. You’ll probably meet someone to play with in some tens of minutes.

What’s next?

There are basically two things that could be done:

1. More features (multiple bomb types, multiple rounds per game, shop with credits, different grades of pickaxes)
2. Facebook or Google+ integration

Whaddaya think? 8)

Oh, and yeah, I replaced the old wordpress theme, due to a variety of reasons. I think this is quite good.

0.3.dev-20111021:
- Modify dungeon masters to only try to shoot players
- Fix object duplication bug at block load/unload
- Improve network layer

Windows build: minetest-0.3.dev-20111021-win32.zip

Linux and other users can grab the source.

There exists a bug in the latest stable release, 0.2.20110922 (0.2.20110922_3), which causes objects to be cloned when a block of world data is loaded and unloaded, when eg. a player walks near it and then goes away, or joins and disconnects.

It cannot be seen initially, but will make performance worse over time and at some point will make at least servers quite laggy and even unplayable.

I intend to release a new version in the near future which has this fixed and not backport the fix to latest stable. If somebody very much needs 0.2.20110922 to be fixed, please tell and I will consider doing it.