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

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

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

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.

EDIT: The resulting “celeron55′s roadmap”: https://forum.minetest.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9177

Minetest is about:

• Messing around
• Being able to do crappy but interesting stuff which nevertheless is enjoyed by other people
• Not taking anything seriously
• Doing this in a voxel-based multiplayer sandbox game.

That is what it has always been about. However, as a project grows, it’s impossible to keep total anarchy or dictatorship, so we need some way of fitting this into the fairly scalable architecture (development-wise) we have now. The alternative would be to scale the project down and make an army of forks. It could be fun too, but don’t think it is generally desirable.

Particularly, Minetest is not about making fancy-looking things at the cost of freedom. Go away right now if you want that.

In order to build upon a larger base of work, the larger base of work must be chosen somehow. Minetest uses these approaches:

• Keep the common base small enough to be manageable, as it is bound to be a monolithic chunk. This is what is called the Minetest Engine. It’s sole purpose is to enable cramming all kinds of messing-arounds into one in a decent voxel world experience.
• Keep the common base (the Minetest Engine) as universal as possible. I like to compare everything that goes into the engine for how well it suits a gravitation-less space game without ground surface. If everything is either disableable or suitable for such, then it gives much more freedom for people to experiment and create interesting things, even in ground-based worlds.
• Keep the common base lightweight, simple and well-written enough for it to not become some monster that everyone fears, because everyone is dependent on it.
• Following these limits, incorporate features that help people do the things in the first list.
• It mustn’t be made unnecessarily hard to make polished content even while most content isn’t polished.

Then there is the work that is built upon this common base. It has it’s own issues. Here are the issues that come to mind and how Minetest solves them:

• Lack of creativity: Minetest tries to make it easy to experiment with weird and unconventional things, and publish those things to inspire others.
• Lack of consistent and large pieces of content: Mods facilitate organization of huge amounts of content. Subgames(*) allow collection of them to coherent wholes. While Minetest’s culture isn’t very focused on consistency, Minetest tries to make it possible if someone wants to focus on it.
• Lack of publicity: Minetest tries to make it easy to share anything, and the community is all about sharing everything.
• Lack of main direction: We suck at this. Short suggestion below.

It’s starting to seem to me that we need to change the Minetest distribution to contain a bunch of different subgames instead of trying to have one main game. New ideas or thumbs ups for this?

Hopefully this explains for example why Minetest isn’t *necessarily* a Minecraft clone, and why it *kind of* is, and why it doesn’t matter in itself.

(*) I use the word subgame here because it’s less confusing for people not involved with Minetest

I think Minetest server maintainers have too little say on things that core developers use their time on. In case you’re one of those, free to fix that by getting more involved on #minetest-dev or github.

Minetest 0.4.8 is kind of starting to see the light at the end of the release tunnel. There’s some stuff still to be taken care of before feature freeze. That’ll take an unknown amount of time. (0.4.7 was released about four months ago without a notice here.)

Here’s the current changelog, showing the changes after 0.4.7 that stable users will see. Nothing new for git users though! http://dev.minetest.net/Changelog

A semi-factual forum thread about what Minetest might have inspired in Minecraft: https://forum.minetest.org/viewtopic.php?pid=112402

The Pyramids mod is quite cool.

I also moved it to be hosted on http://nearlyfreespeech.net for now. Hopefully this set-up will serve us well for quite some time!