electronics, etc.

I have made available in github the first usable experimental version of Minetest 0.4. (A stable release will be made in the future.)

It has a Lua modding API. I call it a modding API because modding is awesomer than scripting.

0.4 is an engine update. I first dvelved into the deep dark corners of Minetest and made pretty much all content dynamically loadable at runtime. Then I pulled in Lua, created the necessary interfaces and finalized the thing to it’s current state with the help of a guy called Kahrl.

From now on, all content will be implemented as mods, and C++ holds it’s position as the engine language.

There is a very important speciality about the Minetest Lua modding API: All mods are run server-side. This means players can connect using the same client to any server and see whole new worlds, without worrying about downloading malicious or incompatible mods.

It also makes a simple modding API, because the modder doesn’t need to handle both sides of the networked system. It is not as flexible, but it is easy. This makes it unique.

It is by no means finished, there are bugs, the API lacks many things and the modding interface will still evolve for some time, but it is highly usable.

Documentation is lacking, but here is a start. Feel free to fill in some of the wiki as you explore the API and make some awesome mods!

Oh, and make sure to report any bugs and missing API features, for example in the forums or in github.

• Linux users: grab the sources from github:
  https://github.com/celeron55/minetest.
• Windows users: Here is a compiled package:
  minetest-0.4.dev-20111129-2-win32.zip
  NOTE: See next post for more recent, better working windows packages.

I just sumbled upon this Let’s Play video made by someone called SirShadowdeath:

I suggest you donate to Wikileaks. I did. Why? Because the silly Americans won’t anymore, due to Paypal not co-operating. If you live in Europe, direct bank transfer is easy.

http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

I hereby release Minetest 0.3.1.

Download for Windows XP/Vista/7: minetest-0.3.1-win32.zip

For Linux and others, see the Download page. Note that packages for other platforms will take their time to update.

Special modifications in this package:
- Once again, bundled with Cisoun’s textures.
- Default video backend is direct3d9. If it causes problems or makes it work better for you, please leave a comment.

Minetest water/lava/glass surfaces fixed

Changelog:
0.3.1: (released on 2011-11-09)
- Fix frustum culling (previous versions have rendered too much stuff that is not actually visible (about 180 degrees, while should have been more like 100.))
- Add occlusion culling (improves performance a lot)
- Add “3d clouds” on/off checkbox in main menu
- Add “opaque water” on/off checkbox
- Fix some random minor stuff
- Turn mipmapping off (This makes far-away textures a bit noisier but better looking)
- Add Command-line signal handler for Windows (contributed by SpeedProg)
- Fix network layer segmentation fault introduced in 0.3.dev-20111021
- Fix water-glass and water-lava and lava-glass surfaces

A small update. THIS will be released as 0.3.1 if there are no problems.

0.3.0 and 0.3.dev-20111104 have a small chance of a segmentation fault in the network layer. This fixes it.

Also this has command-line signal handling for Windows for clean server shutdowns on Windows and water-glass surfaces are handled better.

minetest-0.3.dev-20111108-win32.zip