electronics, etc.

(Quick note: fix to a missing password-related check has been applied to 0.3, making the newest in that series 0.3.3. Those who still run these servers, please update.)

Minetest 0.4.5 has been released. This is the first completely community-made release, me just handling some of this website stuffs.

Go see the changelog to figure out who exactly to thank, but I’ll mention that kwolekr (aka hmmm) set the feature freeze and the Windows package has been built by xyz.

Some changes include a multiplayer server list, umm… ehm… well, there is a ton of changes. See the changelog. Oh, I already said that.

Download:

• Windows (XP/7/whatever): minetest-0.4.5.zip
• Others: http://www.minetest.net/download.php

Info:

• Forum topic: http://forum.minetest.org/viewtopic.php?pid=73978
• Changelog: http://dev.minetest.net/Changelog

EDIT 2013-03-08: It appears the launchpad stable repo is broken for us for now. The unstable/daily repo works slightly better. https://code.launchpad.net/~minetestdevs/+recipe/minetest-c55-stable <- if you click on that link and it appers to work, shout at me.

Copy from the temporary news section on minetest.net posted there on 2012-12-06, for archival purposes:

2012-12-06: Minetest 0.4.4 released

After all the hard work of the past autumn months, we present the Minetest 0.4.4 release.

Ubuntu packages should be ready in Launchpad in a moment, as well as Archlinux AUR packages. Others will probably take more or less time.

-celeron55

Download

• Windows: minetest-0.4.4-win32.zip
• Others

Related

• Forum thread

Changelog

0.4.3 -> 0.4.4 (by Calinou and PilzAdam)

New features:
* Added animated 3D player and a new default skin, the default model also supports Minecraft skins (Taoki, skin by Jordach)
* Added shaders support (can be disabled in Settings menu), makes water a bit smaller than a full block, makes lighting look prettier (kahrl and celeron55)
* New default doors mod: doors have a 3D look, ability to create "double doors" added, added locked steel doors (only the owner of the door can open/close it) (PilzAdam)
* Improve map generation speed a lot (hmmmm)
* Day-night transitions are now smoother (celeron55)
* Water textures are now animated (RealBadAngel (textures) and PilzAdam)
* Added on-demand item previews (reduces load time/RAM usage), disabled by default (celeron55)
* Added 3D anaglyph support (red-cyan glasses) (xyz)
* Fire is now animated and causes damage to players (PilzAdam, Muadtralk (textures))
* Tweaked some textures: apple, nyan cat, bricks, papyrus, steel sword (Calinou, VanessaE)
* Tweaked digging animation (no more mining with the tip of your pickaxe!) (jordan4ibanez)
* Changed apple, sapling and papyrus selection box size to be smaller (VanessaE)
* Players who do not move no longer send their positions to save bandwidth (Taoki)
* Make steel block and brick drop themselves when dug and make them craftable back into their materials (PilzAdam)
* Glass now makes a sound when broken (PilzAdam)
* Dead players are now visible (Taoki)
* Changed default server tick to 0.1 second, decreasing server CPU usage (celeron55)
* Clients now send their position every 0.1 second too, making other player movement look smoother (celeron55)
* Use of /grant and /revoke commands is now logged (dannydark)
* Added ability for server to tweak amount of bandwidth used to upload mods to clients (celeron55)

Bugfixes:
* Fixed falling sand and gravel sometimes incorrectly landing (PilzAdam)
* Fixed empty bucket being named "emtpy bucket" (khonkhortisan and PilzAdam)
* Fixed slab to full block transformation (PilzAdam)
* Fixed smooth lighting between MapBlocks (celeron55)
* Prevent some blocks (leaves, falling sand and gravel) from giving air when dug when they disappear as you mine them (PilzAdam)
* Fixed papyruses and cacti growing inside trees (PilzAdam)
* Fixed flowing liquid animation direction calculation (celeron55)
* Fixed wielditem entity drawtype brightness control (celeron55)
* Fixed ObjectRef:punch() (celeron55)
* Fixed a rare bug in leaf decay (PilzAdam)
* Fixed trees growing into any type of node (xyz)
* Fixed server crashing when "/clearpassword" is typed without an argument (Uberi)
* Head no longer shifts downwards when you are inside transparent blocks such as glass or nodeboxes (Calinou)
* Directories beginning with a "." are now ignored when searching for mods on Windows (matttpt)
* Fixed the automagic render distance tuner (celeron55)

Modding-related changes:
* Added 3D model support for entities (Taoki)
* Added attachment support (so that entities can "ride" other entities) (Taoki)
* Backgrounds and images can now be used in formspecs (RealBadAngel)
* Liquids can now be made non-renewable (xyz)
* Added nodedef.on_blast() to lua_api.txt in order to support chained explosions of any explosives (celeron55)
* Allow transparent image buttons (khonkhortisan)
* Added shutdown hook interface to Lua API (matttpt)
* Added "attached_node" group to make nodes which are not attached to any other walkable node drop (PilzAdam)

It has been three months since 0.4.4. I feel a need to summarize things that have happened since December.

First of all I’ll note that I really am not “the developer” anymore; there are people who are more involved in Minetest than me, and I’m mostly trying to keep out of the way doing other projects. Anyhow, I still have a chunk of things I’m responsible for.

Kept I have, an eye on things, enough to post something.

Website

Website-wise, the minetest.net VPS encountered bad problems (later diagnosed to be failing hardware), and we (me and xyz) moved the forum out to forum.minetest.org on xyz’s servers (2013-01-13). The forums are now automatically securely backed up over to me and xyz. The main minetest.net website is now temporarily hosted on c55.me.

xyz made the http://dev.minetest.net wiki, into which the existing Lua API documentation was moved, and later much Core documentation was written too. It now serves as the main source of documentation for developers and advanced users.

Releases

Many bugs have been fixed since 0.4.4 and I would have hoped for 0.4.5 to be released a month or two ago, but we have ended up on somewhat a rolling release model with mods already using features from unreleased versions and many people making unofficial Windows builds. We’ll try to make a proper release in a month or so, as/if a more suitable time is found. Until then, daily/unofficial builds (xyz’s, PilzAdam’s, sfan5′s) are recommended and I probably need to update the main site accordingly.

Development

So… after 0.4.4,

• uncountable number of bugs have been fixed,
• some MESE stuff was changed (umm…? well whatever),
• hmmmm/kwolekr has done a lot of mapgen/block loading work,
• RealBadAngel has worked on L-system trees with VanessaE using them in moretrees,
• a favourite/public server list has been added by Jeija (with proller doing some more related stuff),
• Taoki updated the player physics (which I don’t know if I like),
• doserj added UI for disabling/enabling mods, some smaller additions to the API were added;
• then there is sapier’s security modifications.
• And many things (sorry, I can’t in any way remember everything, and these are very much biased towards recent times),
• and the pull request list is pretty long.

I’ve granted thexyz, PilzAdam, darkrose and hmmmm upstream access a couple of months ago, so (yay!) I don’t have to wade through all this myself.

*Screams loudly in order to distract this boring officialness*

So, umm… many things are going well and not many things are going badly. Good it is!

On a completely unrelated note, and as a not really active movie watcher at all, I recently watched all the 6 worthy Star Wars movies, in the order of releases. I completely agree with the IMDB ratings.

Minetest core is a volunteer effort, but the barrier to entry is too high. In a series of changes meant to lower that, we’re going to hold an event meant to help people understand the engine: A documentation sprint!

What: Documentation sprint for Minetest
Where: #minetest-doc on Freenode and http://dev.minetest.net
When: 2013-01-19 16:00 UTC to 2013-01-20 01:00 UTC

-MarkTraceur

http://minetest.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4243

• I updated Minetest’s main website: http://minetest.net/
• Minetest 0.4.4 will be released this week.
• You should know about this shit: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html. Most notably, please be aware of the outdated and incompatible crap Debian and Ubuntu feeds you due to political reasons.