At that moment, it occurred to me that... well, I'm a developer, and there has to be an open-source alternative. Enter Minetest. I discovered this wonderful project and decided to repurpose an old server I had just decommissioned from the datacenter a few months back to running a LAN server with the hopes of never having to shell out that much cash to Nintendo again just to feel totally swindled.
I've since built my own game, a laundry list of really cool mods using meshes I created in Blender, and for me, it's been a heck of a ride and a lot of fun learning 3D modeling, the Lua programming language, how voxel games work, etc. So, to that extent, I'd like to thank all of you for this project, and all of your contributions, to make this fun new adventure for me possible.
My kids, however, aren't such happy customers. They refuse to play for more than 5 or 10 minutes before giving up and going back to play Minecraft on their Switches due to the intense lag...
That said, here's my setup:
Server, Dell PowerEdge R640:
- CPU: (2) Intel Xeon Gold 6226R @ 2.9GHz (32 cores total)
- RAM: (12) 32GB DDR-4 @ 2933 MHz (384GB total)
- HDD: (4) Micron 7300 Pro 1.92TB NVMe
- OS: Debian 11.6
(I don't think Minetest could ever possibly utilize even a tiny chunk of what's available here)
Minetest server (software) info:
Code: Select all
cmake build opts:
-DRUN_IN_PLACE=TRUE \
-DBUILD_CLIENT=FALSE \
-DBUILD_SERVER=true \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-DIRRLICHT_INCLUDE_DIR=/root/irrlicht/include \
-DENABLE_CURL=ON \
-DENABLE_CURSES=ON \
-DENABLE_LUAJIT=ON \
-DENABLE_SYSTEM_GMP=ON \
-DENABLE_SYSTEM_JSONCPP=ON \
-DENABLE_UPDATE_CHECKER=FALSE \
-DENABLE_POSTGRESQL=TRUE \
-DPOSTGRESQL_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpq.so.5.13 \
-DPOSTGRESQL_TYPE_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/postgresql/
# bin/minetestserver --version
Minetest 5.6.1 (Linux)
Using LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3
BUILD_TYPE=Release
RUN_IN_PLACE=1
USE_CURL=1
STATIC_SHAREDIR="."
- CPU: (1) Intel Atom C3558 @ 2.2GHz (4 cores)
- RAM: (4) 8GB DDR-4 (speed unknown, 24GB total)
- OS: pfsense 22.05
- Switch: 8-port 1Gbps Marvell 88E6190
Client #1, iMac 19,1 (mine):
- CPU: (1) Intel Core i5 @ 3.7GHz (6 cores total)
- RAM: (4) 16GB DDR-4 @ 2667 MHz (64GB total)
- HDD: Samsung T7 SSD
- OS: MacOS Mojava 10.4.6 (I refuse to upgrade)
- GFX: Radeon Pro 580X 8GB DDR5
- Client: Minetest 5.6.1 (installed from release)
- Problem: Intermittent lag; map blocks stop loading when moving with "fast" across the map from time to time, taking 3-5 seconds to load, meanwhile my character just hits an "invisible wall." I'm guessing this is just a Mac issue though, considering client #2 below...
Client #2, Dell XPS8900 (mine):
- CPU: (1) Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.4GHz (8 cores total)
- RAM: (2) 8GB DDR-3 @ 2133MHz (16GB total)
- HDD: (1) Crucial MX500 SSD
- OS: Windows 10 Pro
- GFX: NVIDIA GeForce GT730 2GB DDR3
- Client: Minetest 5.6.1 (installed from release)
- Problem: I hate Windows, but this one works flawlessly.
Client #3, Asus laptop (kids):
- CPU: (1) Intel Pentium N3700 @ 1.6GHz (4 cores total)
- RAM: (1) 4GB DDR-3 @ 1600MHz
- HDD: Toshiba MQ01ABF050 (5,400RPM mechanical)
- OS: Debian 11.6
- GFX: cpu/built-in
- Client: Minetest 5.1.1 (Linux) using Irrlicht 1.8.4 (installed via apt)
- Problem: Terrible lag. Player movement is very jittery, and when interacting (placing/digging) it'll process a few blocks, freeze, process a few more, freeze.... worst of all, OS freezes frequently (about once per hour) requiring reboot.
Client #4, Toshiba laptop (kids):
- CPU: (1) AMD E-300 @ 1.3GHz (2 cores total)
- RAM: (1) 4GB DDR-3 @ 1600MHz
- HDD: (1) Toshiba MK3275GSX (5,400RPM mechanical)
- OS: Debian 11.6
- GFX: cpu/built-in, Radeon HD 6310
- Client: Minetest 5.1.1 (Linux) using Irrlicht 1.8.4 (installed via apt)
- Problem: Terrible lag. Player movement is worse than jittery (sometimes, whilst attempting to move across map, player gets "stuck" wherein you can move 5-6 blocks before you "snap" back to where you just were, over and over, until it gets "unstuck" and lets you actually go places again). Interaction, however, is not terrible. Digging/placing blocks seems fine. OS does not freeze like Client #3.
Given my server and network hardware, I don't think there's any bottlenecks there, nor much room for improvement lol. My Windows box runs Minetest like a dream, so I'm writing off my mac issues as just that... mac issues. As to the kids, their laptops are basically junk, but that's what we've got and I've seen a number of posts on here about people loving this game for its ability to run smoothly even on old hardware, so I'm hoping that maybe someone can point me in the right direction of some settings I can tweak to get them playing without having to buy them new laptops.
Fingers crossed! Anybody?
Edit #1: P.S. I read somewhere on here that there may be problems with LuaJIT. I tried recompiling the server without it, and that just made problems much worse.