Minecore: An Engine

[paramat]

If I was going to implement them, why would I implement VAEs or dimensions in Minecore rather than in Minetest proper?

Because we don't see how it can be done in MTE currently, also we want to keep all doors open.

VAEs have been in the MT dev wiki TODO for years, we're very keen to add that, with that could come dimensions too since they are related. There's no reason they can't be done in MT, in fact there's more chance of these happening in MT due to the skills and knowledge of the core devs. Best not split talent on this, you could always port it over later.

I'd like to add to the conversation that the Minecore project seems to focus more on pleasing content creators and players than server owners for example, which sounds interesting.

I found it funny this was taken as a compliment, i see it as a concern, there has to be a balance, for example see the controversy over CSM. The balance is actually still in favour of players as is obvious if you chat with server owners.

We still don't have an effective serverside defence against hacked clients, and client-provided CSM (which was not a part of the original plan and was added too soon before server restrictions on it) has moved the balance towards players further, we're still trying to correct this balance.

I know that by 'players' you don't mean hackers, but the fact is a 'player-server' balance is inevitably about the ability to hack or cheat and server defences against that.

[Scarecrowman]

I'd like to add to the conversation that the Minecore project seems to focus more on pleasing content creators and players than server owners for example, which sounds interesting.

I found it funny this was taken as a compliment, i see it as a concern.

I get it. You have to have an understanding of how things will work server side before you can develop some of that stuff. Depending on how much access you give to 'creators' it could put security at risk. Plus, I haven't been very specific on what we mean by the creative aspects of the project.

I have edited our post with a final statement about it.

[GamingAssociation39]

No matter what other people say I believe that this is a great project and am glad to be working on it with a group of great people.

[stu]

I have edited our post with a final statement about it.

Too bad you let the trolls win again :P

IMO There is absolutely nothing wrong with forking open-source projects, I even believe it should be actively encouraged be it for fun, further development or even profit. The only thing that would put me off contributing is the license change from LGPL to GPL, this IMO was the biggest downfall of freeminer, you should not make the same mistake if you are seeking help from this community.

Best of luck with the project whichever direction you decide to take it :)

[sofar]

IMO There is absolutely nothing wrong with forking open-source projects, I even believe it should be actively encouraged be it for fun, further development or even profit. The only thing that would put me off contributing is the license change from LGPL to GPL, this IMO was the biggest downfall of freeminer, you should not make the same mistake if you are seeking help from this community.

Despite my earlier postings, this is how I feel about it, too. You, and anyone out there, is free to fork and explore whatever your heart desires. If I could stress one thing you should really ... REALLY avoid it's that when your project goes south, it leaves something of value behind for the people who are still alive, and that means that the license choice is highly significant. This hasn't happened just to freeminer, but a number of times, and it never worked out for the people who forked, and all their fun stuff essentially vanished in forgottenness.

Of course, just say that you're forking is a whole lot more honest and open about things, too.

[stu]

@sofar nicely put and for the record, by 'trolls' I was not referring to you. In fact the advice given by yourself and fellow devs has been mostly sound overall :)

[numzero]

stu and Sofar have valid points. Virtually everything else here is just ***.
@Scarecröwman if *this* is your reason to not to fork MT, well... You’d better just ignore them.

[texmex]

Although it’s sad to see another initiative consisting of true creatives (not just mod collectors like most of us) more or less being shunned even before really getting started, it’s a healthy sign that they’re not letting themselves get bogged down by the spitefulness and gloat shown to them.

Best of luck with the project.

[TumeniNodes]

I will defend myself as being marked as a "troll" by saying.
My comments reflected my observations and personal opinions.

What I saw, was a hasty announcement made, before any time was truly put into figuring out what the actual plan/objectives were, as well as before there is any remarkable change to justify such an announcement, laced with contradicting statements.

My basic, overall point was..., take the time to have a proper layout/plan, time to implement at least one substantial change in the engine code (which can be merged upstream, if desired), and then make an announcement.
Two months time honestly does not allow for these things.

This would have gained much better reviews than what followed.

It seems scarecrowman has been around this sort of project planning for quite some time, and honestly should have known better. That is a critical criticism from me personally.

I do not think anyone had any intentions of trolling or putting a stop to the project, but rather pointing out obvious ripples, and for the most part offering some (maybe harsh) critical criticism.

In all honestly, if you have to state that you held some information back "for fear of putting some people off", that alone should tell you, maybe you had better put a little more time into the overall planning.

I did not see anyone tell them they could not do it. Rather, I saw a few simply stating, if you are going to do it... do it right.
I don't think they should give up on the original idea... just that they should really put more time and work into it before making an announcement, such as the original one made.
If you are going to announce something new... you should have something new. Simple as that.

So, there it is then. A personal opinion, open to the scrutiny, and interpretation of anyone else's point of view.

[sorcerykid]

So I sit back trying to figure out, what the hell is even going on here?

Minecore (nice name btw. even if it has "Mine" in it) was not and will never be anything that could split the community nor anything even close to what Minetest is. Some people are so frustrated about Minetest development that they create a fork to publish their idea of what should be done.

Minetest devs do a lot of work, but little to nothing is seen outside the dev circlejerk (GitHub issues and PRs) and new features figuratively (and sometimes literally) need years to be released to the final non-dev version and actually visible changes pretty much never happen. I can see why people think there is no progress if the latest REAL change was the introduction of mods.

Indeed, this is the principle reason that I forked the engine. Most of the bug fixes and new features in Minetest S3 would probably never gain any traction if they were submitted to the official GitHub. Regardless of how viable a suggestion is, it seems far more likely to be criticized based on the whimsical opinions and petty valuations of core developers instead of unbiased technical and/or practical merits of the suggestion itself. The issue tracker is almost like a soap opera on replay at times.

A perfect example of this phenomenon in action is issue #5017

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/5017

I gave valid justification for the ability to efficiently search nodes in a given radius, inclusive of the center node. In the case of spawning bones, for example, it is necessary to find the nearest air node at the death position of the player then surrounding the death position (since the player could theoretically die on a rail node, a ladder node, etc.)

Yet a certain core developer outright dismissed my suggestion without discussion, insisting that the correct behavior of minetest.find_node_near( ) is to never search the center node, and that extending this API function as proposed would be effectively worthless. Of course the core dev didn't offer up any concrete examples to prove this was always the case. In fact, the burden was placed on me to supply statistical reports from my server logs merely to justify my claim.

• 

Of course both TenPlus1 and I were quick to point out that this feature would amount to only a couple extra lines of CPP code and no additional overhead, while streamlining the logic of numerous mods. But sadly, whether features like this are both beneficial and economical for the community at large doesn't seem to be a key factor when it comes to improving the Minetest engine. There always has to be some needless contention at play to forestall continued development.

• 

Seeing how experiences like this frequently play out on GitHub, I haven't found much benefit in participating there. It's so much easier (and more rewarding) to fork the engine than trying to talk to a brick wall.

[sofar]

HAHAHAHA

[sorcerykid]

On the subject of the discussion, I will say that I do like the idea of the Minecore project and look forward to seeing where it goes. It appears to have a solid basis, and a competent designer/developer team at the helm. Good luck to all involved!

[Linuxdirk]

Regardless of how viable a suggestion is, it seems far more likely to be criticized based on the whimsical opinions and petty valuations of core developers instead of unbiased technical and/or practical merits of the suggestion itself.

Welcome to Minetest development! :)

Seeing how experiences like this frequently play out on GitHub, I haven't found much benefit in participating there.

I tried being nice, I tried being blunt, I tried only seeing the technical side ... Neither worked. I think it would be more efficient to continue fixing things for and by myself using mods where possible.

[rubenwardy]

Ha! That feature was added as an extra parameter to find_node_near. You also closed the issue, not a dev

Perhaps you should try being useful, by testing and spotting mistakes in opened PRs that you like, rather than bitching all the time

[paramat]

A perfect example of this phenomenon in action is issue #5017 [...]

I gave valid justification for the ability to efficiently search nodes in a given radius, inclusive of the center node. In the case of spawning bones, for example, it is necessary to find the nearest air node at the death position of the player then surrounding the death position (since the player could theoretically die on a rail node, a ladder node, etc.)

Yet a certain core developer outright dismissed my suggestion without discussion, [...]

sorcerykid this post is very similar to viewtopic.php?p=308618#p308618 except the 'certain core dev' is now another person.

sofar's comment was technical and valid for the specific case of placing bones, it looks quite likely that adding a centre node check would not be any more efficient.
He did not 'dismiss it without discussion', he just disagreed at the time and was discussing it with you. His comment was not unpleasant or unreasonable in any way, people are allowed to disagree with you.
In another thread https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/5213 the idea was also being discussed and another dev (me) was considering it as useful for more general uses. red-001 opened a PR for it and it was merged with a very rare 4 core dev approvals.
So how you're trying to twist this is bizarre.

Your post is full of nonsense and negativity, and supportive of this example of nonsense and negativity:

Minetest devs do a lot of work, but little to nothing is seen outside the dev circlejerk (GitHub issues and PRs) and new features figuratively (and sometimes literally) need years to be released to the final non-dev version and actually visible changes pretty much never happen. I can see why people think there is no progress if the latest REAL change was the introduction of mods.

[Linuxdirk]

Your post is full of nonsense and negativity, and supportive of this example of nonsense and negativity:

Prove me wrong.

[Stix]

How come a thread about forking the Minetest engine has come to this: a squabble? these recent posts are very offtopic and must be pretty discouraging to the OP. just my thoughts....
*EDIT: couldnt this be carried-on elsewhere if you must continue?

[Inocudom]

Scarecrowman, you should show us screenshots of your engine when you can. If it is a big improvement over the current one that is in Minetest, maybe it could be a suitable replacement one day.

[roboto]

Everyone, we're no longer a fork of MT. We're on our own. Wish us luck.

We changed our name from Minecore to Qub3d.

If you want to contribute code, check out https://phab.qub3d.org

[Stix]

While having a new independent open-source Minecraft like game/engine sounds great, I'm kinda sad AFAIK all projects of forking MT and going out on their own has failed thus-far. I hope im wrong and that this new engine/game will have a long life. best of luck to the team!

[Ferk]

We've been told it would be a waste of our time to mess with the engine by some of you, (though we're not confident about that,) -so we are just taking word for it and ditching the idea of using MTE as the starting point.

I cannot find the explanations or arguments from those "some" who said you should better ditch the MT engine. Was it someone outside of the forum?

There's people who mentioned that forking the engine just for specific features (such as redstone or mobs) would indeed be wasteful considering there's nothing preventing you from using MTE for it. most of the engine devs already support those feature ideas in some form (See for example this ticket from one of them, you can see mobs and some level of automation were on the list, though not included yet cos the engine currently doesn't have a way to make it work efficiently), and for what I can see, the main reason the engine doesn't have better support for it is lack of development resources (which your team also seems to lack, since you were looking for C++ programmers). The engine and the MTG development directions are not the same.. just because something is not planned to be included in MTG does not mean it's not welcome in MT. Or that's my impression.

You can already do most of those things (redstone and mobs) from Lua (although not efficiently) and you can make PRs for the engine to improve efficiency and features if you actually have the development resources to do it.

Seeing the pace in which this new engine is being developed, I think you are gonna need some years in this project only to reach a level of functionality that's even close to MT.
That's totally fine if you are willing to do it and if you consider this a personal enriching experience or a fun experiment you enjoy playing with, but if you are actually doing this for the community, think if you are actually willing to spend a huge amount of time with little or no short/middle term results before you actually invest so much time on this that you'll inevitably reach a point where abandoning the project without completing it would be very wasteful (that's the real "point of no return").

I have personally a great deal of unfinished projects, but there's a difference between doing something for fun, experimentation or personal usefulness vs doing it under compromise and with the expectation to get some level of recognition or community support. The first case is always enjoyable, unfinished or not, the second can be disheartening and should be thoroughly considered before embarking on it.

That said, if you are actually having good reasons for getting such amount of work under your shoulders and get on with it till completion, that's sure a noble effort which I applaud.

[Linuxdirk]

Wish us luck.

Good luck! (And maybe have an absolutely possible unlimited world size system in mind.)

No really! Good luck in this! Your art looks awesome! Hopefully you manage the first few years of development that are anything except fun!

[ThomasMonroe]

I deleted my post, PM me if you want to read it

[LMD]

Hmm - can I help ? Does the Engine stand yet ? Where can I find it ? What is still required ?
I have C99, Java, Lua and Python experience. I know how to deal with DBs and OpenGL. I also did quite much frontend development, although using Java. Tell me if I am needed.

Good luck! (And maybe have an absolutely possible unlimited world size system in mind.)

Forget about it ! (a) Minetest Worlds are big enough ! (b) You'd increase the DB's PRIMARY KEY, an INTEGER; that means youd have to use 2 primary keys... or you would use multiple tables... so, complicating for no reason

[texmex]

Hmm - can I help ? Does the Engine stand yet ? Where can I find it ? What is still required ?
I have C99, Java, Lua and Python experience. I know how to deal with DBs and OpenGL. I also did quite much frontend development, although using Java. Tell me if I am needed.

Good luck! (And maybe have an absolutely possible unlimited world size system in mind.)

Forget about it ! (a) Minetest Worlds are big enough ! (b) You'd increase the DB's PRIMARY KEY, an INTEGER; that means youd have to use 2 primary keys... or you would use multiple tables... so, complicating for no reason

For the love of Mese, would you stop resurrecting dead threads? This project is discontinued and its successor Qub3d has no presence on the forums. For chat there’s both a Minetest IRC and a Minetest Discord. :)