A few words about why I did this:
Basically I was fed up by Pixture being so broken in the latest public release. The obvious first bug is missing compability with Minetest 5.0.0.
But even without that, Pixture 0.1.1 was basically unplayable. The biggest problem IMO was the crafting system, which was so ridiculously unusable. It was a real shame, because Pixture was not always that broken, it just became broken shortly before kaadmy disappeared. So rather than to let Pixture die, at least I try to keep it on basic life support. :-)
Changes
In this section I will highlight a few changes and fixed I made.
Crafting Revamp
This one is the second-most important change in Pixture Revival. Crafting is actually being in an usable state again.
Basically, the crafting principle of Pixture is the same. I figured the worst bottleneck was the list. The problem was that it showed ALL items at once, not just the once that are actually craftable. I can see the rationale behind that, it seemed to be like a crafting menu/crafting guide hybrid that just went terribly wrong. The reason why this was bad is because you just are forced to constantly search the entire list EACH TIME you want to craft something. This could take ages and really makes you feel bad. So, fixing crafting was the number two prority of this project (number one priority was, of course, to make it work in Minetest 5.0.0!).
I will take part of the blame for the bad crafting system in Pixture. After all, it was me who suggested to move away from the classic Minetest-Game-style crafting in order to “simplify” it. It didn't turn out well. But the system can be repaired, and so I did.
The most important change I made is actually very simple: By default, the list now will only show the relevant crafts, i.e. any crafts you could actually perform from the input items. This makes the list now much, much smaller and is way more managable. Plus, the crafting guide is still there, just click a little button and you will again see all possible crafts.
You might wonder now, “wait, won't the ‘?’ button collide with the item display if a craft requires 4 input items?” and the answer is “Yes!”. The trick? Pixture currently just doesn't have any crafts which require 4 different input items. The maximum right now is 3. Still, I'm really not happy with this and I know a better design needs to be found.
I also made a few smaller usability changes: I added shift-click support to all inventories (=shift-click insta-transfers items to other inventory). If you double-click a craft in the crafting list, it will perform that craft once (if possible). Item slots in the craft recipe that require only an item from a particular group (like, any planks) are highlighted in a different color.
Adding it all togehter, in my playtest, it turned out to much easier to actually craft, and crafting finally is way faster, as it is supposed to be. :-)
Cruft Removal
Pixture had, in my opinion, a lot of cruft that wasn't really neccessary. There was too much chat spam going on and questionable chat commands.
For example, there was a command “uberspeed” that is like fast mode, but, like, super fast. But in contrast, the normal fast mode was made painfully slow. I said to myself “Screw it!” and just made the normal fast mode speed reasonably fast and removed the uberspeed command. I can see the rationale for having 2 fast mode speeds, but I'd rather have this implemented properly in Minetest instead of hacking it in a confusing way as a chat command.
I also removed many chat messages which I deemed unneccessary and breaking the game flow, like the annoying “welcome” message which appeared each time you joined the game …
v6 mapgen experiments
No, there is NO official mapgen v6 support in Pixture Revival! The biomes are such an essential part of the game, and v6 doesn't support custom biomes. However, I still experimented with the v6 mapgen a bit, to make it at least work in a rudimentary way that doesn't look utterly broken. And indeed, the result looks nice:
BUT! The devil lies in the details. Many biomes are missing, like the swamp or the wastelands. Some items, like dry grass would be simply unobtainable due to the lack of savannahs. So while the v6 is technically working, it's not suitable for real-world gameplay at the moment. For this reason, v6 is still disabled.
New slab/stair textures
The old slab and stair textures just used the same image on all sides. This looked bad for some blocks:
So I just made a few individual images for the sides of slabs and stairs:
Creative Inventory
Creative Mode now finally works! Sadly, not per-player, but it's still better than nothing.
Also note the “plus” icon is the icon for the Creative Inventory. The icon for achievements (which was the plus sign in Pixture) has been changed to a trophy.