Wuzzy wrote:4) The minetest.net homepage is not good enough in explaining what Minetest can do. It kind of lacks the overview. There is a grand total of 6 “meh” screenshots, mostly MTG. There is no real showcase of high-quality games or servers. These
Solarus and
FLARE webpages got it right. The
Minetest webpage didn't.
There were multiple discussions on modernizing the page or at least adapt it to the reality that was introduced with 5.0.0 … i.e. content database hidden somewhere in the footer instead of bein positioned in a prominent location on the main page. It is nice to have a link on the “customize” page, but no-one will click this tab in reality.
People get scared away by the dark and depressing header image and the six utterly bland screenshots that are labelled as a “Gallery”, more like a joke.
But this applies to the whole page. For example: Click “features”, boom, the menu is gone, no way to get back to other menu options. Or click on “Downloads” there the menu is visible again. Do not mess with navigation options. Ever. If there is a menu bar, show it on all pages. Or at least add a hamburger menu or a three dots menu to show the navigation options when scrolling away from the navigation bar.
Oh, and while on “Downloads”. Why is the first section there about the FAQ? And why is the “Get it on Google Play” so badly aligned? And speaking of this button, what do
{# and
#} around the APK link mean? And why are the Linux links so inconsistent?
The Debian link brings you to the package search instead of the package, the Ubuntu link brings you to a package sources overview or a PPA, the Fedora link brings you to the package, and VoidLinux link brings you to something – dead? And I am not entirely sure, do tey still use
make install on FreeBSD instead of using the package manager for self-compiled packages, too?
I am by far not a web designer (heck, my website bases on changing the Apache directory listing output using CSS), but I know when I see a user-friendly and modern game engine website, and minetest.net is not one.
Wuzzy wrote:This single feature must be advertised much more heavily, plus showcasing a few quality games (problem: we don't have any)
We don’t have any good games because the core devs did not make one (according to paramat the core devs are “the people most qualified to create new games”).
Wuzzy wrote:Every game we have now is …
… basically are more or less heavy modded “Minetest Game”.
Wuzzy wrote:The UI looks horrible, especially the main menu is user-hostile and ugly and needs a major overhaul.
This won’t happen because it could cause minor breakage in how the UI of mods look. Having a look at Minetest development shows that the devs are uber scared of even the slightest inconvenience related to stuff that was made for 3-4 larger updates ago (which is pretty much 3-4 years).
There are some things that won’t change until someone forks Minetest and gets successful with it and will have some active devs that do not fear breaking backwards compatibility for content that was made for multiple years old versions and is nowadays abandoned.
1. World size
2. Maximum registered nodes size
3. Lighting system
4. Maximum stack size
5. Those stupid Formspecs and their weird syntax
6. An actual game shipped with default installation
Wuzzy wrote:Google Play is flooded with crappy Minetest forks for Android. In the best case they are just crappy and in the worst case include advertisements or even in-app-purchases.
Don’t worry, the devs are generous towards them. Some devs even worked for them (and at least one dev got money for working for one of them) and the majority of the devs endorses those forks to parasitize the Minetest infrastructure.
(All of my statements base on facts that are provable by searching through the forums and the GitHub repositories but actually I am too fucking lazy doing this now. I just accepted the development pace and style for Minetest. We can’t change it anyways, so why putting effort in changing it?)