The casual player
believes KNOWS that Notch (or Microsoft if they're too young to know about pre-Microsoft Minecraft) invented the voxel mining game genre which therefore only consists of Minecraft (the
alleged original) and Minecraft ripoffs that fail badly at being Minecraft because they aren't Minecraft. Mind you, these people also
believe know that Microsoft invented both the computer operating system, the graphical user interface, the word processor and the spreadsheet application. They also believe that macOS (if they've ever heard of it) is a Windows ripoff for wealthy, latte-sipping hipsters, GNU/Linux (if they'e ever heard of it) is an amateurish Windows ripoff, and Android is an iOS ripoff for people who can't afford an iPhone.
This makes Minecraft the gold standard against which everything else has to be measured. If something, anything is different from how it is in Minecraft, it sucks because it fails at being Minecraft. So for these people, Minetest will suck hard unless it becomes a 1:1 Minecraft clone that does everything that Minecraft does in exactly the same way Minecraft does it and that looks exactly like Minecraft. So if items are automatically picked up in Minetest, or if you have a 3×3 crafting grid right away, or if redstone is yellow and called MESE, or if you can stack 99 instead of 64 items, this sucks for people used to Minecraft because it's different from Minecraft. Even if it's technically superiour, it's still different and therefore bad. I'm pretty sure they'll say that installing mods without having to weave them into the engine's code sucks too because that isn't how it's done in the "original". So the only way to make something better than Minecraft is to create such a 1:1 clone and pile cool stuff on top of it without changing anything about the being-exactly-like-Minecraft thing.
Of course, this is not Minetest's goal, and it shouldn't be. This means that Minetest will continue sucking for casual gamers who come from Minecraft, but that's the way it is. And Minetest already has one redeeming quality that's enough of an advantage over Minecraft that it has drawn a number of gamers from Minecraft to Minetest: It's free-to-play.
Another problem that arises here is that Minetest is basically unplayable for the vast majority of the Generation Z. Our generations are used to having actual computers for all kinds of gaming. This doesn't apply to the Zoomers. They only use computers for playing either the newest AAA games or Fortnite, and these computers are always overclocked, high-end dedicated gaming machines running Windows and Windows only. But for everything that's neither the newest hottest shit from Gamescom nor Fortnite they use their smartphone which is more often an Android phone than not. (BTW: Port Fortnite to Android and make smartphones powerful enough to run it at 1080p60 or even 4K120 on highest detail settings, and they won't need a computer anymore at all.)
This collides hard with Minetest's badly neglected Android client that's still mostly built for experienced GNU/Linux users but with touch controls slapped on it in order to compensate for the lack of a physical keyboard and a non-screen pointer device. It collides because the Android client is by far mostly used by people who usually don't even use Windows, let alone GNU/Linux.
Wuzzy wrote:Hmmm, this begs the question: Do we even have a manual or any documentation on how to use Minetest on Android? Like, a wiki page or something? Sounds like it would be desperately needed.
Having a wiki is all fine and dandy, but it's also highly inconvenient if you have to look up stuff
while playing because there's no in-game guidance what-so-ever. Even desktop gamers can't be expected to run Minetest on one screen and have the official wiki open on another or to switch back and forth between Minetest and their browser with the wiki open. Parallel use of a wiki is useful for setting up Arch, but not for gaming.
Wikis maintained by a small community also tend to be somewhat unreliable unless you have good, dedicated, disciplined maintainers. If you don't, you end up with a wiki that's 20% "TODO" and 10–20% red links, and the rest may be outdated, written from a developer's rather than a player's POV or both.
What makes matters even worse is how difficult it is to wrap casual computer/smartphone users' minds around the fact that there are wikis out there that aren't Wikipedia. I kid you not.
And let's not forget one important thing: Gamers don't read manuals anymore, casual gamers doubly not. They want to jump right in without having to read up on stuff. The only way to teach a gamer how to play a game is an in-game tutorial.
If anything, the Android client has to become its very own entity with a specialised mobile graphical frontend instead of the desktop client built against an Android SDK plus touch controls in lieu of a mouse cursor that's expected to run as-is (even worse if it's ported and built by people who have never used it themselves and never will, and who simply assume that it works unless bug reports or, better yet, PRs come rolling in on Github). It has to be designed for touch controls first and foremost, it has to be intuitive and self-explanatory, even for people who don't know the desktop client (and I guess way more than 90% of all Android Minetest players don't).
Linuxdirk wrote:Wuzzy wrote:The player also had trouble with privileges. I wonder how you are even supposed to grant yourself privs.
You click the three dots on the left, then you click the speech bubble, and then you type
/grantme XYZ, where
XYZ is the permission you want. Not intuitive at all and needs prior knowledge of how the Minetest permissions system works. Managing permissions (even such fundamental ones as flying in creative mode) on Android is as inconvenient as it is on PC. There is no easy way to set permissions on either of the platforms and on Android it’s even harder.
Just like I've said: Minetest is designed for experienced GNU/Linux and console users in mind, and so is its Android client. But it ends up being used by people for whom anything that isn't 100% intuitive point-and-click is unusable; Windows users who have never laid their hands on some *nix at best, Android users who
don't even have a freaking keyboard in the first place at worst.
Linuxdirk wrote:Wuzzy wrote:- Ugly main menu and worlds named “unnamed” with random number: No idea how this happened, the creation of worlds was off-camera
This is the default behavior if you do not enter a name. Instead of something sane like “Unnamed World (created: DATE)” it was
decided by nerzhul to use what we have right now.
Only feasible solution:
Make players enter names for their worlds. Refuse to generate worlds as long as there's no name entered.
Linuxdirk wrote:Wuzzy wrote:Looks like there are no tooltips on Android
Yes, that’s the case. Minetest was made with “always having a mouse cursor” in mind and was never properly adapted to mobile platforms.
Not only "always having a mouse cursor", but "always having a physical alphanumeric keyboard
and a pointing device that isn't also your screen".
Linuxdirk wrote:Wuzzy wrote:- Hotbar inventory slots on top not on bottom: Clear Minecraft bias shows here. This can be dismissed ;)
In the early days of Minecraft the “hotbar slots” were on top, too. But the Minetest developers reconsidered that and moved those slots to the bottom. Which makes sense, because the hotbar is on the bottom, why should the hotbar slots be on the top then?
On the one hand, this falls under "It isn't identical to Minecraft, so it sucks."
On the other hand, if Minecraft used to be the same as Minetest is now, the player in question simply isn't old enough to remember. As I said, these gamer kiddies think Microsoft has created Minecraft, and they basically assume that Minecraft has always been the same as it was when they've discovered it.
Linuxdirk wrote:Wuzzy wrote:PS: I bet the player will be shocked when he learns his video on this tiny YT channel generated such a large discussion. :D
A large and absolutely valid discussion :)
Just link this thread under his video and see what happens.
paramat wrote:"Rating system and final results": Are mostly referring to MTG. They cannot judge MT from only MTG.
But they do. And why? Because they see Minetest as the same kind of closed, self-contained black box that's Minecraft instead of a modding platform with a basic game included (again, they find a voxel mining game and assume it's identical to Minecraft in everything but name and price). Because they don't know that Minetest is modular and consists of an engine and a basic game that has got next to nothing to do with the engine. Because they don't read up on stuff they randomly install from the Google Play Store and jump right in and derp around instead.
If you want casual gamers to like Minetest, you have to give them something that feels like a self-contained black box at first while giving them everything they desire. The alternative is to ignore the hate from the casual gamers and concentrate on the same target audience as GNU/Linux outside of Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
