The reason I want to play MC more than MT

[pampogokiraly]

IMPORTANT! Read before reading anything else

• This is not an another MineTest vs MineCraft discussion!
• Everything that I state here, is just my opinion! If you are not interested in my opinions, then don't read any further!
• I only played MineCraft for like 10 minutes, but I watched millions of MineCraft videos, and I'm also completly up-to-date with everything that's happening to MineCraft.
• I might be wrong about a few things, but in general it doesen't really changes anything about my opinions :P
• Please fix my grammar mistakes, or just simply any mistakes in my general english! (I'm Hungarian)

So my problem with MineTest is that there is no good default game!
Don't get me wrong, I know what MineTest is made for, but in general this is why I want to play MineCraft more than MineTest. Let me explain this in more detail:

So lets say I made something that I am really proud of, and I want to share it with others.
For this I not just have to show a picture, I also have to tell which game I use, which texture pack I use, and also all the mods that I use.... at the end I just have to hope that others use the same mods, tps, and games so they understand why it was really hard to make that "thing".

As an example I made a lovely decoration that fits into my farm, but actually looking at ten more mods, I don't know if I can/should be proud of my decoration! All mods approach the same decoration in a different way and I can just say "It was too easy with this mod. I should have used that mod instead"!
The same example goes for a pile of diamonds. If someone uses the technic mod, then he/she can get the pile of diamonds easily, while someone who uses pipeworks and mesecon, it's so much harder!

People in MineTest are very different, and so they all use different mods!
Lets also say that I want to play MineTest with a group of people... the outcome is going to be horrible! Everyone is used to playing with different mods and games, and so you can't decide on which mods not to use, and which mods to use!
This is not the case for MineCraft! If a group can't decide on which mods to use/not-to-use then they just go with the vanilla MineCraft because It's already a good game, and it doesen't need mods to play it unlike MineTest!


So a little bit back in time, I said that "you can't decide whetever you should be proud of your farming decoration or your big pile of diamonds!"
Some people might just say "You shouldn't be proud of things that you made inside other's games, instead you should be proud of the games and mods that you created!"
And I fully agree! But then this raises the question: "Why MineTest isn't straight up a game engine?"
And now you propably think "But wait! MineTest is already a game engine!"
Unfortunately not! (before you read any further! I do make games with a 2D game engine named "stencyl") (also don't forget what I said at the very beggining! It's all just my opinion about things!)

So here is why I think MineTest at It's current form is not a game engine:
Lets say that you have a great game idea that would use MineTest's block engine.
You start off by making a new game that should be empty! But It's not!
Instead of getting an empty canvas where you can make your own game, MineTest already brings a lot of features that you might not even want in your game! To name a few, MineTest gives you gravity, inventory, a hand, a hotbar, a sun and a moon (with day-night cycle), and a lot more!

A game engine can't work like this, because people lose creativity by seening which direction the "game engine" brings them with all the gravitiy and other stuff...


Okay! But what about modding?
As I know, MineTest has a great API that allows creators to make awesome mods!
Very true, and so with this here is how I can express my feelings about MineTest:
"MineTest is a great modding engine without a game that you can mod!"
Of course this is not entirely true but everything that I see in MineTest feels this way :(


So I actually really love MineTest, and I was thinking that imo what needs to be changed to make the game(engine) feel better ("for me" as stated at the beggining)
I actually got two ideas:

1. Make MineTest into a full on board blocky game engine! This would change so much, and in general would make MineTest a lot better in my opinion! :D
2. "give up" on this game-making, and mod-making strange concept, and start making a real good game (kinda like how MineCraft operates currently).
   If this would happen then I would actually love to help! I am pretty good at coming up with good ideas, that are fun and balanced at the same time (I helped this way in multiple other games (shapez.io for example))!
   I actually like this idea more than the first one, because I just love playing the same game with others! :D

This is all what I wanted to say, and feel free to tell me whenever you disagree, or agree with me!
Just please, please, please don't forget that this is all just My opinion!!

[Wuzzy]

I only played MineCraft for like 10 minutes, but I watched millions of MineCraft videos, and I'm also completly up-to-date with everything that's happening to MineCraft.

Hmm, I think you accidentally noted another problem with Minetest. Lack of communication. You know on Minecraft news, but not much on Minetest news. You can't be blamed. Players don't often hear from development news. You have to go straight to GitHub, but this is the Nerd Zone! :D The only official dev news for players is the News forum which you see usually only posts for releases or major new features. Would be nice if more player-digestable dev news would be written.
But this will of course eat away time, who wants to do that? Hmm...

So my problem with MineTest is that there is no good default game!

I agree with that … 50%. But yes, this IS a serious problem. The lack of a default game that newbies will actually like AND understand is definitely a big problem when we want to attract new people. But this is more an issue of presentation.
And frankly, we don't really have a really good default game to present yet. MAYBE that could be Repixture (that I maintain, hehe), because it's relatively simple, will have what players probably expect, ... but IMO it might be too small. The reason I only agree 50% is cuz I'm not really happy with selecting ONE game as default tho. This might us just throw right back into the Minetest Game ages, in which only one game dominates discourse. This is NOT what Minetest game should be, not what Minetest was made for.

What I would REALLY love is that when minetest.net would improve its website to include a beautiful, up-to-date, hand-curated, maintained, well-described, screenshotted showcase of the best downloadble functional (!) games right on the website. With inspiration from <https://www.solarus-games.org/en/games>. This would go a long way to actually show players what Minetest can do.
This is so much better than just listing down highly technical features, talking about modding and other things that players don't understand.

People in MineTest are very different, and so they all use different mods!
Lets also say that I want to play MineTest with a group of people... the outcome is going to be horrible! Everyone is used to playing with different mods and games, and so you can't decide on which mods not to use, and which mods to use!
This is not the case for MineCraft! If a group can't decide on which mods to use/not-to-use then they just go with the vanilla MineCraft because It's already a good game, and it doesen't need mods to play it unlike MineTest!

That's kind of the point of Minetest, isn't it? Yeah, you have to choose one specific game if you want to share, there is no way around that. I understand your complaint, but I'm afraid just due to the nature of Minetest, there is no real solution for that without radically changing

If Minetest is not a game engine, then WHAT is Minetest? Minetest is clearly not a game on its own, as there is nothing to play. Also note that Minetest and Minetest Game are stored on separate repositories.

If you want to start from 0, it's probably better to either start from 0 or use a truly general-purpose game engine like Godot.
what Minetest is. But I don't want that, and I suspect many in the community either.

But I think the problem you described CAN be alleviated by seriously working on the usability front. Because a LOT is wrong with Minetest's usability. If serious usability work would be done on even just the main menu, that would be such a an improvement. As for mods, Minetest could just make it as painless as possible to manage mods.

To name a few, MineTest gives you gravity, inventory, a hand, a hotbar, a sun and a moon (with day-night cycle), and a lot more!

ALL of the named features can by disabled and bypassed with ease. The fact that they are on by default is unfortunate, but it's historical baggage. Can't change that now. Even gravity can be disabld, although then you must figure out how to do movement.

But yeah, it is beneficial to try to reduce some of the more arcane hardcoded assumptions that Minetest uses, though. Work on that front is constantly happening, though. The API is extended all the time.

So here is why I think MineTest at It's current form is not a game engine:

Minetest is absolutely 100% a game engine in my book. Minetest serves as the basis of multiple games that have quite different gameplay. The majority of games are sandbox and within this group you find a lot of similarities. But there are also puzzle and combat games.
If Minetest is not a game engine, then on what basis do these games run on? Minetest, of course!

I believe when you say "game engine" you think about a super generalized piece of software, not tailored towards one type of game. Like Godot. But even with those you usually run into limitations eventually. Many game engines are restricted and have a clear purpose for only one genre, or feature set. Other game engines were created for 1 game only. The fact that these are restricted in features does not mean they are not game engines. Game engines specific to one genre only exist, too. FLARE is an example.

The reason why game engines even exist is to speed up the development of games, by making certain tasks more simple/faster/efficient to do. Which Minetest absolutely does. Some great games like Inside the Box were created with Minetest. Inside the Box would literally not exist without Minetest. The claim that Minetest is not a game engine is absurd.

Sorry, you calling Minetest not a game engine has triggered me. :D

A game engine can't work like this, because people lose creativity by seening which direction the "game engine" brings them with all the gravitiy and other stuff...

Just because Minetest is limited to voxel games, and Minetest is arguably also limited in feature does NOT mean it is not a game engine. It just means that the variety of games that you can make with Minetest is limited. This is by design! Minetest was NEVER supposed to be a general-purpose engine for every conceivable game.

Let's look at FLARE: FLARE is even more "restrictive" in the type of games it was made for, namely, action RPGs and a LOT of core features are hardcoded here. This is not a bad thing!

You can criticize that Minetest makes too many assumptions, and I kind of agree. But the fact is, many things can be disabled with a few lines of code, it's really no big deal.

Make MineTest into a full on board blocky game engine! This would change so much, and in general would make MineTest a lot better in my opinion! :D

Well, it already is. This request is not helpful. What specific features are missing?

A game engine can't work like this, because people lose creativity by seening which direction the "game engine" brings them with all the gravitiy and other stuff...

Of course a game engine can work like this. You can say that it sucks that some things are hardcoded and, fair enough, but Minetest is still a game engine. That's not an opinion, that's a fact.

"give up" on this game-making, and mod-making strange concept, and start making a real good game (kinda like how MineCraft operates currently)

Sorry, ain't gonna happen. We have too many game projects already, some of them finished. We can't just shut them all down and pretend that only one game "exists". This would bring Minetest just back to the Minetest Game ages, in which one game de facto dominates all discourse, while others get ignored. NO, this is what I want Minetest to move away from. Just put the spotlight on the actual games that work and are in a "presentable" state.
To be fair, we DO need to have some serious high-quality content, tho. I know, the potential is there, even with all shortcomings of Minetest.

[TumeniNodes]

I only played MineCraft for like 10 minutes, but I watched millions of MineCraft videos, and I'm also completly up-to-date with everything that's happening to MineCraft.

Hmm, I think you accidentally noted another problem with Minetest. Lack of communication. You know on Minecraft news, but not much on Minetest news. You can't be blamed. Players don't often hear from development news. You have to go straight to GitHub, but this is the Nerd Zone! :D The only official dev news for players is the News forum which you see usually only posts for releases or major new features. Would be nice if more player-digestable dev news would be written.
But this will of course eat away time, who wants to do that? Hmm...

Perhaps a "NEWS" tab can be added to the Menu?
Not sure where , as it's already a bit cramped for space now
Of course the content would have to be kept updated by someone willing to devote the time, and who gets their info/news from official sources.
And maybe that "NEWS" tab can be open to modding, so that individual games can use it to keep their players updated with news related to the game? And maybe even a server...

Only catch:
This "NEWS" feature would retrieve News from a new "NEWS" webpage, or some other webpage, which would require pulling info from outside a person's PC (not popular to all people)
This opens some security issues I suppose
This is already the case for ContentDB but, that is run by known/trustworthy sources.
When pulling from 3rd party websites, is where the concern comes into play

[pampogokiraly]

Well.. thanks for the response!

True that I wasn't really correct on the topic of what is a game engine, and what's not.... the thing is that I never really seen any game engines that are only restricted to one type of game (other than MineTest, as it turns out :D ).


(hmmm... I want to explain what I want MineTest to support to be a game engine (I'm talking about my definition of '"game engine'), but I really can't! frick my english!)

[sorcerykid]

the thing is that I never really seen any game engines that are only restricted to one type of game (other than MineTest, as it turns out :D ).

The Dark Engine, is recognized as a game engine even though it was designed with only three games in mind: Thief: The Dark Project, Thief II: The Metal Age, and System Shock 2. As a result it provides a mostly hard-coded feature set, upon which these games can be built using a corresponding visual editor, DromEd. It was never intended for general-purpose game development.

[LaserJet]

I did read the main post but not really the replies.

I use to play Minetest before i got Minecraft. I fully agree with the “Minetest does not feel like a full game.”

I find servers in Minetest more community-like or at least from like 5 years ago. I remember coming on Minetest and joining JT2 and finding Baggins who just showed me around. Thats something you’ll hardly find in Minecraft. There is still alot of room for improvement for Minetest.

I played Minetest way before Minecraft so I want to see this succeed but I also want something unique and creative.

edit: sorcerykid? Suprised you still play. Been a long while since i saw that name.

[Linuxdirk]

So my problem with MineTest is that there is no good default game!

While this is true it's like saying that there is no good default website for a browser or that there is no good default application for the Java runtime. Those things - like Minetest - are just the engines that run the content you feed them.

The lack of an awesomely great default game is that there is no awesomely great game (and with that I mean comparable to other games). There are some promising good games that could be offered on first start of Minetest for players to select from, but that's basically it.

Minetest is an engine. This should be emphatized more.

Let me explain this in more detail:

You just do what you like. If you want this mod, use it, if you want another mod, use that mod instead. Minetest games (and specificially Minetest Game) are very open and modifiable. All of them Most of them are jsut sandboxes where you can do whatever you want.

If you prefer "re-doable" content then the easiest way would be using one of the available games and do not add any mods. So people can reproduce your buildings in an easy way without caring about additional mods.

Lets say that you have a great game idea that would use MineTest's block engine.
You start off by making a new game that should be empty! But It's not!

Of course. You can use Void as base and strip it down even more and disallow all world generators except singlenode. With this you have a game that literally contains nothing except a representation of the player in form of an entity.

To name a few, MineTest gives you gravity, inventory, a hand, a hotbar, a sun and a moon (with day-night cycle), and a lot more!

Those things can be removed if you don't want them. The Minetest API has calls for that. Those things are present because it is just convenient and 99% of all games use those. So they do not need to re-implement it all the time.

A game engine can't work like this, because people lose creativity by seening which direction the "game engine" brings them with all the gravitiy and other stuff...

... like browsers bringing their own style presets.

[Sokomine]

People in MineTest are very different, and so they all use different mods!

Freedom can sometimes be stressful :-) Don't worry too much about it. It's just that way.

Lets also say that I want to play MineTest with a group of people... the outcome is going to be horrible! Everyone is used to playing with different mods and games, and so you can't decide on which mods not to use, and which mods to use!

Well...then the group of people is probably too diffrent? In general, playing something together requires to decide what to play and how. In MT, it's usually a more long-term invenstment. Server owners invest a lot of time and effort in selecting and adapting mods so that they form a game the server owner thinks is good. Just choose one you all like?

This is not the case for MineCraft! If a group can't decide on which mods to use/not-to-use then they just go with the vanilla MineCraft because It's already a good game, and it doesen't need mods to play it unlike MineTest!

To me, MC mostly feels like just another MT server. A bit diffrent in parts, and a lot of useful things are missing, some things are better - and not much intresting variety compared to MT servers.

[MCL]

Some great games that could be featured on the main page: XaEnvironment, RePixture, NodeCore, MCL, MCL 2, Juanchi Game (how do you even pronounce it? Joo-an-chee? Jun-chee? Joo-an-kee?)

[bzt]

Please fix my grammar mistakes, or just simply any mistakes in my general english! (I'm Hungarian)

Nem mondod :-) Ki nem találtam volna :-D

So my problem with MineTest is that there is no good default game!

That's not true. MCL2 is very good even in its half-ready state. It is also the most popular game in MT, just see the sheer number of pages and number of views on its forum topic.

So I actually really love MineTest, and I was thinking that imo what needs to be changed to make the game(engine) feel better ("for me" as stated at the beggining)
I actually got two ideas:

1. Make MineTest into a full on board blocky game engine! This would change so much, and in general would make MineTest a lot better in my opinion! :D
2. "give up" on this game-making, and mod-making strange concept, and start making a real good game (kinda like how MineCraft operates currently).

I agree on 1. However note that this would mean even less playable default game. I think that's fine, there should be two default games: one that's minimal (like developer test and could be shipped with the engine), and one that is playable at once without any modding magic (just like MCL2, it's perfectly fine if this needs to be downloaded and installed separately to the engine). Sadly MTG does not fit into either of these two categories, it falls on the floor between two chairs: it's too complex for a default game, needs constant updates (difficult to ship with the engine), yet it's not enjoyable as-is without mods.

If this would happen then I would actually love to help! I am pretty good at coming up with good ideas, that are fun and balanced at the same time (I helped this way in multiple other games (shapez.io for example))!

This is not so simple with MT. Sadly the developers are not cutting it. Don't get me wrong, they try their best for which I respect them. But still, the number and age of the Open PRs are overwhelming.

People in MineTest are very different, and so they all use different mods!

Freedom can sometimes be stressful :-) Don't worry too much about it. It's just that way.

Providing lots of modules and games is what makes MT great. The real issue here I think is, that its Lua API is terrible; MCL2 is not compatible with MTG for example. Should the engine provide a better and more standard API (instead of that "default" mod monstrocity), this incompatibility would never happened in the first place. Playing with others on the same server (using the same mods) is pretty easy, I think this is one of the things that the engine got right. I find using the UI comfortable and easy to join to MMO worlds.

Let's look at FLARE: FLARE is even more "restrictive" in the type of games it was made for, namely, action RPGs and a LOT of core features are hardcoded here. This is not a bad thing!

I agree! And I also want to add that "restrictiveness" does not limit the games! Just compare Empyrean and Polymorphable. Different views, fixed character vs. multiple characters, different skills, different weapons and tools etc. etc. etc. It's hard to say at first sight that those two games actually use the same engine!

My thoughts: maybe it is time for Minetest-NG? Learning from all the things with MT, I think the best would be to start over from scratch, focusing on these:

• Inherit the basic folder structure, the UI, the way how contentdb works etc. These are great
• Put more to the GPU: by using shaders, allow the GPU to calculate shadows and things like that. The CPU generated brightness of the nodes was a brilliant feature when MT was first released, but time got passed since, hardware changed a lot
• The engine should handle everything from the world's perspective. The core should be game-independent as much as possible, working with terrains, objects, and mobs in a generalized way
• Building on top of that world rendering core, add game-logic separately with a consistent API (aka. merge "default" mod into the engine)
• Provide exactly one way to do one thing. This principle is what made UNIX and C great. I mean by this time all the engine developers and all the modders have a pretty clear idea what are the culprits of the current API, why certain functions had to be changed in the past, and why are difficult to merge certain features into the engine (plus simpler and more consistent API means easier to maintain code base)
• Put lot of effort to document the modding API (the way how to communicate with the game-logic and the world) very well from the start. I'd say this should be the most important part.
• Work together with modders to port current mods to the new, cleaned up API (which does not need "default")

IMHO, these are my two cents. I'm sure these would guarantee the long-term survival of MT.

Cheers,
bzt

[pampogokiraly]

Please fix my grammar mistakes, or just simply any mistakes in my general english! (I'm Hungarian)

Nem mondod :-) Ki nem találtam volna :-D

Hah! Még egy magyar! Így már összesen hárman vagyunk (nem beleértve azokat akikről nem tudok...) :D