While I've been away I've been doing a lot of thinking and minetest, and about programming and game/engine design in general.
I want to make a fork of minetest that functions as a general-purpose voxel engine, which minetest is clearly not intended to be and never will. My main concerns are these:
- Minetest is specialized. It has far too many game-specific features, all of which need to go.
- Minetest is poorly managed. It has no clear goal and currently exists as a list of ideas, nothing more.
- Minetest is dearly missing many essential features. most of which will never be added.
- Minetest is too entrenched in 'tradition' to fix many things, for example the very limiting lua-only API.*
- Minetest is horribly niche and old fashioned in terms of branding and appeal. It's unpolished in terms of the application, the sites, and its entire presence. (except for the CDB of course.)
- Minetest has horrible settings management, and user friendliness in general. Setting up a game and creating a world with mods and settings feels eerily like managing an SQL database, which after doing so for two years I can tell you no-one should ever have to do.
So, now we get to the point of this topic. I can do this alone, but it will be slow and very annoying because of all the things I have yet to learn. So I'd like to know if anyone's interested in this proposal, before I even start planning properly so I can account for that in the roadmap.
Lastly, this project will not be non-profit. Any team members will receive a cut from whatever ads or donations the project receives, when I get that set up.
I love Lua. Coming from a background of classic maths and logic notation, lua is very close to the ideal scripting language from my point of view. However, I also love Python, JS, and many other scripting languages.
It's obviously one of the most long-term goals, but getting one or more other modding languages working would be amazing. The main downside of lua for me at least is the lack of huge module population that python and others have. Being able to write the main content for a mod/game in lua and then the menus and forms in JS, and then the file control and data management in python would be a dream come true.
(something even crazier that I've thought about doing before, and even attempted once, is developing a new syntax format to streamline developing minetest content. I've gotta say, it looks promising.)