About Minetest and Exporting it to ipa and apk

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vega007
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About Minetest and Exporting it to ipa and apk

by vega007 » Post

Hello everyone, first of all i'm just a beginner and newbie here so please don't mind my questions if they seem stupid, thanks, so my first question is, is it possible to use minetest open source to make a mobile game and launch it on google play & appstore? if yes, how? ( if it's yes i would be very grateful if you show me the steps so i can hire someone to do it for me ) thanks again, second one if i can't use minetest to make a game that i can launch on google play and appstore how can i do it? because i see many guys using minecraft similar source codes and i don't know from where they get it like this guy "https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... .minicraft" thank you so much and i hope someone can answer my questions,

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Re: About Minetest and Exporting it to ipa and apk

by Blockhead » Post

This topic is going to open a bit of a can of worms given some history of Minetest on Android but here goes. I'm goign to remain as neutral and factual as I know how

We have an official app (google play) for Android. So that's an easy starting place. So easy in fact that we're pretty much certain that loads of the free Minecraft clones on Google Play are just Minetest with some custom games, mods and textures applied - I wouldn't know exactly, since I only have the official Minetest app and that's it.

The can of worms really opens here. The most successful of the Minetest derivative apps is called Multicraft (source). It's actually way more successful than our official app but it includes advertisements*. The success and the practice of including ads has been subject to a lot of controversy, but it does not constitute a violation of the GPL. You can read a lot of discussion about Multicraft on this forum, which I'll leave to you. There are other Minetest derivatives that actually do violate the GPL and may have other bad practices but any comment I could give would be speculation since again, I've never played any of them and never would. Still, the fact that they exist and can connect to Minetest servers means a lot of server admins have to deal with players and the reports usually aren't good. Don't be like those guys.

The next topic is iOS. We have no official iOS app. Again, if you do a search on these forums you'll find threads discussing and bemoaning the lack of it but in summary the problem is twofold. (1) The Apple App Store doesn't like GPL-licensed software and (2) we just don't have the expertise.

Yet you'll find a lot of people (kids mostly, we think) that play Minetest on iOS. Kinda. They can only play on 0.4.x-compatible servers because none of the Minetest derivatives on that platform seem to be based on our later 5.x series which broke backwards compatibility. I assume it took them a fair bit of effort to port the code to iOS and that they don't expect to see benefit by breaking backwards compatibility, so they stay on 0.4.x.

The history of Minetest derivatives on mobile platforms has mostly been a history of exploitation: See a game engine that's almost ready, take it, put a mod and texture pack on it, add some advertisements, make money. The illegal bit is that most of them don't contribute their changes back - the exception is that Multicraft does, but it remains controversial anyway. Not making your source available violates the GPL, but they just don't care. That's the summary, and again you'll find more info if you search around these forums.

So if you want to do something ethical, the best thing you could probably do is to help is get Minetest's current version, 5.4.0, or maybe 5.5.0 by the time such a project could be completed - ported to iOS so it can be distributed on Cydia or similar. There's no real money in it for you if you do the iOS port though. You probably stand to gain a bigger market share by supporting 0.4.x because that's where the majority of the market is at. It'd be a philanthropic endeavour.

Footnote
* The exact details of how many and when the ads are displayed are part of the controversy surrounding Multicraft and other Minetest derivatives. I won't even try to guess here because I've never installed Multicraft and never would when I know it's just based on Minetest**. What remains indisputable however is that there are ads, because this is stated on the Google Play store page for the app. Multicraft having ads included shouldn't effect anyone's moral judgement of Multicraft.

Footnote to the footnote
**Unless maybe I really desperately wanted a free Minecraft clone for some reason instead of other games for Minetest Engine, but I'd probably just try to install Multicraft Game onto the official Minetest client first.
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Re: About Minetest and Exporting it to ipa and apk

by PolySaken » Post

If you want to use it to make an actual game, you're out of luck. The engine is hardcoded to only produce minecraft clones as is, so unless you want to fork the engine and rewrite most of the C++ code, you'll just end up with a less successful multicraft. If all you want to do is propagate a minetest "game" (subgame) as its own app, you can do some pretty trivial modifications to the builtin menu scripts and package your subgame with the standard android build, provided you follow the licensing rules.
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