From celeron's roadmap.Modders: Give feedback to the core developers (including me)
- Modders mean those who make subgames or individual mods.
- The engine's purpose is largely to provide a good platform for the content that runs on it, be it subgames or individual mods, and one of the first steps in figuring out what features to add is to hear about what modders would imagine having use for.
If no one else does I'd like to start:
For modding I don't know of many features to be added, instead it would offer much more freedom if more engine side definitions and behaviors could be changed. As an example, at the moment it is only possible with ugly hacks to determine when a player ate something. An option to disable drowning would be nice, overriding all liquids to "drowning = 0" feels wrong and does not work for mods loaded afterwards. For almost everything an option to disable it would be usefull, both for subgames and for server. A server on small hardware could just disable mapgen, one thats gets spamed often could disable doping of items.
Being able to tweak everything might not be obviously useful for every detail, but in special cases someone will find a perfect use for it. For my subgame it would be perfect if I could set the number of items the middle click takes/places to nine. The thing is, the more variety the engine offers the more different mods and subgames there will be.
Especially for node definitions I think that every small extra option results in an exponential more freedom for modders.
For subgames there is an issue the modders them selfs have to address. All the "old" mods are written for minetest_game. And with the first release that will contain serveral subgames many mods will occur which will only work for some special games.
I think there should be some kind of standardization and consensus on how to name mods in the subgame (e.g. only use "default" when it share many content with the "default" of minetest_game), and whether minetest_game should be the reference or something else.
@celeron
"The other logical extension [beside VAE] is making things buildable in finer detail"
In fact, when the VAE would be scalable then it could be possible to do that. You could create a voxel area that is the total size of one node but contains 8x8x8 nodes in itself. Or did I misunderstood the concept?