Wuzzy wrote: ↑Wed May 06, 2020 12:22
So you're teaching your kids to depend on
provably insecure, proprietary spyware for communication? Nice.
Zoom might be more convenient to use, but you have to make a lot of sacrifices to use it …
You've got to pick your battles. I was already asking parents to grapple with 2 bits of OSS, it's hard to argue about network effects when it means your daughter can't see her friends on her birthday.
I know, I know. You are right in everything. About the graphics being “ugly”: I have heard a lot of opinions on these, and they are very split. Some people like them, some people hate them. I guess I need to switch the textures eventually (again :-( ). But in my defense, MineClone 2 is not finished. Not even close. Bugs are mentioned very clearly on the title screen. MCL2 is in alpha stage. This is very important to keep in mind!
Sorry, I didn't mean it as a slight - Mineclone 2 is great! Obviously there's always going to be more to bring it up to the standards of one of the most successful games in history. It did a great job.
As for the graphics, I actually think the MT/MCL2 textures and landscape look better than proper Minecraft - where MT/MCL2 falls short is the shaders, shadows, etc. If you look, most individual block squares are nicely shaded in MC, while they're generally flat-shaded in MT/MCL2. Also, some little animation things - flying animations, swimming animations, head-models looking up and down.
That and the little cosmetic thing that fullscreen is actually non-obvious how to activate, so everybody was playing it windowed.
When we realized that Mumble was a usability disaster, we changed the plan to just use Zoom for the minetest game too.
How about giving feedback directly to the Mumble devs? FOSS devs generally suck at usability, so feedback in this area is very important.
I wouldn't even know where to start on that one - as a developer I hate bugs that are like "it's confusing and parents don't like it". The startup wizard is excellent for power-users, but for example it instructs users to set their mic gain. Each successive Windows version makes the mic gain harder to find. And one challenge was mac users saying "it doesn't work" - I can't pass that kind of info on, that's not much to go on.
On the other hand, Mineclone 2 also lacks an installation process, but in a good way: you just connect to my Minetest world and you'll automatically download Mineclone 2.
Well, there is an installation process. It's called ContentDB.
I was being glib for literary effect. It was the best kind of installer, the kind you don't even notice. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
It was a hit. I had to furiously type teleport commands as fast as I could to get the kids all into the same area to introduce them and give them the lay of the land:
This suggests Minetest needs a new command for “teleport all players at once”.
For this "tour guide" kind of scenario, definitely. Ditto grant.
Hah, yeah, I totally should've logged that one.
This was basically the stress-test for MCL2, and MCL2 failed. I'm not surprised at all at this, as the code that handles my mobs sucks and is very clunky.
I wouldn't sweat the performance - our players would've spammed mobs until *whatever* performance limit existed. 9-year-olds. If the mob performance is good enough for survival, then it's good enough.
We have dropped the term “subgame” a long time ago. Now we're just calling it “game”.
Yeah, that caused confusion when I was floating the idea to friends.
"Wait, we're downloading the game minetest and then the game mineclone2? What?"
"No, minetest is the engine, mineclone2 is the game"
"Okay, but I'm looking at the game minetest and it says play minetest in the game..."
"Yeah, Minetest is also a game in mintest. Mineclone is also a game in minetest"
"So we're getting MineTest the engine but to play MineClone2 the game and not MineTest the game"
"Third base!"
"Subgame" seemed to make more sense to my players, so I rolled with that terminology.
The “proper” Windows installation process on any software is quite insane. You ship an additional EXE with the only purpose of installing things. And this EXE just barfs files into your system as it likes to.
Using a Zip file is even worse, I fully agree. But FOSS developers really hate in dealing with anything Windows-related, because it's not fun to work with. As far I know, there is not real standard way to install things. As far I know, there is no official MS-made installer tool, so there's a amount of 3rd-party installer tools and as a dev you have to figure out which to use. Not fun. The Minetest devs could try to figure out how the installer stuff works, but I doubt nobody really wants to do that. I can totally understand.
This installer nonsense is a direct result of Windows' lack of software package management. On GNU/Linux, you usually have a software package manager, and the installation process there is pretty straight-forward. Just select Minetest in your package manager and you'll get it. No need to trust third party EXEs to barf files into the correct system locations.
Oh God, you don't have to tell me. I kept around Visual Studio 2010 just for the Installer Projects - that was the last time it was easy to generate an .MSI, at least if you were willing to use a GUI to do it. MS has completely screwed the pooch on the story for software installation.
It looks like there *is* code for a Windows installer in the MT project, but it hasn't been used since 5.0.1. I took a swing at getting MT to build so I could see if I could resurrect it but I retired my Ubuntu partition a few years back and getting MT to build under Windows was just too much of a PITA.