[Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game] - Contributors needed!

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celeron55
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[Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game] - Contributors needed!

by celeron55 » Post

Minetest Game is a game which is bundled by default with the Minetest Engine. It aims to be lightweight, moddable, and fairly playable without mods.

Download: https://github.com/minetest/minetest_ga ... master.zip
Github Source: https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game

Note that Minetest Game isn't Minetest, it's just the game which is bundled by default and shares the name.
Last edited by rubenwardy on Tue Apr 03, 2018 21:29, edited 21 times in total.
Reason: update

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Re: [Game] Minetest [minetest_game]

by Wuzzy » Post

The gameplay is mostly sandbox-style. There are no monsters or animals. You start in a blocky world somewhere between the coldest glacier and the hottest desert and just do whatever: Craft a pickaxe and go mining for ores, gather blocks and resources, craft new blocks, tools and items, go farming, use your new blocks build an awesome house, and so on. Read the Minetest Game wiki page for a full explanation.

Screenshots
Savannah biome:
Image

Player-built tower in a deciduous forest:
Image

Glacier:
Image

Useful links

Documentation and help
Collaboration Discussion Screenshots
  • The thread “Post your Screenshots” tends to have a lot of screenshots of Minetest Game (although not exclusively).
Short game info
  • Name: Minetest Game
  • Version: In sync with Minetest. E.g. Minetest 0.4.15 got released together with Minetest Game 0.4.15
  • Supported map generators: All of them!
  • License of code: GNU GPL 2.1 or later (!)
  • License of media: CC-BY-SA 3.0 with one exception (CC-BY 3.0)
  • License details see here.
Download
see other post above
Last edited by Wuzzy on Wed Sep 05, 2018 12:52, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: [Game] Minetest [minetest_game]

by veriaqa » Post

I'm glad that gravel now have other function other than decorative in 0.4.10. Now waiting for desert sandstone and desert sandstone brick. Come on community, make it happen :) .

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Lone_Wolf » Post

Could you add Mobs_redo to this game? I personally think it would be a GREAT addition xD
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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Wuzzy » Post

Good luck with this suggestion. Because you'll really need it. Chances of mobs being added to Minetest Game are basically zero. At least for now.

Don't ask me why, ask the developers. :P

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Lone_Wolf » Post

Wuzzy wrote:Good luck with this suggestion. Because you'll really need it. Chances of mobs being added to Minetest Game are basically zero. At least for now.

Don't ask me why, ask the developers. :P
k xD
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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Inocudom » Post

I like the fact that the default subgame of Minetest now has its very own discussion topic. New players should find it to be informative.

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Wuzzy » Post

FYI: This thread is almost 3 years old. xD

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by LordStephen77 » Post

You have described very well what is Minetest_Game. For years I've been looking at new blocks: Colored glass, colored clay, new plants and fruit for farming, stairs corner ... and more to improve the building. Minetest_Game is a collection of right mods? Take the best of the mods you have and implement everything from default. Insert existing elements into other mods is complicated? Small code changes, just take the best and place it in Minetest_Game. So the new player does not have to download 50 mods to have a nearly complete and usable game.

They added the tin from the "more ores" mod. Why did not they include Mithrill and silver? Modifying tin and silver textures (to make them different and easily visible) would be a nice addition. Better than anything right?

Greetings to everyone.

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Wuzzy » Post

LordStephen77 wrote:Insert existing elements into other mods is complicated? Small code changes, just take the best and place it in Minetest_Game. So the new player does not have to download 50 mods to have a nearly complete and usable game.
It's not that adding new things would be complicated. It's more like that Minetest Game developers seem to be very conservative. Every non-trivial code contribution first has to get 2 approvals to get anywhere. The bigger the feature, the harder it gets. Especially if we talk about stuff like crafting guide or mobs. It is not rare that code contributions undergo weeks of discussion before any code is actually added to Minetest Game.

Needless to say, Minetest Game development is very slow. On the plus side, it does not have many bugs.

And I agree, Minetest Game is very incomplete. Well, it's playable, but it greatly lacks in depth. It fails the 6 hour test, I mean it runs out of gameplay content long before 6 hours of playing. You could consider it “alpha” stage software. Hmmm, maybe this thread should be moved back into the WIP subgames forum then? :P

For now, I recommend you look around in the subgame forum for other subgames. Even WIP subgames tend to offer more in terms of gameplay and completeness.
Many subgames are direct derivations of Minetest Game and try to build on that for making a “more complete” game. VoxBox and Carbone NG are pretty nice.
Other subgames unrelated to Minetest Game are interesting, too. I like Pixture, rpgtest, Lord of the Test, Minetest Hades, and The Legend of Minetest.

See here for a list: http://wiki.minetest.net/List_of_Subgames#The_list
They added the tin from the "more ores" mod. Why did not they include Mithrill and silver? Modifying tin and silver textures (to make them different and easily visible) would be a nice addition. Better than anything right?
One player was even opposed to tin because the some of the existing ingots have little uses. Indeed, it looks very bad for gold ingots and copper ingots. And now tin ingots as well. Only 2 crafting recipes each. Compare that to 18 crafting recipes (and counting!) which include steel ingots.
I am not opposed to tin in general but I fully agree the current ingot uses are seriously out of balance. What's important than new ores now is giving actual uses to the existing ores. Fun fact, tin has been added straight before feature freeze (Well played, paramat. Well played. xD) and thus won't be removed before 0.4.16.

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by LordStephen77 » Post

Thank you. I greatly appreciate the conservative spirit of the developers, in fact I was referring to all those default features that made Minecraft what it is today. No crafting table, and strange stuff, for these things there are the mods. But adding simple decorative blocks just to enrich the building that is the only thing you can do about Minetest. As for the customization and structure of Minetest is great! Easy to create new content, textures packs, mods, and customization of the gaming engine, these are things done very well.

Another "mysterious" thing, Minetest uses a rendering engine called "Irrlicht" that handles shaders, and other things at a graphic level. I noticed that there are no shaders to increase the aesthetic impact of the game. Light and shadow with the same quality as Minecraft can be handled optimally by Minetest being developed in c ++ rather than Java. I mean additional shaders created by the community, it would be very nice.

Minetest is a project that I've always loved, and I'd be happy to see a more complete, useful, playable version of the lesson, maybe creating a small personal server to build with friends.

Minetest has great potential, I love classical and conservative style, on this aspect are on the part of developers. It really lacks much to make Minetest complete for use in creative mode, really little.

Thanks Wuzzy.

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Andrey01 » Post

You mistook in that there are not mobs in the game.
MOBS: rats, bees and one monster!

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by GreenXenith » Post

Andrey01 wrote:You mistook in that there are not mobs in the game.
MOBS: rats, bees and one monster!
Those were removed in 0.4.8 or something.
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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by paramat » Post

It's not really conservativism, more that MTGame is not meant to be a complete and exciting subgame, the idea is that it is a minimal core to add other mods onto.

There is also discussion and uncertainty about MTGame's future.
We were moving it towards being a more complete game, but now it is possible we will decide that a new subgame is best for that, and that MTGame remains a minimal modding base subgame.
It is also possible another new subgame is made to act as a modding base, in which case MTGame will be maintenance and minor changes only.

For the moment we will continue to add basic new content and tune and improve mapgen and biomes.

u19503

Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by u19503 » Post

paramat wrote:There is also discussion and uncertainty about MTGame's future.
We were moving it towards being a more complete game, but now it is possible we will decide that a new subgame is best for that, and that MTGame remains a minimal modding base subgame.
paramat you will probably deny this comment because you don't seem to like me that much and that's ok I just want minetest to have a good future and I know you do too :)

That would be great having a more complete game would also attract more people to the community and more people means more content and more content means even more people this will have a big impact on minetest (in the good way) I'm happy you guys are finally taking it in mind and consideration

Also sorry if this is offtopic

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Wuzzy » Post

It's not really conservativism, more that MTGame is not meant to be a complete and exciting subgame, the idea is that it is a minimal core to add other mods onto.
Okay, I call it “minimalism” then. :-)

If Minetest Game is, despite the name, not supposed to be a full game, why does it still enjoy the status of the default subgame? That doesn't make sense.

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Casimir » Post

The engine is a test and MTG is the proof of concept. And it has been since I registered here (2012).

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Wuzzy » Post

You are of course right, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to keep it that way.
A proof of concept is something for developers, not for players.

Even if they are now called differently, many people, even verteran forum users, still equate Minetest to Minetest Game, although those are two completely separate things. The selection of the default subgame is very important because this is the subgame which newbies will see first. And I think the default subgame should be reconsidered. It is not a good idea to expect from newbies to know how to install mods (because this is what you are almost obligated to do with Minetest Game).

Of course, as a proof of concept, Minetest Game is just fine. As a “modding base” it may be okay, too. Actually, it is quite good with some very strong APIs. It's just a pity that many mods simply just fill in the gaps. Even a modding base should at least have basic balancing, something which I think Minetest Game is lacking.

And anyone who contributes to Minetest Game, well, by all means, feel free to do so, I am not blaming you. :D
But then clearly Minetest Game should not be advertised as game anymore, don't you think?

The minetest.net homepage has only screenshots on Minetest Game. Which of course contributes to the false equation Minetest = Minetest Game.

Maybe Minetest Game is just put on too high a pedestal. What I mean, Minetest Game obtains way too much free attention, while other subgames remain in relative obscurity. E.g. the homepage does a poor job on showing subgames, it does not even have screenshots like the wiki does (http://wiki.minetest.net/Subgame).

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Lone_Wolf » Post

+
Spoiler
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:P
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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Casimir » Post

Actually I was complaining too ;) And I agree with all your critic.

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by texmex » Post

paramat wrote:It is also possible another new subgame is made to act as a modding base
How about this as base, or something like it? It's even supposed to be backwards compatible with mods.

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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by octacian » Post

Lone_Wolf wrote:Could you add Mobs_redo to this game? I personally think it would be a GREAT addition xD
Yeah, I know this was a post from a while back, but I just wanted to add that mobs_redo is a really bad idea. No offense to tenplus1, but from what I've seen, not only does it not work very well, but the code is kinda messy in many places. It'd be far better to try to adapt something like jordan4ibanez's Open AI. Sure, the coding style isn't the best there either, but it has way more advanced AI and functionality than does mobs redo, from my personal experience.
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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Lone_Wolf » Post

octacian wrote:
Lone_Wolf wrote:Could you add Mobs_redo to this game? I personally think it would be a GREAT addition xD
Yeah, I know this was a post from a while back, but I just wanted to add that mobs_redo is a really bad idea. No offense to tenplus1, but from what I've seen, not only does it not work very well, but the code is kinda messy in many places. It'd be far better to try to adapt something like jordan4ibanez's Open AI. Sure, the coding style isn't the best there either, but it has way more advanced AI and functionality than does mobs redo, from my personal experience.
Ok. Mobs_redo seems great to me but I'm not used to very smart AI
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Review of Minetest Game 0.4.16

by Wuzzy » Post

Review of Minetest Game 0.4.16

I have planned this for a long time, now here it is: This is my ultimate review of Minetest Game 0.4.16.

In this big in-depth review I pretend as if Minetest Game would be an officially released game at version 1.0.0. I do this to point to specific problems in Minetest Game, but I am of course aware that it is still in alpha stage. Also, I talk of Minetest Game without any mods!

Disclaimer: I have made some commits to Minetest Game myself, but only small things.

Very Quick Summary
Good: Strong modding API and lots of de-facto support for it, many of the popular servers use Minetest Game with mods.
Okay: Creative Mode, biomes.
Bad: Poor depth, gameplay, balancing, coherence, atmosphere, no mobs, unsuable for beginners. And finally, an apparent lack of vision.

Recommendation: Drop as default subgame (not neccessarily drop development), give other subgames a fair chance.

Gameplay
Basically, you just dig and build stuff, and there's no goal! There's nothing wrong with that. :D

The devil lies in the details.

Depth
There is very little depth. You run out of new things to do way before 6 hours of playing.

I acknowledge the new biomes added by paramat and the support to v7, etc.
The biomes are pretty nice and add to the flavor of the game.

But the biomes are not really offering much in terms of gameplay. The blocks and plants are not really unique. There is no real reason or reward for exploring other biomes. The biomes mostly just differ in blocks used. The biggest impact on gameplay is maybe the kind of wood you find because of differing burning times. Or if you don't find any wood at spawn so you have to walk. But that's basically it!

There is almost no underwater life. There are corals, which are limited to hot biomes, but that's it. Overall, the underwater world is very bland.

The ores are not really interesting. There is somewhat a progress here, but it quickly just cuts off. Below Y=-1024, everything just repeats.
The underground is not a big challenge. Just avoid the lava. And it's the overly simple (and boring) rule of “the deeper you dig, the more you find”. But while ores become more common as you dig deeper, the difficulty stays basically the same. Reaching diamond ore is not any more difficult than, let's say, iron ore. It just takes longer. The biggest criticism I have about the unerground that it is almost entirely stone. There are no other underground stone types. For a game where the underground is very deep, this is a big disappointment.

Farming is fun for max. 2 hours, then it becomes just the same again. There are only 2 plants to farm which is way too little.

Building in Creative Mode is okayish and there is a small but healthy set of blocks to choose from. In Minetest Game you are already able to build a lot of great things (see the various screenshot threads). For people who are only interested in creative building, Minetest Game is already good. But there's still room for improvement. I still feel there could be more blocks, some ideas are simply unexplored. I think of snow/ice bricks. More walls, door, xpanes types. More cobblestone.
What is definitely missing are more uses for dye. Currently only wool can be colored. There are no colorful beds, brick blocks, wood, glass, stone …

Balancing
One of the major weaknesses is poor balancing. My overall impression is that balancing really has never been on the TODO list so far.
  • Food is extremely overpowered. Just stockpile 99 bread, react quickly and you can take a bath in lava or survive very long PvP fights. This is absurd
  • Mese axe is faster than diamond axe
  • Wooden shovel and wooden axe are almost worthless, they seem to be no noticable upgrade over the hand. I know wood tools are supposed to suck, but at least they should be better than hand, right?
  • The hardest block is not obsidian brick or diamond block, no! It is a locked chest you don't own. :D
  • Bronze tools don't seem to be not much better than steel tools, but it is quite a hassle to craft them. It does not seem to be thought through very well.
  • The bones delay can be easily defeated by surrounding your victim's bones with locked chests and sitting out the timer
  • As said earlier, it's easy to find diamonds, you just need a bit patience
  • The fuel times seem to be acceptable
  • The smelting times are strange. Most things (including ores) need only 3 seconds, keys need 5 seconds and bread needs 15 seconds. Where's the logic behind that?
  • Multiplayer is chaos (see below)
Poor balancing is bad becaue this is one of the areas which you can't just fix with mods. It must be fixed in the core.

Crafting
  • Uses the same braindead crafting system as Minecraft. It's braindead because it is needlessly complicated and unusable without crafting guide (which Minetest Game still doesn't have)
  • Most recipes are okay but …
  • Steel ingots are currently too overpowered. They are used to craft almost everything, while other ingots are almost useless.
  • Bronze crafting is poorly thought through: For your first bronze pickaxe you need 8 copper and 1 tin because of the braindead bronze crafting. While a mese pick just needs 3 mese crystals and can completely skip the step of smelting.
  • I feel there's a lack of crafting possibilities for a couple of items. There are some items which are not useful for crafting (corals, dry shrub, dry grass)
  • You can't craft beds without red wool. This seems awfully specific
Multiplayer
Multiplayer is very chaotic in nature. It is almost just singleplayer with multiple players thrown into the same world. There is no focus on neither cooperation nor combat. I'd say Minetest Game in multiplayer is very, very WIP.

Combat is just completly broken because food is overpowered. Whoever has stockpiled more food, wins.

The bones cooldown is not exactly helpful when you realize you can simply surround your victim's bones with a hard block or even multiple layers of locked chests and wait out the cooldown period.

There is a very basic protection system with locked chests and steel doors/trapdoors, but everything else is completely open to griefing. There are also keys. This is an interetesting and unique feature indeed, I have to admit it. But in the context of a mostly non-existing protection system, they are mostly pointless.

Minetest Game has some interesting multiplayer ideas, more than Minecraft even (Minecraft does not even have locked chests), but overall this feels very incomplete. If you take all of the multiplayer mechanics together, it is not coherent and it's still just chaos. Keys are a great idea, but in the context of a limited protection system they are still pretty much pointless.

Playing multiplayer in Creative Mode is just silly, because anyone can build anywhere, but also destroy everything. This is a long known problem as “griefing”.

Unsurprisingly, servers with a completely unmodded Minetest Game are a rare sight and very unpopular. One of the most popular Minetest Game based server is JT2 and has many mods. I know, the idea of an “anything goes” world might be appealing (I play it, too, sometimes), but then you have to keep in mind the combat system is also completely broken.

So, you can basically forget vanilla multiplayer on public Internet server, especially in Creative Mode. You need to use mods.

Modding
This is one of Minetest Game's greatest strengths. It provides many tools for modders to extend it, and I have extensively used this possibility.
All APIs are documented and easy to use. This is not something you can say often elsewhere. Minetest Game is a good example what to do when you want to provide APIs in your subgame. I know all this from experience.

In the forums a ton of mods for Minetest Game has been made, there are some true gems among them. You can basically design your own game.

Minetest Game also stays strong on servers when modded. The most popular servers are based on Minetest Game and include various mods. Minetest Game can actually be good when it is combined with the correct mods. The fact that you can easily join (some) random servers in Minetest helps a lot. Servers I like include JT2 and Jungle.
In fairness, it also has to be said that some server operators put a lot of work in compiling a proper set of mods together only for their server. Sometimes they go to such lengths that you could say they have created an entirely different game. I'd say it's still a big win for Minetest Game for enabling this.

Mods are very important for Minetest Game indeed. If it weren't for the mods, Minetest Game wouldn't survive.

In-game Help
There is pretty much none. If you are completely new, you are completely lost.
There is also no crafting guide, which is completely inexcusable now that >20 subgames have crafting guides.

Ambience
Biomes give a nice good flavor and I am glad to say that this is finally not an area anymore where Minetest Game is lacking. The lack of mobs or just anything dynamic (besides liquids maybe) limits the atmosphere, however.

The sound ambience is almost non-existant. If you don't do anything, the world stays completely silent. But ambience in general is still an unsolved problem in Minetest, so this is excusable. For now. :-(

Mobs
There are none. This is a major flaw. There are many reasons why mobs would be a major improvement: The world feels less dead, there would be some sort of challenge or danger, they would be a new source of things to explore/loot or it would just be fun to watch them roam the world.

If some people still won't to have any mobs to keep their world clean, this can be solved by a simple option. So this is no excuse to not have any mobs whatsoever.

Also, Minetest 0.3.0 already had mobs but they were removed when Minetest 0.4.0 was released.

Other bits and things
  • You can place ladders on the ceiling and on the ground and you can place ladders in front of other ladders so you will get floating ladders if you're not careful. This is super annoying
  • You must point to signs to read their text. The sign is not visible otherwise
  • Bookshelves and vessels shelves are usable as storages for books and vessels with half the capacity. Seems pointless to me. There is zero reason to craft bookshelves or vessels shelves as storage. Making them usable as storage would make sense if they had at least some unique feature or difference compared to normal chests.
The project
Nobody really knows what Minetest Game is supposed to be. There is a lack of vision. Or at least there doesn't seem to be any consensus. This is definitely my major criticism of Minetest Game. I know it's alpha software, so being incomplete is to be expected. So all the missing features, the poor balancing, lack of depth, etc. all of this would be excusable if there is at least a direction, a design document or whatever.

Project development is extremely sluggish. In the 6 months between 0.4.15 and 0.4.16, only 146 commits were added by multiple programmers.

Minetest Game is closely coupled with Minetest and shipped as default with Minetest. Many people still equate Minetest Game with Minetest which is completely wrong!

Conclusion
Minetest Game has a few strengths and many weaknesses. Its strength lies in its extensibility and well-documented and easy-to-use APIs and also the de-facto sheer amount of mods people have created. You can basically create your own personal game by just compiling a set of mods.
Creative Mode and biomes are kinda okay.
The weaknesses of Minetest Game are its shallowness, lack of gameplay, poor balancing, poor coherence, no real atmosphere and being completely unusable for beginners.
I'd also count “lack of vision” as another major weakness of the project.

Given this conclusion, the target audience of Minetest Game can not be complete beginners. But Minetest Game is the first subgame which beginners will see, because it is the default. Beginners have a reasonable expectation to see a playable game without mods but they don't get that. Beginners have no reason to expect that they first have to add mods before they get a semi-decent experience.
The target audience of Minetest Game is advanced Minetest users who feel comfortable to install and try out all sorts of mods. If you are not prepared to do this, then Minetest Game is not for you.

The goals of Minetest Game are not really clear, so I don't know how to measure Minetest Game.
If the goal of Minetest Game is just to be a simplistic base for modding, then that goal may have been achieved long ago. Still I think the “modding base” is just too small. And mods can't fix everything. Things like poor balancing should be fixed in the core, not by mods.

If the goal of Minetest Game is to be a game or sandbox you can enjoy out of the box, it's a complete failure.

Final recommendations
Drop Minetest Game as the default subgame. Development can continue as usual, but the heavy over-promotion of Minetest Game needs to stop. Other subgames need to be given a fair chances as well (I am talking about the homepage).
Newcomers should not get the impression that Minetest Game equals Minetest, or that Minetest Game is the best we have to offer.

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Lord_Vlad
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Re: [Game] Minetest Game [minetest_game]

by Lord_Vlad » Post

Just wanted to add something I find critical in your review : World generation :

World generation is quite good for the most part, but seriously lacks a sense of height. Some hills are nearly impossible to climb without making a stairway allong the sides of it and there is no well done flat land, even in the more grassy biomes. There are too many cliffs everywhere and in every biome.
But I guess that isn't specific to Minetest game. What is is that there is no good way to travel on large mountains and such. Not a climbing tool, not a vehicule, maybe ladders, but then you need a ton of them.

Other than that, I guess the subgames that would be included by default should be decided by some kind of vote in the community.

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