Content database for in-menu installer - add your things!

[orwell]

Because the forum does not offer it.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=20372

[markthesmeagol]

Erm, I have added my wip-mod tides, and I was thinking: It might be nice to know how often it has been downloaded. I have the followung thoughts:

• Modders might like to know which of their mods are the most popular, and by how much
• Since this is an open-source project, I'm pretty sure that a lot of us are on #the-duck-side, and hate trackers, google, microsoft, trackers, etc; thus, using google-analytics might not be the best move (as in losing users). Also, I don't think that the in-game downloader supports javascript.
• a simple grep and wc on the access log should give one the number of downloads. There is thus no real need for any advanced analytics.
• Exact numbers would be nice, but since that might lead to unfriendliness, inexact numbers would also be nice. At the moment I don't see any numbers.
• I don't know of any linux distribution that doesn't include popcon(popularity contest) to see what packages are most used.

[rubenwardy]

In order to save data on the API, all packages are downloaded from ContentDB by visiting links such as https://content.minetest.net/packages/r ... /download/
This makes counting downloads pretty easy

Adding download counting is planned, but I'm waiting for minetest 5 to be released first so we can start actually having data. I'll also be adding a "trending" section to the home page, which will show mods which have seen a large amount of recent downloads, maybe weighted to avoid the standard popular mods like mesecons appearing too high. Suggestions for algorithms relating to this would be welcome

As for privacy, a counter does not contain any personal information at all. This very forum counts topic visits anonymously.

[MHL]

0.5.0 will have an in-menu mod/game/texture pack installer. This is powered by a website backend.

That's... good I suppose, but is it safe though?

[rubenwardy]

That's... good I suppose, but is it safe though?

As safe as installing from the forums!

Possibly safer as mods which ask you to disable the security sandbox are not allowed :)

[nrz]

And it's maintained by trusted users too ?

[Wuzzy]

I just tested Minetest 95d4ff6d1b62945decc85003a99588bb0539c45b with a clean .minetest directory, and whenever I try to download any of the games, it just fails. It claims it cannot put the game into the ~/.minetest/games folder. Mods seem to work, however. Any idea what's wrong here?

Also, someone uploaded some of my games on the Content DB. This is problematic. For technical reasons.

This is because my games are NOT ready for 5.0.0 yet and have known bugs for this upcoming version. I will deal with this AFTER 5.0.0 is released. Note that my development policy is that I only support latest stable and NOT the bleeding edge. Official support for all my games is provided ONLY for 0.4.17.1 right now.

I recommend to take down (or hide) all of my games for now because they have known bugs or simply won't work.
I think my mods should be (mostly) fine.

I plan to go over ALL of my mods and games and do the neccessary fixes when MT 5.0.0 is out, and do that as fast as possible.

Of course, anyone is free to upload my stuff, but PLEASE at least verify it still works in -dev. It would be bad to ship 5.0.0 with broken games.

Maybe there should be a mechanism to report broken things, and when it has been confirmed, they will be hidden from view (not deleted) and the author notified so it can be fixed.
“Broken” here means “does not work at all”, “insta-crash”, “crashes every 5 minutes”, “critical vulnerability”, “massive performance drop”, etc.


EDIT: Actually, most games on Content DB might be broken or buggy:
- MineClone 2 insta-crashes
- Tutorial fails to generate Tutorial World
- Almost all games have the “shifted player model” bug (that was a breaking engine change)
- Pixture renders the hearts twice in HUD
- Probably other compability fails because only a few game developers live on the bleeding edge
- Not a game, but the HUD Bars mod breaks in 5.0.0 as well
- Seriously, just download a few random mods and see what happens

It seems there will be a LOT of work for modders and game makers to do … I mean, I can handle it, I hope others will follow suit.

[rubenwardy]

Hudbars and pixture breaking in 5.0 is a bug in the engine. It would be very helpful if you could port your mods before the release in order to find issues (can be on a dev branch). Don't just assume that something is broken by a breaking change unless it's listed in the changelog

5.0 is no longer the bleeding edge, it's a release candidate

[GreenXenith]

- MineClone 2 insta-crashes

Cannot confirm. Using 5.0.0-dev-95d4ff6d, MCL2 starts fine for me.

- Almost all games have the “shifted player model” bug (that was a breaking engine change)

This is true, but to be expected. It doesn't affect playability.

[MHL]

This could be a pain in the *** for most users of the Contnet DB because it's target audience is children who have no clue about computers and they will press OK on msg boxes which will probably get malware on their PCs

[TumeniNodes]

0.5.0 will have an in-menu mod/game/texture pack installer.

celeron55 ^, if you can please add a couple sub-forums into the textures section, and someone can start going through and sorting, would be a big help getting that going :)

*releases, *wip, *old/abandoned, *discussions

As it is currently, it is one big jumbled mess with dead links, wips never finished, outdated, a few current, etc.
So it is impossible for CDB to sort as it does mods.

[rubenwardy]

There aren't that many texture packs, let alone good ones, which makes it not so important to have separate sections in terms of CDB

This could be a pain in the *** for most users of the Contnet DB because it's target audience is children who have no clue about computers and they will press OK on msg boxes which will probably get malware on their PCs

CDB is very unlikely to ever have malware on it. Minetest is also sandboxes, which makes it hard to affect the running system

[rubenwardy]

CDB now has knowledge of Minetest versions



This has two purposes: it stops packages which don't support the current Minetest version from showing in the client, and also warns users about the support of releases:

[rubenwardy]

CDB now supports full text search! This means that search works in a more intelligent way, and recognises different variations of words

[Wuzzy]

Nice. That versioning feature was quite crucial.

BTW, many games and mods have wrong names in the Content DB:

It's “Hades Revisited”, not “Hades”.
It's “Help”, not “Doc”.
It's “Indestructible Bedrock Layer”, not “Bedrock2”.
It's “Dice”, not “Dice2”.
It's “Schematic Editor”, not “Schemedit”.
It's “Surprise blocks”, not “Tsm Surprise”.
It's “Watering Can”, not “Wateringcan”.
It's “Simple Fast Inventory Buttons”, not “Sfinv Buttons”.
It's “Mesecons Windows”, not “Mesecons Window”.

It's “Legend of Minetest”, not “Legends of Minetest”.
It's “More Blocks”, not “Moreblocks”.
It's “More Ores”, not “Moreores”.
It's “More Trees!”, not “Moretrees”.
It's “X-Decor”, not “Xdecor”.
It's “Ethereal NG”, not “Ethereal”.
It's “Achievements”, not “Awards”.

I could go on and on and on … Did you add all those things by hand? Or will the “human-readable mod name” be actually supported in future Minetest version? Would be nice because then it could be easily parsed.

I can't seem to be able claim my account right now. I locked myself out, it seems. :-(

[rubenwardy]

I can't seem to be able claim my account right now. I locked myself out, it seems. :-(

You can't claim an already claimed account, for security reasons

Either:

1. Log in using Github, you'll then be able to set an email and password
2. Give me permission to set your email on ContentDB. This will send you a confirmation email, which after you accept you will then be able to request a password reset. As a moderator, I can see the email address of all forum users, but won't copy them to CDB without permission

I could go on and on and on … Did you add all those things by hand? Or will the “human-readable mod name” be actually supported in future Minetest version? Would be nice because then it could be easily parsed

ContentDB is designed to try and get the human-readable title from the forum topic, and then fallback to a title-cased name if it is unable to find it. I fixed a bug in this recently, which is why some of the titles may be wrong

[joe7575]

Whats wrong with the Content DB? I can't update any of my mods!

Edit: It works as expexcted, if you do not try to enter the URL to your repository.
Is this documented somewhere?

[runs]

I cannot upload my game, cos it's very big: +50 mb
:-(

[PolySaken]

I cannot upload my game, cos it's very big: +50 mb
:-(

Put it on a VCS site then

[runs]

I cannot upload my game, cos it's very big: +50 mb
:-(

Put it on a VCS site then

Whats a vcs site?

[PolySaken]

I cannot upload my game, cos it's very big: +50 mb
:-(

Put it on a VCS site then

Whats a vcs site?

version control software.
like github, notabug, repl... etc.

[texmex]

I was thinking: are there mechanisms in contentdb for when a mod is abandoned by its maintainer? For example:
- what if maintainer wants to hand over control to another user
- what if the maintainer goes awol and the mod listing confuses and misleads more than anything else
- what if the maintainer simply wants to mark it as ”unmaintained” or ”stale”

[Wuzzy]

Good questions! I also like to add a question:

- What if maintainer goes full berserk mode and wants to wipe out all traces of their projects on Content DB and elsewhere? Will it be possible to restore the things?

[rubenwardy]

- what if maintainer wants to hand over control to another user

- what if the maintainer simply wants to mark it as ”unmaintained” or ”stale”

I'll add the ability to assign someone else as the maintainer of a package, at which point that user is also considered the owner. I wasn't sure whether allowing multiple maintainers was needed, which implies access controls, so I didn't do that yet. I think just one maintainer is good for simplicity

- what if the maintainer goes awol and the mod listing confuses and misleads more than anything else

Hopefully this is noticed, and then the user is banned

- what if the maintainer simply wants to mark it as ”unmaintained” or ”stale”

I'd like to add a field to track the state of a package, including: "Work-In-Progress, Beta, Stable, Mature, Abandoned"

Although, some of these labels should probably be on releases too. This would allow affectively having unstable release channels too

Good questions! I also like to add a question:

- What if maintainer goes full berserk mode and wants to wipe out all traces of their projects on Content DB and elsewhere? Will it be possible to restore the things?

Yes, CDB backs up 3 times a week. I should make a script to make it easier to restore everything by a user, just to make sure that the backups work :)

[TumeniNodes]

I wish updating was automatic... I keep forgetting to update my mods with CDB