[Game] Void – A Game That Contains Nothing

[Linuxdirk]

This game for Minetest was reduced to the bare minimum of files and configuration. It contains quite literally “nothing”. It registers no more items than the essentially needed nodes and the hand.

The game is not meant for playing (well, of course you can but there is nothing fun to do except digging the three essential nodes and placing them again).

The purpose of this game is to test mods in an absolutely “clean” environment with absolutely no “3rd-party” mods or APIs provided by such mods.

Contents

Except the bare minimum for a game to be seen as game by the Minetest client, Void contains two mods.

The void_essential mod contains all that is needed for the map generator to create a usable world for testing mods; and the void_hand mod that registers the “hand tool” which is not technically needed to generate terrain and entering a world but not having it, testing would become unnecessary complicated because the unconfigured hand does not even allow to break nodes that are configured to be breakable by hand.

Usage

To use this game simply switch to the game in the client and create a new world. You can use all standards compliant map generators with all of the settings. Except the three essential nodes (stone, water, river water) and the “hand tool” nothing is registered or loaded, or provided. You’ll have a pure, absolutely independent, bare minimum version of a game.

In order to test your mods simply configure the created world and add the mods as needed for testing. Then start the world and see what’s happening. Since there is no creative inventory turning on creative mode does not change the Minetest-provided default inventory. You need a mod for that or use the `/giveme` command.

Game Meta

Code: https://git.0x7be.net/dirk/void
Latest version: main.tar.gz
CDB entry: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Linuxdirk/void/
All code license: MIT license
All media license: CC BY 4.0

[twoelk]

interesting-----
seems faster mapgenerating than normal.......................
so can this be used to test mapgen speed without decoration?
or is decoration code still run but none placed

[Linuxdirk]

so can this be used to test mapgen speed without decoration?
or is decoration code still run but none placed

While I created the game to be used for testing mods independent of any other game's presets and APIs it can of course be used to test mapgen speed.

Except the three essential nodes (and their aliases for the mapgen) nothing is changed for terrain generation. So if a mapgen tries to load and place decorations then it does that. If it does not try it, then it doesn't ... It's as simply as that :)

There is neither code in the game or the game's mods that registers decorations, nor is there code that prevents the mapgen from trying to place decorations, nor is there code for unregistering biomes/ores/etc.

[sorcerykid]

I really like the concept of this game. It will prove essential for me to test the performance of some of my mods that require a minimal interactive gameplay environment. Nice work!

[paramat]

This is interesting. I am surprised how minimal this is, i did not realise MT could function with so little game code.

[Linuxdirk]

i did not realise MT could function with so little game code.

Absolutely. Most work is done by the world generators which do a pretty solid job.

[Sokomine]

Very impressive to see that so minimal a setup can be enough.