[Referring to the original post, not the irrlicht discussion.]This is an old discussion and the main reason I created Voxelgarden. I was to lazy to deal with the cumbersome process for things that likely will get rejected. VG therefor was MTG but with the contributions I would have made to MTG. I hoped that people would go and copy them, some chages I made in VG eventually made it into MTG, but I think that most of them have just been reinventing the same things.
As a result I mainly ignored the engine and did my own thing and this it worked for me. But the problems in the core development are still the same.
I don't belief in effort. Sometimes it reads as if some people just have to make more effort - to be nicer, to be more focused on a road map, to engage more in the community, and so on. But effort only lasts so long as someone is willing to put it in, and that resource is limited. There is no use in blaming any particular people, the real problem is always institutional.
Some of the following points have already been mentioned. I just list them out again to make clear why they are important.
The IRC bubble - Myself and others already pointed this out years ago. Because everything happens in IRC, development is happening separate from the community. In order to participate, you have to "hang out" on IRC and pay attention to what is happening there. This demands a lot of time which not everyone is willing to invest. To get input on an issue or PR, you often have to go into IRC and draw peoples attention to it. Often issues get discussed, but the result never gets out of that bubble - and it's completely impractical to search the archives to find that information.
To many feature ideas - It's the beauty of Minetest that you can imagine everything. But that also leads to infinite ideas flooding in, impossible to sort or to find any direction in them. Many of the issues open on github are just ideas of that sort.
In VG I constraint myself by the categories
bugs >>
improvements >>
features >>
nice to have. I would only add improvements if all bugs have been fixed, only add features if all improvements on the list are done, and maintain the nice to have list to get a sense of which direction I want to head. As one can see from the
open issues I'm not to strict with that rule, but it would be better if I where. So far it helped me to keep this project clean and maintainable.
For Minetest this would also allow to faster sort requests. You don't have to argue about every idea, for some it's enough to say "Yeah, that's a good idea. But . . . isn't really on our road map as of now. This is
nice to have yet not a feature we would add any time soon."
No clear focus - Yes there are road maps and discussions and many plans on how to go forward. The problem isn't the lack of them, it's that there are to many. I don't suggest we should discard all but one, but change the process by how the road map is formed. The principle mentioned above does help in that regard, as it helps to sort ideas. For example there is the
TODO, but aren't some points like the Voxel Area Entities a
nice to have instead of concrete features people are working on? In the metaphor of a road map, it is just a list of places one mights to go someday, some closer, others further away, but no connection between them - no road.
An engine without games - Since MTG is in maintenance only mode, it is official that Minetest ships with no real games. MT could really be an engine for all types of games, from jump and run (see the failed attempt "Uforun") to RPG to RTS. The common answer is that there aren't good enough games to include. I do understand that we can't add Mineclone2 (the best one, in my opinion), but now there is Exile - which is genius and quite different from the Minecraft-style game, and there are several others that are popular.
It's a chicken-egg problem. As long as games aren't included in the release of the engine, game developers will have less motivation for their work or might loose interest and drop their project entirely (e.g. pixture). When included, then those games would also have more player and therefor more people willing to help with that game. But also, as long as the engine is limited to the classic voxel-build-survive type of game, the others types can not even start to develop. Game developers already try their part to push the boundaries and create good content, it just still seems that Minetest lacks the will to be more than an engine to only MTG.
When the problem is not about people, but about structure, then this has implications about a possible fork.
When you fork and just switch out the developers, then nothing will change and it will be a waste of time. However if Minetest is unable to address those problems and change its structures, then a fork could work -
if it is very selfconscious about those structures, thinks hard about them and implements better ways to handle things.
There is also something about half a fork. One argument for not including more games in MT is that it's supposed to be an engine and therefor the game developer should release the game bundled with the engine. What about we take this argument seriously? Create a website, choose a better name than "Minetest" and release a bundle that includes several games and the engine patched with pull requests that didn't went into the official engine. How close the new thing then is to the original Minetest is variable. It could be exactly the same plus some games, or on the other extreme diverge as much as Freeminer did (but without changing the license please).
So if you have this kind of attitude towards the project then i suggest you to leave this place, as your behaviour isn't helping the project to move forward, just delays it from moving further.
This discussion has been going on for years. Just shutting up won't solve the problem. Many creative people already took your advice and left Minetest for ever. Their work is now missing, and that's really what delays the game from moving further.
