The new name isn't great (too many vowels in the same place, you couldn't spell it if you heard it) but at least it's original and doesn't sound like it's a knockoff test implementation of minecraft anymore.
Minetest is kind of a unique experiment in how modular a voxel game can be with mods. It's pretty cool. You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods. You have dependencies and stuff so not every mod has to reinvent the wheel. Much better experience than minecraft modding.
Minetest should lean into this and make the core gamemode more different than minecraft. Change up the artstyle, and make the physics feel better.
I am an English speaker and disagree too. The spelling is fairly natural to me (probably how I would spell it if I heard it) and, in any case, English spelling is not exactly known for being obvious.
Minecraft Bedrock Edition is Microsoft's freemium children's game where you buy "mods" and "skins" using minecoins and you can visit a number of pre-approved pay-to-win servers or pay Microsoft to host a "server" for you and like 8 other people as long as you obey the microsoft guidelines and drink enough verification cans.
You might be confusing it with a beloved viral indie PC game called Minecraft (2011) which is no longer for sale.
Correction: Bedrock is not freemium. There's also nothing wrong with Bedrock. It allows for cross-platform play. The minecoins/purchases are available in the menus, but they're never pushed in-game. The experience is very similar to Java.
Also, Java and Bedrock both have Realms (the managed "server" option you referred to).
There's a big catch here: creating mods for Bedrock is difficult. And, Mojang is taking steps that make it difficult for modders to create stuff for Bedrock. [1]
There's no match for the modding capabilities that Java edition gives you.
Your dripping disdain for Bedrock seems pretty biased, and it seems like you have spent very little time with it. I’ve been playing it for a solid year because it’s what my kid can play (prefers touch controls) and the bedrock experience is light years away from a modern pay to win/in-game-currency focused game such as you’d find on a tablet.
(To any reader: Skip the rest of this comment unless you are curious to hear the answer to “Isn’t Minecraft Bedrock a crappy in-game-purchase machine pretending to be a game like the crap on mobile app stores? Why would anybody ever choose it over Java?”)
I know you said you only like the “old indie” version, but all my following comments apply to it as well since they’re about its huge omissions.
Going back to Java with its archaic menu system and weird, drifty controls was jarring. (I played back in Alpha and for a couple years after, then stopped until using Bedrock last year).
Bedrock supports simple LAN multiplayer! Java makes this possible only if you have a real computer (server) and know how. Any people playing Bedrock can play a LAN game with zero preparation, even 3 consoles, a PC, and an iPad.
It contains a listing of 5 or 6 servers, yes, which is 5-6 more than Java includes helpful links to. You can also click below that and type in an IP.
Yes, avatar costume items cost money. It’s because yes, 5-year-olds cannot use the Java skin editing mechanism of “just make a PNG file.” Of course, that’s all Java even has or had. And Bedrock has that as a free option too.
Overall the marketplace is something trivially easy to ignore (btw the actual game costs $20 so it’s not “freemium”.) It’s just another option on the main menu. But my kid has “bought” all manner of both fun and educational stuff on that marketplace for completely free so I’m glad it’s there. There’s a bunch of free stuff on there. One really cool thing I liked was the special “15 year journey” map and modpacks they put up for the occasion of the game’s 15th anniversary.
Again I know there are a ton of free mods for Java but that whole scene has become a nightmare for me with all these various weird third party programs I have to use to “apply” the mods. Again, not really a safe situation either to just have even a young teen on Google looking for downloads which may or may not be Minecraft mods. Or even non-tech-savvy adults, tbh.
> Bedrock supports simple LAN multiplayer! Java makes this
> possible only if you have a real computer (server) and know
> how. Any people playing Bedrock can play a LAN game with
> zero preparation, even 3 consoles, a PC, and an iPad.
You can do this with Java. After you start a new world you select "Open to LAN" in the settings menu.
> Again I know there are a ton of free mods for Java but that whole scene has
> become a nightmare for me with all these various weird third party programs
> I have to use to “apply” the mods. Again, not really a safe situation either to
> just have even a young teen on Google looking for downloads which may or
> may not be Minecraft mods. Or even non-tech-savvy adults, tbh.
Nobody is downloading mods from Google. Modrinth, CurseForge and Prism are all very straightforward apps. You download the mods within those apps and they (mostly) handle dependencies. It's 1 click to launch Minecraft after that. My 6 and 9 year old use them easily and only one of them is a genius - but I won't say which one out of fear they might read these comments after I pass.
They both prefer Java fwiw.
And Essential mod gives you costume editing as well as making playing with friends even easier than it already is. https://essential.gg/
More and more of Minecraft is moving into data packs, which is pretty neat. So many things that required .jar java mods are now first-class citizens for customisation, automatically ‘downloaded’ when you connect to a server. Pretty neat.
The barrier to having better physics is that better physics requires more complicated netcode.
It is also a long-standing precedent in Minetest that the default game is just a minimal skeleton. "Change the artstyle" is a misguided suggestion because there are very few assets that are part of Minetest and not a 3rd party minetest mod.
> You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods. You have dependencies and stuff so not every mod has to reinvent the wheel. Much better experience than minecraft modding.
Reminds me of Unreal Tournament 2004, that was pretty much the same experience.
I absolutely adore minetest and have an enormous amount of love and respect for the people who have built it into the phenomenal platform that it is.
But damn, they are not great at naming things.
I have long wished they would rename from minetest to something else, because as silly as it is, one of the biggest barriers of adoption I have run into is the name. When people hear the name, it is confusing and they think it is stupid and a joke. Hell, I even joke about it sometimes too.
Naming things is very difficult, so I do feel for them. I also will give this new name some time and see if it grows on me. I am a bit skeptical, but they have more than earned some trust.
Regardless, this is a fantastic game and a fantastic platform, and I really don't understand why so many people play Minecraft when there is an open open source alternative that is this good.
The code is genuinely very good, and is a pleasure to read. It is one of the things I love about a great open source project, where it was done for the love of the art, not just to grab a paycheck. The code is well thought out and well written, and dare I say even beautiful. Exactly my kind of project!
Lots of libre projects are terrible at naming things, I don't know why.
Doing the "use a word in some exotic language for some reason" is lazy and rarely great. Another example of that is "Forjego", they forked Gitea and went with some Esperanto word because... reasons.
It's actually Forgejo not Forjego, with this example further proving what a convoluted name it is, with the added bonus that there are at least two points where the pronunciation can vary widely (is the J as in Jack or as in Spanish Juan? Is the G as in Google or George?).
In Esperanto Ĝ represents that soft G sound and the word is spelled "forĝejo", which breaks into "forĝi" (to forge) plus "ejo" (a place), i.e. a place where one forges.
Yeah, I've been on a minetest kick lately and it's a great game, and I can understand not wanting to call it "minetest", but minetest is 2 english words mashed together and one of them is extremely relevant/descriptive of the game in question. I personally even think that it's fine that it sounds like minecraft, because it... is basically minecraft but proper FOSS; that's approximately the reason I like it. This new name contains zero english words and frankly I'm having trouble getting my brain to hold it at all. Lua... something. And I only remember "lua" because I already knew about the programming language. I think I'm going to have to set up an alias or something on my machines so I can actually launch the thing now...
I highly recommend Nodecore. Try to see how far you can get without looking anything up. For certain kinds of brains it's a uniquely satisfying experience.
6 months ago you’d have to tell your friends to join you on Mineclone2, a Minetest game, which was like telling people to switch to Doodle Chrome on Microsaft Wandows Beta. Any new name is so much better.
> We decided to avoid using “free” or “libre” in the name ... Projects like Blender, Krita, or Godot are awesome, and they don’t need to convince you about their libre nature by putting it in their names.
so... we decided to add the name of the programming language we use instead?
It seems like a pretty reasonable choice when thinking about Luanti as a game engine instead of a game. If someone is choosing a game engine to write a game in, one of their most significant considerations is likely to be what programming languages are supported, so highlighting Lua in the name of the engine is not a bad idea.
The "n" obscures the notional reference to "lua". "Lua" is two syllables, but "luan" is just one. The name makes me think 乱, not an element you'd want to include in the name of most projects.
IDK a lot of the games feel really lame but there is this one CTF server that was fun. I might be too old for this stuff but I think it could be the next roblox if you could get it running inside of a webpage with WebGL.
Just scrolling through the list I found some interesting ones that really think outside the box (no pun intended), like this one that generates 3D-printable models.
But don't people playing Minecraft play it for the fun mods? And people playing Luanti play mods that replicate the original Minecraft? They've gone full circle in too little steps.
There are a lot of creative mods + abilities. That the Lua programming language is core to the engine, means it is easy to do all sorts of supported creative things with the engine. But some of the mechanics and 'smoothness' of play that you can get in Minecraft just isn't there yet in Minetest, due to how the network protocol works. Give it a shot, you can play a local world with very little effort, and if you know lua, look at some of the 'world' definition code.
The thing that bugs me is how ... intrusive the object dependencies are. Outside of the most trivial mods, you absolutely must buy into one of the major ecosystems, and quite a few things can't be changed in an external mod, only in the ecosystem's core mods, because they're all registered in a single function that's not hookable. Changing the core mods themselves of course causes problems whenever you want to update them.
That said, some of the ecosystems (frameworks?) themselves are decent as-is. The two mineclone forks (I don't pretend to know the difference) are probably the best place to start.
Mapgen sucks if you want any kind of realism though. Even the mods that pretend to care about it (half of which are in lua and thus really slow) don't operate on a "top-down" level, so always end up with things like "water flows uphill in a circle". And the grid is very obvious, especially if you're obsessed with the dimensions of your base like I am. I also suspect poor RNG control in places. And there's definitely an idempotency option - if you quit (or crash) the game while mapgen is still running, you can end up with half-generated terrain.
Even the builtin mapgens are slow to generate new terrain if you use the "fast" cheat.
(this ended up being a bit more negative than I'd like; I don't intend to stop people from trying it)
Pretty much everything in Minetest is a 3rd party mod coded in Lua. It is viable, but you are limited by the netcode and the quality / integration of 3rd party mods.
I find it hard to take seriously much debate on naming things. Whatever name you choose is going to upset some people and please others; in the end, all you need is something fairly unique. You quickly forget any intrinsic meaning and it becomes transparent. ‘YouTube’ is a pretty amateurish sounding name and yet it stuck, and here we are now. When was the last time you even stopped and pondered its etymology?
The name of any successful entity quickly becomes synonymous with that entity. It’s a fallacy to think you can imbue the entity with meaning by picking its name very carefully.
If you think I’m underestimating the importance of a name, just imagine the reaction if you’d suggested naming a computer company ‘Apple’ in the 1970s.
I agree but I always thought YouTube was a great name for what it was. It was me choosing what was on (no pesky programming) and us making videos.
It’s very different now but “you”, as in me, was very central to my idea of what YouTube was. And the TV was a CRT. It was the tube. And as per GWB it was a series of tubes it came through (facetious).
> We decided to avoid using “free” or “libre” in the name ... Projects like ... Godot are awesome, they don’t need to convince you about their libre nature by putting it in their names.
Yeah, this name sucks. It will endlessly be misread as "Luna-ti" and assigned astrological connotations, it sounds like a pharmaceutical, and it tells you nothing about the platform.
Luanti is easy to pronounce and distinct, but it's also vague enough that someone making a game using the Luanti platform will want to name their game something else.
The new name isn't great (too many vowels in the same place, you couldn't spell it if you heard it) but at least it's original and doesn't sound like it's a knockoff test implementation of minecraft anymore.
Minetest is kind of a unique experiment in how modular a voxel game can be with mods. It's pretty cool. You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods. You have dependencies and stuff so not every mod has to reinvent the wheel. Much better experience than minecraft modding.
Minetest should lean into this and make the core gamemode more different than minecraft. Change up the artstyle, and make the physics feel better.
> The new name isn't great (too many vowels in the same place, you couldn't spell it if you heard it)
That's only a problem for english. Finnish people (and I can say romance language speakers) would disagree.
I am an English speaker and disagree too. The spelling is fairly natural to me (probably how I would spell it if I heard it) and, in any case, English spelling is not exactly known for being obvious.
The new name lacks context that the old one had. Imagine discussing it on a bad telephone connection:
“There’s this game similar to Minecraft; it’s called Minetest. You know like, mining and testing”
Vs
“There’s this game similar to Minecraft; it’s called Luanti — uhhh, l-u-a-n-t-i”
The new name isn’t hard, but it’s definitely not as easy.
> You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods.
That's how mods work in Minecraft bedrock
Minecraft Bedrock Edition is Microsoft's freemium children's game where you buy "mods" and "skins" using minecoins and you can visit a number of pre-approved pay-to-win servers or pay Microsoft to host a "server" for you and like 8 other people as long as you obey the microsoft guidelines and drink enough verification cans.
You might be confusing it with a beloved viral indie PC game called Minecraft (2011) which is no longer for sale.
Neither of them is free and they're both still for sale https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/store/minecraft-deluxe-colle...
Correction: Bedrock is not freemium. There's also nothing wrong with Bedrock. It allows for cross-platform play. The minecoins/purchases are available in the menus, but they're never pushed in-game. The experience is very similar to Java.
Also, Java and Bedrock both have Realms (the managed "server" option you referred to).
> or pay Microsoft to host a "server" for you and like 8 other people as long as you obey the microsoft guidelines and drink enough verification cans.
Or you can just run your own dedicated bedrock edition server, no need to pay anyone.
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server/bedrock
There's a big catch here: creating mods for Bedrock is difficult. And, Mojang is taking steps that make it difficult for modders to create stuff for Bedrock. [1]
There's no match for the modding capabilities that Java edition gives you.
[1]: https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/2309...
No disagreements there, but I was just correcting misinformation in the previous post
Not if you want to connect from the console ports without very awkward hacks (and if you're on PC you wouldn't be running Bedrock in the first place).
Minecraft Bedrock isn't free is it? Not when I looked at getting it for my kids it wasn't.
> You might be confusing it
I doubt it. Datapacks did originate in Bedrock, though Minecraft Java does have them now.
Downloading Forge/Fabric mods automatically has never been supported as far as I know - good thing tool, it would be a security nightmare.
You get the Java and bedrock version when you buy Minecraft for the PC.
Your dripping disdain for Bedrock seems pretty biased, and it seems like you have spent very little time with it. I’ve been playing it for a solid year because it’s what my kid can play (prefers touch controls) and the bedrock experience is light years away from a modern pay to win/in-game-currency focused game such as you’d find on a tablet.
(To any reader: Skip the rest of this comment unless you are curious to hear the answer to “Isn’t Minecraft Bedrock a crappy in-game-purchase machine pretending to be a game like the crap on mobile app stores? Why would anybody ever choose it over Java?”)
I know you said you only like the “old indie” version, but all my following comments apply to it as well since they’re about its huge omissions.
Going back to Java with its archaic menu system and weird, drifty controls was jarring. (I played back in Alpha and for a couple years after, then stopped until using Bedrock last year).
Bedrock supports simple LAN multiplayer! Java makes this possible only if you have a real computer (server) and know how. Any people playing Bedrock can play a LAN game with zero preparation, even 3 consoles, a PC, and an iPad.
It contains a listing of 5 or 6 servers, yes, which is 5-6 more than Java includes helpful links to. You can also click below that and type in an IP.
Yes, avatar costume items cost money. It’s because yes, 5-year-olds cannot use the Java skin editing mechanism of “just make a PNG file.” Of course, that’s all Java even has or had. And Bedrock has that as a free option too.
Overall the marketplace is something trivially easy to ignore (btw the actual game costs $20 so it’s not “freemium”.) It’s just another option on the main menu. But my kid has “bought” all manner of both fun and educational stuff on that marketplace for completely free so I’m glad it’s there. There’s a bunch of free stuff on there. One really cool thing I liked was the special “15 year journey” map and modpacks they put up for the occasion of the game’s 15th anniversary.
Again I know there are a ton of free mods for Java but that whole scene has become a nightmare for me with all these various weird third party programs I have to use to “apply” the mods. Again, not really a safe situation either to just have even a young teen on Google looking for downloads which may or may not be Minecraft mods. Or even non-tech-savvy adults, tbh.
> Bedrock supports simple LAN multiplayer! Java makes this > possible only if you have a real computer (server) and know > how. Any people playing Bedrock can play a LAN game with > zero preparation, even 3 consoles, a PC, and an iPad.
You can do this with Java. After you start a new world you select "Open to LAN" in the settings menu.
> Again I know there are a ton of free mods for Java but that whole scene has > become a nightmare for me with all these various weird third party programs > I have to use to “apply” the mods. Again, not really a safe situation either to > just have even a young teen on Google looking for downloads which may or > may not be Minecraft mods. Or even non-tech-savvy adults, tbh.
Nobody is downloading mods from Google. Modrinth, CurseForge and Prism are all very straightforward apps. You download the mods within those apps and they (mostly) handle dependencies. It's 1 click to launch Minecraft after that. My 6 and 9 year old use them easily and only one of them is a genius - but I won't say which one out of fear they might read these comments after I pass.
They both prefer Java fwiw.
And Essential mod gives you costume editing as well as making playing with friends even easier than it already is. https://essential.gg/
We all know Minecraft Bedrock edition, the children's game where I can actually play with my nieces and nephews confined to iPads and xboxes.
It is also beloved by many, but i'm sure those folks count as subhuman to you.
More and more of Minecraft is moving into data packs, which is pretty neat. So many things that required .jar java mods are now first-class citizens for customisation, automatically ‘downloaded’ when you connect to a server. Pretty neat.
You mean you are presented with fifteen purchase dialogs the moment you enter a server?
"Luanti" is pretty easy to pronounce/spell for me. I'm not sure what your native language is, though, maybe it's harder for you.
The barrier to having better physics is that better physics requires more complicated netcode.
It is also a long-standing precedent in Minetest that the default game is just a minimal skeleton. "Change the artstyle" is a misguided suggestion because there are very few assets that are part of Minetest and not a 3rd party minetest mod.
> You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods. You have dependencies and stuff so not every mod has to reinvent the wheel. Much better experience than minecraft modding.
Reminds me of Unreal Tournament 2004, that was pretty much the same experience.
Counter-strike too
I absolutely adore minetest and have an enormous amount of love and respect for the people who have built it into the phenomenal platform that it is.
But damn, they are not great at naming things.
I have long wished they would rename from minetest to something else, because as silly as it is, one of the biggest barriers of adoption I have run into is the name. When people hear the name, it is confusing and they think it is stupid and a joke. Hell, I even joke about it sometimes too.
Naming things is very difficult, so I do feel for them. I also will give this new name some time and see if it grows on me. I am a bit skeptical, but they have more than earned some trust.
Regardless, this is a fantastic game and a fantastic platform, and I really don't understand why so many people play Minecraft when there is an open open source alternative that is this good.
The code is genuinely very good, and is a pleasure to read. It is one of the things I love about a great open source project, where it was done for the love of the art, not just to grab a paycheck. The code is well thought out and well written, and dare I say even beautiful. Exactly my kind of project!
Lots of libre projects are terrible at naming things, I don't know why.
Doing the "use a word in some exotic language for some reason" is lazy and rarely great. Another example of that is "Forjego", they forked Gitea and went with some Esperanto word because... reasons.
It's actually Forgejo not Forjego, with this example further proving what a convoluted name it is, with the added bonus that there are at least two points where the pronunciation can vary widely (is the J as in Jack or as in Spanish Juan? Is the G as in Google or George?).
Oops my bad, I thought they went with it because it's in Go
If it's "Forgejo" I thing I would pronounce it like in "forget", then "jo" like in jack, not sure if that's close
It's G as in "forge" and J as in "yo".
In Esperanto Ĝ represents that soft G sound and the word is spelled "forĝejo", which breaks into "forĝi" (to forge) plus "ejo" (a place), i.e. a place where one forges.
Yeah, I've been on a minetest kick lately and it's a great game, and I can understand not wanting to call it "minetest", but minetest is 2 english words mashed together and one of them is extremely relevant/descriptive of the game in question. I personally even think that it's fine that it sounds like minecraft, because it... is basically minecraft but proper FOSS; that's approximately the reason I like it. This new name contains zero english words and frankly I'm having trouble getting my brain to hold it at all. Lua... something. And I only remember "lua" because I already knew about the programming language. I think I'm going to have to set up an alias or something on my machines so I can actually launch the thing now...
It's really weird to see it on HN as I've been diving into it hard this past week.
Voxelibre is a fantastic standalone pack, and I'm trying out some of the others.
I haven't ventured online but will at some point
I highly recommend Nodecore. Try to see how far you can get without looking anything up. For certain kinds of brains it's a uniquely satisfying experience.
6 months ago you’d have to tell your friends to join you on Mineclone2, a Minetest game, which was like telling people to switch to Doodle Chrome on Microsaft Wandows Beta. Any new name is so much better.
> We decided to avoid using “free” or “libre” in the name ... Projects like Blender, Krita, or Godot are awesome, and they don’t need to convince you about their libre nature by putting it in their names.
so... we decided to add the name of the programming language we use instead?
It seems like a pretty reasonable choice when thinking about Luanti as a game engine instead of a game. If someone is choosing a game engine to write a game in, one of their most significant considerations is likely to be what programming languages are supported, so highlighting Lua in the name of the engine is not a bad idea.
I think it's very wise to market your product on something people might actually care about.
Free/Libre is a fine philosophy, but as a selling point it has had a very disappointing history.
Great, but I wish they invested their nomenclature resources into design and ease of access.
https://bloxd.io/ is currently reaping kids who can't afford official Minecraft. (Browser based, free, ad driven)
But then again, MineTest is a bunch of volunteers playing around with a tool, so you can't exactly force anybody to do anything.
So what exactly did you wish they did? Make a browser version?
Yeah, make a browser version with the time saved by not renaming the repository.
I think making a browser version would take a bit more time than that. The idea is nice though.
Wow, Bloxd is really impressive. Works great on mobile.
Great project, which has sorely been in need of a better name.
"Luanti" works. Unique, pronounceable, alludes to Lua ties.
The "n" obscures the notional reference to "lua". "Lua" is two syllables, but "luan" is just one. The name makes me think 乱, not an element you'd want to include in the name of most projects.
For non-chinese speakers 乱/亂 is pronounced luan4 in Chinese and means disordered.
Lu-anti seems like two syllables to me
The main website lists lots of games that are built on Minetest / Luanti. [1] Does anyone have opinions on which of them are the most fun to play?
[1] https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=game
IDK a lot of the games feel really lame but there is this one CTF server that was fun. I might be too old for this stuff but I think it could be the next roblox if you could get it running inside of a webpage with WebGL.
Just scrolling through the list I found some interesting ones that really think outside the box (no pun intended), like this one that generates 3D-printable models.
https://content.minetest.net/packages/Warr1024/fdmcube/
I haven't played much myself, but VoxeLibre (and Mineclonia) are pretty good Minecraft replicas.
My only complaint is mobile controls. Desktop is decent but the mobile version (off F-droid) leaves much to be desired.
VoxeLibre is trying to be less of a Minecraft replica, now. Mineclonia still is, though.
But don't people playing Minecraft play it for the fun mods? And people playing Luanti play mods that replicate the original Minecraft? They've gone full circle in too little steps.
> But don't people playing Minecraft play it for the fun mods?
Some subset of them does, many do not.
> And people playing Luanti play mods that replicate the original Minecraft?
Some subset of them does, many do not.
Name is awful but game itself looks awesome. Can any speak to how “good” it is, especially server play?
There are a lot of creative mods + abilities. That the Lua programming language is core to the engine, means it is easy to do all sorts of supported creative things with the engine. But some of the mechanics and 'smoothness' of play that you can get in Minecraft just isn't there yet in Minetest, due to how the network protocol works. Give it a shot, you can play a local world with very little effort, and if you know lua, look at some of the 'world' definition code.
The thing that bugs me is how ... intrusive the object dependencies are. Outside of the most trivial mods, you absolutely must buy into one of the major ecosystems, and quite a few things can't be changed in an external mod, only in the ecosystem's core mods, because they're all registered in a single function that's not hookable. Changing the core mods themselves of course causes problems whenever you want to update them.
That said, some of the ecosystems (frameworks?) themselves are decent as-is. The two mineclone forks (I don't pretend to know the difference) are probably the best place to start.
Mapgen sucks if you want any kind of realism though. Even the mods that pretend to care about it (half of which are in lua and thus really slow) don't operate on a "top-down" level, so always end up with things like "water flows uphill in a circle". And the grid is very obvious, especially if you're obsessed with the dimensions of your base like I am. I also suspect poor RNG control in places. And there's definitely an idempotency option - if you quit (or crash) the game while mapgen is still running, you can end up with half-generated terrain.
Even the builtin mapgens are slow to generate new terrain if you use the "fast" cheat.
(this ended up being a bit more negative than I'd like; I don't intend to stop people from trying it)
Pretty much everything in Minetest is a 3rd party mod coded in Lua. It is viable, but you are limited by the netcode and the quality / integration of 3rd party mods.
Hardcore fans shall be called "luantics".
I find it hard to take seriously much debate on naming things. Whatever name you choose is going to upset some people and please others; in the end, all you need is something fairly unique. You quickly forget any intrinsic meaning and it becomes transparent. ‘YouTube’ is a pretty amateurish sounding name and yet it stuck, and here we are now. When was the last time you even stopped and pondered its etymology?
The name of any successful entity quickly becomes synonymous with that entity. It’s a fallacy to think you can imbue the entity with meaning by picking its name very carefully.
If you think I’m underestimating the importance of a name, just imagine the reaction if you’d suggested naming a computer company ‘Apple’ in the 1970s.
“…as in, the fruit?!”
I agree but I always thought YouTube was a great name for what it was. It was me choosing what was on (no pesky programming) and us making videos.
It’s very different now but “you”, as in me, was very central to my idea of what YouTube was. And the TV was a CRT. It was the tube. And as per GWB it was a series of tubes it came through (facetious).
I agree, actually. But I do think it’s an odd name given what it’s grown into. And as far as I know there’s no movement to have it changed.
Apple is snappy and easy to remember, and they literally had to fight the Beatles for it.
"Luanti"—a nice name!
fwiw in Russian language "minetest" is "bj is available".
Reminds me of the Minecraft server software "MiNET" and the issue that followed: https://github.com/NiclasOlofsson/MiNET/issues/446
At least the didn't call it Unity or Proton.
Minetest is not a good name but I felt it had become iconic as the game grew more solid. But I trust the maintainers to make the right decision here.
Name change solves a problem I was having just yesterday. And it is easy to use and spell in the tongue I was using it.
When was this published? hard to keep up anymore
> We decided to avoid using “free” or “libre” in the name ... Projects like ... Godot are awesome, they don’t need to convince you about their libre nature by putting it in their names.
This article was published today, October 13th, 2024.
Why would you choose a new name that you don't have the .com for?
How about voxelmod.com or something else that is a) relevant and b) the .com domain is available.
First off, there are more TLDs than just .com.
Secondly, the majority of people go to websites by googling them, not by typing a URL.
luanti.com — only $188.75/mo. for 36 months!
Yeah, this name sucks. It will endlessly be misread as "Luna-ti" and assigned astrological connotations, it sounds like a pharmaceutical, and it tells you nothing about the platform.
Lua does mean Luna, just in a slightly different language.
Luanti is easy to pronounce and distinct, but it's also vague enough that someone making a game using the Luanti platform will want to name their game something else.
Despite my familiarity with Lua, my mind originally went to the Yuan-ti.