Minetest: Minetesting Edition

Minetest

I've been trying some of the 0.5 dev versions of Minetest and Squaresville C (a Minetest fork focused on mapgen, see: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18509 ), as well as some of the more experimental mods, so I thought it'd be interesting to have a Minetest thread focused on that while everyone is waiting for 0.5 to be done. If you want some pre-built versions of 0.5, you can find them here in this forum: forum.minetest.net/viewforum.php?f=42 Squaresville C is focused on stuff like ruins, roads, realistic landscapes, realistic rivers, passageways, etc. Its best played with some of the author's mods, like nmobs, booty, and elixirs. Theres some appimages for Linux and some Windows builds in the thread, if you want to try it out without compiling. You'll have to grab minetest_game's mods from a version of 0.5 and chuck them in the subgame for it to work.

Documentation
0.5 has a big text file for documentation, which you can find here: github.com/minetest/minetest/blob/master/doc/lua_api.txt
Dev wiki: dev.minetest.net/Main_Page
Game wiki: wiki.minetest.net/Main_Page
Doc (help mod): forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15912 has some base game documentation (have to download another mod for full base game documentation for 0.4.16), some mods make some entries in it occassionally, such as Digtrons or dfcaverns. Other than that you'll just see typical data about the entry. Smart inventory and some other inventory mods have doc integration.

The latest mod I've been trying out is Terumetal, a mod that adds a new ore for alloy smelting. Terumetal is a little broken, mod author seemed to have forgotten to supply a couple of values when calling reg_tools when making the raw terumetal, but I dumped in some and the pure terumetal pickaxe is now working. You can find Terumetal here: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=19194
What have you guys been doing with Minetest lately? Last I heard there was only that barebones arcana testing server, which didn't seem too interesting to me.

Other urls found in this thread:

forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18898
rubenwardy.com/minetest_modding_book
wiki.minetest.net/World_boundaries
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15806
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18140
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=11982
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=12889
github.com/minetest/minetest/blob/master/minetest.conf.example
minetest.net/downloads/
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=16487
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?id=7846
github.com/minetest/minetestmapper
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=12139
forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2840
wiki.minetest.net/Map_Generator_Evolution#indev
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Nice to see your stupendous stuff again, Minetest autist.
HOST A SERVER AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I don't really have the patience to fiddle with a server, I just like to explore strange worlds and mess around with interesting mods in singleplayer mostly. I have no idea how the mods I use or Squaresville C would work out online. Squaresvilles C is a lot faster than using lua mods for mapgen, so it might be a decent thing to run on a server, although I don't know how stable 0.5's online stuff is. I think you'd need an 0.5 client to even join it since the devs are apparently making breaking changes for 0.5 concerning online stuff. Squaresville C could use a farming mod/additional flora too.
The Squaresville C dev made a 100% lua version of the fork, which is inherently slower. It apparently does not work on Windows according to that guy in the thread: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18898

I wouldn't mind giving this a spin again, haven't tried it in a while. As long as you have technic enabled, OP.

Some sort of recipe-viewing mod is also really important.

There's this brilliant introduction to modding and the API: rubenwardy.com/minetest_modding_book

looks cool, two questions

It's twice as buggy, has a quarter of the content and a thousandth of the mods, and adds literally nothing aside from being OPEN SOURCE

I've played for a good while on a few of our old Holla Forums servers, it was okay as a building block simulator but really not much other than that. I haven't seen anything like the mods OP posts, though. Unfortunately for me, I only have fun with autismblocks if it's multiplayer.

I've yet to hear a convincing argument as for why the height limit (not infinite; it's just like 50,000 blocks or something, instead of 256) even matters. You can't see far enough for a building game to take advantage of making fuckhuge structures. Nobody is in any hurry to create some kind of huge adventure-cave using that vertical distance. At this stage, it's nothing more than No Man's Sky's fifty gorillion worlds that you can never visit in a hundred lifetimes. It's a number bigger than the number offered by the "competition"; big fucking deal.

Well it lets you build and explore vertically and implement shit like flying and floating islands better, 256 is not that much to be honest. No one is in any hurry to develop anything, this is an unknown meme clone for autists. I'd consider playing pirated Minecraft but most here would dislike the idea.

The biggest lie ever told yet retards keep parroting it over and over.

Minetest definitely runs better for me than Minecraft.

Fuck off.

The world limits are different, there is more vertical room in Minetest, but less horizontal space. Basically the world is a giant cube. This gives ample room for caves, and for modders to do stuff with the empty space. There are some experimental floatlands in the v7 map generator that are subject to change, which you can enable with a flag called mgv7_spflags=floatlands. See: wiki.minetest.net/World_boundaries
The rest of the differences are:
Theres probably other differences, but I haven't played much of Minecraft's more recent versions.


Minetest has only had a Lua modding API since version 0.4 and it has a much smaller community. Its not really surprising that it has less mods. The default subgame is not meant to have a large amount of content, its more like a bunch of basic stuff that tends to be used.


Get close enough to generate the chunks, press R (sets the view distance to unlimited) or hold + for a while to increase the view distance. The reason why you usually wouldn't want to turn view distance on that high all the time is because the framerate will obviously drop quite a bit. The practical view distance limit is where the chunks start to unload. You can also turn off the ingame fog if you want by pressing F3.
I'm pretty sure the default caves can get bigger than anything in Minecraft, and cave mods already generate caves larger than the default Minetest caves. Plus, it makes room for layers: Underworlds, Geomoria (only provides one layer), Geominer, and dfcaverns are examples of mods that provide underground layers.

Smooth terrain mod for minetest when?

So your view distance is effectively capped by chunk loading distance. This is literally the same as Minecraft.

The problem with Minecraft caves is that they are tiny and spindly and maze-like. For what you've got, they are usually more than large enough. Making them ten times bigger but similar in shape only matters if you've got a major hard-on for being totally fucking lost. Either that, or making giant underground passages and rooms and things. Which, again, is useless because of the view/loading distance being capped at such a small amount.


Thing is, Minecraft realized it was a game. It realized there were serious limitations on how far you can see because of this, and capped the build limit accordingly. Minetest wants to believe that giving the player such a large space, it frees them to build in a "real world" scale, but it just won't work. You can build a 5-mile-tall skyscraper, but never be able to see the whole thing at once, so what's the point? Like an artist making a painting on a canvas the size of a wall, but the only way anyone can look at it is with a magnifying glass.

Welp, at the very least, you can load every chunk by going near it or by running some sort of script, then enable full view range, letting you see such a tower.

It already exists to some degree in a mod called Erosion, but it gave me an out of memory error eventually. It tries to simulate erosion in addition to turning some things into slopes via moreblocks. The small caves with slopes can get kind of cramped. You can find it here: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15806
There are other sloped terrain mods too, here are some that I found:
Natural Slopes: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18140
Dwarf Fortress like ramps: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=11982
Australopithecus (subgame by same guy who did the ramps, has slopes in it): forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=12889


There are settings that can change how mapblocks are loaded. For example, client_mapblock_limit is the maximum number of mapblocks that the client keeps in memory. You can set it to something higher, or set it to -1 for an unlimited amount, but you obviously don't have unlimited memory on your computer. There is also client_unload_unused_data_timeout, which is the amount of time it waits to remove unused map data from memory. See example config file: github.com/minetest/minetest/blob/master/minetest.conf.example
5 miles in Minetest would be 8047 blocks high since each block (node) is 1 meter tall. I kind of doubt most people would build that, but they could if they wanted to.
Anyway, if you have the physical memory for seeing a 8047 node high building, you can take a gander at it, from what I can tell.
Theres a lot more to do with that empty space than build a really tall building anyway. You can make a mod to generate stuff in the sky, or hide a base up there. Its the de facto place to put "realms" right now as well, since Minetest doesn't have real realms yet.
The larger caves look sort of like spheroids slapped together, not really maze-like. There are windy smaller caves that are like passageways, which can connect to bigger caves, dungeons, the surface, modded in stuff, etc. You could use the minimap and debug info or one of those compass mods if you tend to get lost.
You can have bigger caves/dungeons/whatever than in Minecraft. Depending on whichever version of Minecraft you have a fetish for, the height limit is either 128 or 256. You can make caves bigger than those values in Minetest via modding, there can be many of those caves. Infact, I was able to find a default cave network using the v7 map generator that is at least 263 nodes high. The last image is a not very useful screenshot of it from afar when noclipping, was just using the base subgame in 0.4.16.

I'm starting to get the itch to play this again thanks to this thread. Wonder if any of the game-type theme mods are a little more mature now.

I really like the third pic for some reason. When do we get a decent gun mod so we can build the zone and have a blocky poor man's multiplayer stalker?


It's way better for just building, but the interface and anything to do with survival is still garbage as far as I can tell.

...

Ah this mod, it could have been doing a bit better job at that but I guess its better than nothing. Didn't this author also mentioned that for each different sloped blocks type you will get these instead of regular cubes? which sucks because then more inventory space gets wasted.

jesus, do something about those textures, you cant have a game that looks worse than minecraft

Last time I tried it, it didn't run as well as it could, despite being made with trusty C++ not awful javascript, and when I tried to promising looking modpacks it felt like they were missing some content including interface features even though they seemed to have it when I inspected the folders. What did I do wrong?!!

Also, Squaresville C sounds fantastic. When I first heard of and tried Minetest I developed a concept for a game/mod, quite divergent from regular Minecraft imitations, but that would have required some massive worldgen changes, and other shit. If you want, I can share my concept with you.

The mods are written in Lua, minetest_game in your games folder is a bunch of Lua code. If you have LuaJIT on your system, it will run Lua mods faster, but then theres the inherent memory limit of LuaJIT to deal with. Mainly they need to improve the engine's performance from what I understand.
Java, not Javascript. They're two different languages.
Which modpacks were they?
You may want to take a look at what is being added/changed in the dev versions, for example they have added a new C++ map generator called Carpathian that focuses on more realistic map generation, mainly plains, hills, terraces, and ridged mountains.


If I remember correctly there is still an OpenGL 1 renderer and a software rendering mode, so it should be able to run (although not necessarily well) on older hardware. Basically you'll need LuaJIT or a Lua version that is at least at the same version LuaJIT is at on your system, and a Minetest binary if available for your system or the required libraries/compiler/etc needed to build Minetest. However, in the latest version they are switching to C++11, so support for some older systems is disappearing (officially). Technically it could still compile and work if you have the required software, Windows XP for example is not supported (in the dev versions), but still works.
Download page has some basic information about supported OSes, obviously: minetest.net/downloads/


This flintlock pistol one is decent, hurts the mobs from nmobs at least, no idea if it hurts players: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=16487
Theres the shooter mod, which requires a lot of fiddling to make it work with mobs: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?id=7846 It could use a lot of work, not really my favorite. Not guns, but elixirs includes throwable bombs and molotov cocktails.
Alive AI adds a bunch of overpowered enemies, some of which use guns, although it can be unstable sometimes.
Technic obviously adds uranium (which is radioactive and can hurt you) to the worldgen and you can build nuclear reactors, so theres that.

Too bad it missed the entire point and has a pathetically shit API

Theres a useful utility called MinetestMapper that can generate a 2D overview image of Minetest worlds, it can be configured quite a bit: github.com/minetest/minetestmapper
It has a GUI version as well called MinetestMapperGUI: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=12139
NodeBoxEditor is another useful utility for making nodeboxes, especially useful for making new mobs for nmobs: forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2840


I don't think that would be very hard to fix, looks like the modder went out of his way to make it give you full nodes instead of the slope itself.


They're pretty different games, and last I heard they still didn't have an open source implementation of the server software.

HOLY FUCK Minetest is only 14mb to download.

So what's a good server to play in? Someone set up a server

OP would be the only host I'd want at this point, our previous ones didn't know much about mods.

Oh grand, we needed a mod for ores to smelt. We only have, like, 1000 of them.

So this new mapgen fork. Can it replicate how Minecraft was before infinite worlds? A finite cube of world with highly variable generation parameters would be pretty great.

Squaresville C is a fork that just comes with an additional C++ mapgenerator, whatever changes to the engine that were needed to make it work, and the lua helper mod for the squaresville mapgenerator that comes with some settings you can configure as far as I know. Its not intended to replicate Minecraft's terrain before infinite worlds, but this doesn't stop anyone from attempting to do so with Minetest itself.
You can alter mapgen parameters of the C++ map generators in Minetest, to do so, Settings > Advanced Settings > Server/Singleplayer > Mapgen or just edit minetest.conf. You can also make a lua mod that autoselects the singlenode map generator and generates everything from scratch. The flat mapgenerator obviously already generates flat worlds, and has flags to turn lakes and hills on and off. v5 has a tendency to create chunky/blobby floats already and could probably be coaxed to generate more of it.
Minetest had an old map generator in 0.4.9 called Indev that had floating islands at Y=500, some very big "caves" as well as v6 type caves, and extreme terrain near the world boundaries, pics related. See: wiki.minetest.net/Map_Generator_Evolution#indev

bump to express my desire for a server

If someone hosted I'd probably join. Needs technic though.

Would join to build shit

I was on one of the previous servers. Would be nice to build with you fags again.

Bump for server

just play minecraft

Generated stuff and such. Valleys is looking like v7 here.

Damn if someone can get the mods in this thread's screenshots working with multiplayer.

I really like the generations, but the texture look like shit, can someone make a port of Minecraft's textures.

Do trees fall apart if you cut the base block of wood? That feature should be default

Why do people keep shilling this bullshit?
I'd prefer (((Minecraft))) over Minetest any day.

Just get a cracked Minecraft client you fuckwit
It still runs like fucking ass
Who gives a shit? Nobody is going to build 50 miles into the air

Meanwhile on Minecraft you have

Meanwhile, on Minecraft, you have
-an unfinished game made by a liar who fucked off after growing rich from charging people money for it
-now owned by Microsoft
-closed source, proprietary Java shitware

Who can be said to be a "shill" again? Someone advocating for a free product or someone advocating for a proprietary commercial product?

So I just heard about a Minecraft mod called Cubic Chunks, that not only makes the game load chunks as 16x16x16 cubes instead of 16x16x256 pillars but enables a theoretically infinite spread of terrain along the y-axis. This can be tweaked upon world gen so that it doesn't go quite so high up, but it doesn't demolish the build-height limit.

Why is nobody talking about this? It's basically the only thing Minetest has over Minecraft that isn't a "muh open source" meme. The only thing I can think of is that, because of the fact it seriously alters central game code, it's incompatible with other mods. But there are plenty of people still playing vanilla.

Remember this fag?

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