> 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.

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.

That's how mods work in Minecraft bedrock

> 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

So what exactly did you wish they did? Make a browser version?

Wow, Bloxd is really impressive. Works great on mobile.

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).

Apple is snappy and easy to remember, and they literally had to fight the Beatles for it.

This article was published today, October 13th, 2024.

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!

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.