Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

I have no idea about what the players want these days. The large-player-count servers I believe still use instancing and transferring players between servers to support those numbers.

The other hard part is the game's mechanics. You'd need a lot of careful game design to reign in the destructible nature of the game world and all its contents. Minecraft isn't about questing and loot, it's about construction, and if you're not leveraging this you might be better served by making your own game. Large servers typically address this with round-based deathmatch or deathmatch-like gameplay, not really what you seem to be interested in.

It's true that Java (which the original and mainly modded version of Minecraft is written in), is widely known and generally allows to write functionality relatively quickly.

Minetest uses C++ for the engine and Lua for its modding API. C++ is much better suited for a game engine, due to being closer to the hardware, using less RAM (due to not being executed in a virtual machine), not having a Garbage Collector, which halts the universe for a short moment every few seconds and is the main-reason for Minecraft still having lag spikes after years of optimizations, and then miscellaneous things like array boundary checks, but also just more game libraries being available in the C++-context (Minetest for example builds on top of Irrlicht).

But Lua for the modding API is the critical part. Minecraft doesn't have a modding API. To this day, you still mod the original Minecraft by decompiling its code (which is relatively easy thanks to Java), making your changes as a professional developer at Mojang would have to make them, and then bundling your modifications up and releasing it to the world.

As a result, it's just really not easy to do at all and mods regularly break when Mojang releases a new version.

With Minetest's modding API on the other hand, it's really easy to just quickly make some changes. I for example always disliked that digging stone gives you cobblestone, which you then have to smelt in order to get stone again. Changing that took me less than 10 minutes with no experience in Minetest modding.

All I had to do, is to find the right file and then in this section:

    minetest.register_node("default:stone", {
	description = "Stone",
	tiles = {"default_stone.png"},
	groups = {cracky = 3, stone = 1},
	drop = 'default:cobble',
	legacy_mineral = true,
	sounds = default.node_sound_stone_defaults(),
    })

I then also added in a crafting recipe to convert stone to cobblestone, if I ever want to use cobblestone. Again, find the right file and then just add this:

    minetest.register_craft({
	output = 'default:cobble',
	recipe = {
		{'default:stone'},
	}
    })

Modded Minecraft is pretty unlike a typical modding community. Few people add one mod to their Minecraft game, what people tend to do is run a mod _pack_ which is typically dozens of mods with different authors that are integrated together by the pack author the way a movie's Editor turns hundreds of hours of pictures and sounds into a coherent 2 hour film.

It's out of hand enough that you will see people saying e.g. "Ugh, I can't face Magic Bees without Gendustry" - Minecraft doesn't have any bees at all, bees are added by a mod called "Forestry", then magical bees are added to that with "Magic Bees" by a different author and the mod called "Gendustry" by yet another author exists _solely_ to make the genetics gameplay from the Forestry mod more... industrial.

So there's an _ecosystem_ at work here, akin to the Windows vs Unix ecosystems and that network effect applies to your whole ecosystem.

The PC "Java" Minecraft associated with modding actually ships new versions relatively often still after all these years. But because mods are so involved, even tiny changes under the hood can mean hours of software development for the mod authors, so the ecosystem moves to newer versions less steadily, a "pack" of mods will usually be forever associated with a specific Minecraft version. Unlike most games which "upgrade" like a web browser or operating system, Minecraft actually lets you pick at start time which version you want to run in order to facilitate this. For example one of the most famous packs "Agrarian Skies" is for 1.6.4 and will never work with a newer Minecraft but still has some players.

As a result of players being interested in this ecosystem rather than the individual mods, it only takes one of dozens of key developers to stymie a move to a different platform, whether that's a new Minecraft version or somebody else's Minecraft clone. If this happens, the only way forward is for part of the ecosystem to evolve around the gap which happens much more slowly.

Example: A big part of Minecraft is crafting, and mods often add dozens of new things to craft and even new ways to craft things. Rather than have a web browser open on your phone to check what you're doing as you play, the game needs an integrated way to remind you how to make, say, a Wireless Crafting Terminal (yes that's a thing you can make inside the game). The first mod to do this was called Too Many Items. So a pack would add "Too Many Items" and that made players lives easier

But TMI was limiting and ceased to be maintained. What to do? Fortunately Not Enough Items came along. Not Enough Items was maintained for a long time, and became pretty sophisticated, able to tell players which complicated industrial machines could produce which products and with what inputs. But eventually Not Enough Items too fell by the wayside and in the latest Minecraft versions packs use Just Enough Items which is different but arguably better.

And there is a lot of these. It would not surprise me, if Minetest had already silently overtaken Minecraft in terms of active players.

But yeah, this doesn't solve the awareness issue. These users don't know that they're playing Minetest. Even if they were playing the official Minetest Android build, they'd not know that this is the real thing.

And people interested in modding Minetest might not learn this either, so never reach the platform in the first place. Some of these rebranded Minetests bundle mods, icon packs etc., so you at least have an audience.

There's also a plain Vanilla impl as well.

And yes, you'd need to create a client mod. Sure, it's a compromise, but it'd still be an improvement over the current state of affairs.

As an aside they make a claim that will be familiar to many lisp programmers. Their claim is by providing better power they will improve the average performance in the long run for their users (e.g. people who like lots of mods). Look at it this way, if you use horribly buggy edge cases to build flying machines that's going to take a ton of work for the server to simulate (minecraft flying machines often use tick perfect timings arrived at through - effectively - busy loops); if instead you used a mod that provided flying mechanics, and flying control blocks (e.g. that knew when to inject their logic) you would save a lot of performance. They may not be able to have the fastest server around, but given the things their users will use it for, theirs will probably be faster than those efficient servers in those cases.

https://github.com/GlowstoneMC/Glowstone/wiki/Configuration-...

It says for the "allow-flight" option that the default is "false" and it's "Currently not implemented."

I tried setting it to "true" anyway, but it still didn't work.

I presume you accidentally posted too soon. Would love to see the example.

It is not necessary to have mod compatibility in order to provide an extensible, powerful alternative.

$5/mo for 0.5G, $10/mo for 1G, $20/mo for 2G. All the standard droplets, except for the 3G for $15/mo one, make you pay $10 more per gigabyte.

Both Vultr and Linode seem to offer twice the amount of RAM per dollar though.

I've been able to host Minecraft instances on my own hardware over a cable modem feed, and on a VM provisioned within a machine I fully control, but it's just not economical to do cloud-wise.

I do miss the days when the server component of a multi-player game was pretty lean and non-intrusive so you could run it as a background process on pretty much anything that had good bandwidth.