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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunate missed opportunity to build on top of Minetest (an amazing open source clone of minecraft that works really well) instead of re-implementing the hard parts yourself (unless that was part of the fun, which I totally understand!).

If anyone is thinking about doing something like that, you can develop entire games as "Minetest mods"[1] which would have allowed him to mostly just write "business logic." I've started writing a "game" using that myself.

Nonetheless, great idea and I'm glad to see it happen!

[1]: https://dev.minetest.net/Modding_Overview

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What do you mean with "re-implementing the hard parts"? Matheminecraft is an "adventure map", playable in Minecraft 1.12.1.

Ah my mistake, I made a bad assumption based on the pictures (I couldn't read the language and Google translate wouldn't work for some reason, probably because of stuff I do with uMatrix).

That said, still would have loved to see them use Mintest instead as a platform :-)

I had never heard of Minetest before. Have you written up any of your experiences "writing a game" as you say? I'm looking over it and having a hard time thinking about the best way to dip my toes into it.

I have not written anything up about it yetas I'm still in very early stages. I've never used Lua before so am learning that as well (tho having used Ruby/Python/JS extensively it's amazing how readable Lua is, just need to learn the APIs).

If I get anything working tho, I'll put together a write-up to go along with the code :-)

Wow, Minetest looks really cool: Minecraft clone with a Lua API for modding. This may get us back into using Minecraft modding as a way to learn programming.

EDIT: Oh, it's a game engine. Is there a basic 'vanilla' Minecraft clone based on Minetest, for this purpose?

> Is there a basic 'vanilla' Minecraft clone based on Minetest, for this purpose?

Yes, it's the default `minetest_game` that comes with the game (as well as `minimal`). Note that the redstone-alike mesecons is a separate modpack (which isn't a problem in practice) as is mob support (which is).

It is also a basic vanilla Minecraft clone (the wording is kind of poor). If you install it you can play a basic game.

It's also in the repos of every linux distro I've tried it on (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian), and if it isn't it builds really easily (even built on my Chromebook with both crouton and crostini).

You can also add "mods" to it that add a ton of rich features to the game. I recommend adding one at a time tho as they can make your server unstable (mods vary in quality). The minetest core is rock solid stable IME, but not all mods are.

If there's any interest, I can write a blog post about this with getting started instructions at playing and configuring. I'm not affiliated with the project, but I'm a big fan and use it at home with my kids (and a server I setup on our LAN).

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