Minetest: An open source voxel game engine | Hacker News Reader

Minetest: An open source voxel game engine

minetest.net

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A Minetest game I recommend is Nodecore: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Warr1024/nodecore/

Description: "A surreal dream-world where everything is possible but nothing is easy. Peaceful and Zen. Brutally obstinate. Prepare to unlearn everything you thought you knew about voxel sandbox games."

"Brutally obstinate" is right, it's pretty mystifying and I didn't get very far when I played it, but it's definitely interesting. It's like heavily modded Minecraft from another dimension. If you like a game where figuring out how to play is part of the challenge, I think you'd like Nodecore.

So this is like Minetest blended with The Powder Toy?

with a sprinkle of QWOP

Man, I spent way too much time on qwop, and still can only finish it like 1% of the time...

I had a Minecraft background and I disliked Nodecore. I would not recommend Nodecore if you want a minecraft-like experience.

For a more Minecraft-like – but still unique – experience, I recommend MeseCraft: http://mesecraft.com/

I do not mind the minecraft aesthetic, but it feels a bit weird if all voxels evolved into was that. Most promising showcase (for its time) that I know of was Delta Force from 1998 in which the landscape geometry was vastly more detailed. But then again I haven't been paying attention and might be missing many obvious examples. I'm guessing graphics hardware decided against it but are there more modern showcases? Or any other future of voxels?

Delta Force images: https://tagn.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/delta-force-a-memory-o...

Delta Force video: https://youtu.be/Fnj-q3ux-Us?t=287

Outcast was also great

Also first thing that came to my mind. Also, I can recommend playing the remaster (Second Contact).

Back then they had a bug in the naming of the quality settings, so that the high quality was labeled low and vice versa.

Played the whole game in bad quality until near the end

Check out Voxatron (https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php), it's like Pico8, but in voxels.

If I recall properly, Minetest started out as an open-source Minecraft clone hence the aesthetics.

Best looking modern voxel games I know of are Teardown[0] and Shadows of Doubt[1].

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/

It's not just "that". Minetest is actually a "voxel game engine", and allows all sorts of things. A better showcase is the community's mod catalog, "ContentDB" [1].

Some mods/games even try to break out from the cubic theme, for instance "Little Lady" [2] or the "Rocks" mod [3]

It should be mentioned, though, that beyond those "extreme" cases, the MC-like voxel model is vastly easier to deal with for mod creators, and that's really a key point. That's the kind of thing a high-school kids can hack because it's Lua and PNG textures all the way.

[1] https://content.minetest.net/ [2] https://content.minetest.net/packages/Just_Visiting/littlela... [3] https://content.minetest.net/packages/Just_Visiting/rocks/

Smooth of voxel terrain isn't new, ultimately it doesn't play well so it isn't included in most voxel games. Minecraft stores data as voxels but renders as polygons (blocks). There are voxel rendering techniques as well. But at the end of the day it comes down to triangles or rays, right? So that voxel data has to be turned into polygons sooner or later, and the more magic you do to it, the less coherent these polygons are as a gaming mechanic. Blocks turn out to be fast/cheap to render and are highly usable in gaming mechanics.

I think the reality is that in Minecraft for example, every voxel is in memory, including the 99% of them you can't see. In minecraft, a chunk is up to 16x255x16 or 65,536 voxels, and with a view distance of 10, that's 21x21 or 441 chunks loaded, with up to 28,901,376 voxels in memory.

So whatever we do to turn voxels into polygons, we're going to likely be doing it across an enormous amount of data (relative to a home computer).

(And remember, in minecraft, chunk generation occurs live too. No world pre-gen. As you walk around, the game is inventing the world 65k blocks at a time!)

The undeservedly little-known Planet Explorers¹ has a rather nice voxel engine and is using it well. Mine anything, dig tunnels in any shape, modify terrain, etc.

Without the cuboid look.

¹ https://store.steampowered.com/app/237870/Planet_Explorers/

There was also Comanche: Maximum Overkill, one of the first voxel-based games, quite impressive for 1992!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche:_Maximum_Overkill

Minetest has a lot of promise, but also has a lot of low-hanging fruit, particularly around the fit and finish of the game. For instance the configuration GUIs for setting up your controls is pretty bad, you still can't reconfigure your mouse keys without editing minetest.conf

Still, it gives me hope that if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow, minetest should prove to be a good foundation for community-run block game.

The Minecraft IAP and server spam is getting pretty close.

This is the major reason I stay away from bedrock versions, java seems to have way less of this

> if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow

Honestly I haven't touched Minecraft since Microsoft started enforcing "you have to have a Microsoft account". It's not ruining the game per se, and it's not an overwhelmingly burdensome thing, it has just raised the activation energy of getting back into the game enough that I haven't summoned the will yet.

I bought Minecraft for my son and I've been extremely frustrated by this requirement and that there's seemingly no way to stay signed in— I've had to print out my MS account details and tape them to his computer so he can sign in whenever he needs.

I'd recommend using a launcher, it stops that happening. I use Prism Launcher and after the initial sign in about a year ago I've never been asked to log in again even after going a few months of not playing it.

If you are on Linux, this is a known issue, I think you need Gnome Keyring installed (on any DE) to avoid this behavior.

Okay! Thanks for this. Yeah it's on a bog standard Ubuntu 20.04 install; I didn't realise this might be fixable by installing additional software.

Fwiw I think standard 20.04 already has gnome keyring. As suggested here, try a launcher perhaps? I think the one in the store has been working fine for me.

I'm using the official Minecraft launcher, likely from the snap store? In any case, knowing that this is fixable, I will take a closer look when I have a chance.

Ironically, for all this trouble, at least we were able to get Minecraft running at all on Ubuntu— on a separate Windows 10 machine I couldn't get it going at all. Might try again at some point with a VM so that we can play together.

Complete speculation on my part, but I wonder if maybe snap applications have trouble accessing the keyring from inside the sandbox.

I've worked around this by printing the command line while minecraft is open with something like:

cat /proc/$(pgrep java)/cmdline | sed -e "s/\x00/ /g"

And then pasting that sucker in a script wrapped around a .desktop file and from then on only launching that. Opens just as fast as it did back in 2010 and I don't need to open the launcher unless I need to update the game or something like that.

I only play on single-player, haven't tested on multiplayer. The tokens might expire after some time and thus require you to "reseed" the command line from time to time.

use multimc

Wasn't there a lot of drama around MultiMC recently?

You may be thinking of the PolyMC->Prism Launcher transition.

And then there are people like me who purchased the game, and now cannot play it.

This is why I f#$@ing pirate you idiot managers

right now microsoft has had minetest removed from the google play store for a month using groundless copyright accusations

Groundless copyright accusations? If there were accusations, they seem grounded. I took one look at the site and those images are 95%+ similar to minecraft

I looked it up, they are actually groundless in this case: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13363#issuecomme...

I don't know copyright law very well, so I ask in earnest.

If you copy the entire essence but still write the code yourself, is that not infringement?

You can't copyright an idea, just a particular realization of an idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_dist...

Game mechanics pretty much can't be copyrighted at all.

Game mechanics haven't been copyrighted, but they have been patented.

The developers of shadow of war has a patent on their nemesis system. It's not just an implementation detail, it's the entire concept.

https://www.ign.com/articles/wb-games-nemesis-system-patent-...

>The patent protects the "Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games."

>This encompasses a hierarchy of procedurally-generated NPCs that interact with and remember the player's actions. The patent also covers changes to the NPCs' positions in the hierarchy, as well as their appearance and behaviour, again based on the actions of the player.

the link to the patent is incorrect

but yeah software patents are a huge problem

fortunately we don't have to worry about them in this case

Per Atari v. Philips, Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive, and Spry Fox v. Lolapps, among other cases, substantial similarity in presentation is enough for a video game to infringe on another game's copyright, even if it shares no code or assets with the infringed-upon game. And yes, this means the idea that game mechanics or even "look and feel" are not copyrightable is a myth.

The concept of Tetris, in particular, is protected with copyright, patent, and trademark armor so thick that if you write a clone of the game, Henk and Alexey will sue you into a smouldering crater.

debian and ubuntu ship an implementation of tetris in the bsdgames package (and bsd has included it since the 80s), gnu emacs has included tetris.el for 25 years (despite removing yow lines), and debian also includes bastet, blocks of the undead, crack-attack, gtkboard, kblocks (which is part of kde), ltris, netris, petris, stax, termtris, tetrinet, tint, vdr-plugin-games, vitetris, /usr/share/vim-scripts/plugin/tetris.vim, and quadrapassel (which is part of the official gnome release)

you've been able to buy cheap '9999 in 1 block game' hardware with 200 nematic pixels, preprogrammed with tetris, for at least 15 years at any import port in the world

i've written two tetris clones myself, http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/inexorable-misc/tetris and https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/tetris.c, and no lawsuits have yet arrived

also, minecraft is just an infiniminer clone, and there are fifty zillion clones of each of pacman, space invaders, breakout, snake, doom, and super mario

so these novel legal precedents you mention, though indeed menacing, are at least still being very narrowly applied in practice; conflicting precedents include data east v. epyx, capcom v. data east, and atari v. amusement world

even in tetris v. xio, the judge held that tetris's gameplay is not copyrightable, and the case was not appealed, so it isn't binding precedent outside that one district

also your mention of patent suggests that maybe you're not very well informed about the area; tetris came out in 01985, so any patents on inventions disclosed by the game would have had to have an application date no later than 01986 (01985 outside the usa) and, barring lemelson-style submarine patent tricks to delay issuance until 02006 or later, be expired for over a decade now

What if you call it Infiniminer?

And if you could-- minecraft itself was highly derivative if infiniminer. Many of the elaborations in mincraft itself existed as freely distributed community mods first, etc.

Minecraft was a copy of Infiniminer, AIUI, which has been open-sourced. I think you'd need more than one look to tell something was based on MC rather than just being part of the block genre that Infiniminer spawned?

In my personal opinion, as USA has politically appointed judiciary it's hard to see copyright domain extension - eg to game mechanics - as anything other than overreach to use international treaties to protect USA business interests?

I wasn't aware of Infiniminer, but that makes a strong case to negate any strong claims from microsoft trying to stop minetest. But I also would change that name.

The copyright might be groundless, but using the name "Minetest" is incredibly risky as basically any court will decide it's trademark infringement, as it's too confusingly similar to "Minecraft".

If I were the creator, I'd change the name before I'm forced to.

Amusingly they probably went with ‘test’ over ‘craft’ to avoid sabre-rattling from Blizzard. I think Freecraft was taken down at around that time?

Right now, Microsoft is perm-banning accounts from all servers for gameplay activity that is openly encouraged on certain servers, like griefing, which is a fundamental aspect of anarchy servers like 2b2t; to say nothing of the speech policing.

not in my experience. const (the only playable anarchy server) is as vile and wild as ever and nobody got banned AFAICT. 2b was hot trash for a long time now and it mostly serves to fuel hauses raging coke addiction

They banned people for mass scanning billions of IP addresses then creating bots to automatically grief these small servers.

I don't know how you can justify this. This isn't someone being an asshole on 2b2t... this is someone destroying thousands of small servers just to be destructive.

There is some serious cognitive dissonance in the Minecraft community. There's a narrative that Microsoft is "destroying" the community that does not align with reality.

Most recently, the outrage was over the (entirely optional!) chat moderation features on private servers, and the mindless recitation that it would lead to widespread abuse and false-positive bans. It didn't.

I can only assume it's the result of non-technical people who know _just enough_ to think they know what they're talking about parroting misinformation in discords, Twitter, YouTube comments, etc. Perhaps it's a just a younger, more impressionable audience.

There is seemingly no reasoning with them either. They will vehemently defend wild points with zero evidence, and often with evidence to the contrary readily available.

This is how outrage spreads on the Internet, through "very online" communities, and gaming tends to have a lot of them. People who have an axe to grind against X (big tech company, a streamer, a game, etc) exaggerate the truth and make lots of paranoid points. These communities tend to be very big about solidarity so everyone else in the community parrots the message and through a game of telephone fake rumors whip up outrage.

It happens on HN a lot these days too on pretty much any Big Tech related topic.

I could be wrong but IIRC the chat moderation can not be disabled on a per server basis. Microsoft forces it onto every server and if your account is banned because of something you said on one server you won't be able to join other servers, even those you run yourself.

Because of the pseudo-open nature of the MC source code, in practice it is trivial to run an authenticated server without signed chat

This was exactly the point of the outrage, servers ought to be able to opt out of this system but they can't. There are mods [1] that server admins can use to remove the chat message signatures, players are powerless if they strip the signature that certified ever message they send, vanilla servers will block them by default and prevent them from joining.

It is true however that there wasn't really the wave of false positive bans happening that the community was expecting. At least as far as I'm aware.

[1] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/no-chat-reports

Can't you just run a third party server?

I run a server. Chat signing isn't enabled. Upon login, the user sees a message along the lines of "chat can't be verified on this server." Reporting doesn't work. Everything else works just fine.

But can someone who got banned by Microsoft still join your server?

Why would I want them to?

because Microsoft could get it wrong? isn’t that why we’re disabling chat signing?

Since the feature has been implemented can you point to a single case in which Microsoft "got it wrong?" I'll even be generous and include the entire year prior to java's chat signing in which the feature existed on bedrock.

Spoiler: you can't because that scenario doesn't exist. It's a FUD bandwagon argument, nothing more.

then why are you disabling chat signing?

I'm not.

your comment from further up in the thread:

> I run a server. Chat signing isn't enabled. Upon login, the user sees a message along the lines of "chat can't be verified on this server." Reporting doesn't work. Everything else works just fine.

are you a GPT or something

I didn't disable it. It just doesn't work.

Let's actually give some context to the chat moderation issue rather than just your hearsay on the matter that dismisses without any consideration one side of it in favour of Mojang.

1. Chat moderation is *required*, unless you modify the vanilla game. There is no toggle for it on vanilla. You can choose to not enforce it for clients connecting to your server, but if they are a vanilla client they will sign chat regardless.

2. The initial wording of the rules that could result in a permanent ban, were incredibly loose & vague, allowing for bans for things such as swearing or alcohol/drugs, regardless of player age / legal status in their countries. This was something the community was able to change through pressure and the "outrage" you belittle.

3. > ...and the mindless recitation that it would lead to widespread abuse and false-positive bans. It didn't.

The reason it didn't was that since this community has a pretty tech-savvy sub-community of modders, we pulled apart that section of the code to examine it. And what we found was horrifying from a security standpoint.

Your message is signed by you (sig psuedocode in brackets):

"Want to play a round of spleef?"(JohnCrafter) "Sure"(jahsome)

Nothing, absolutely nothing in those initial few snapshots, ties your "Sure" to the context of a spleef match, or any proceeding chat. So with a burner account, one could change it to:

"The gays sure have ruined America, they must be purged."(BurnerAccount) "Sure"(jahsome)

It took several more snapshot releases before they started to actually implement a chain of context with signing, where one could prove what you replied to, or that a report had be adulterated. Again, psuedocode for how it's signed now after the "outrage":

"Anyone selling saddles?"(TexRanger) "Want to play a round of spleef?"(JohnCrafter+saddleMessage) "Sure"(jahsome+saddleMessage+spleefMessage)

4. The planned release schedule, and the "community consultation"

Something that seems missed to the history books, is that the development cycle for this was going to be one snapshot, one pre release, then release (In total, 2 weeks for community at large to see and respond before it's live to all)

That seems, rather short compared to most other previous releases that featured such a big feature? If it was adding emojis, sure. But a signature system, and full reporting framework? Turns out, from leaks, they had consulted a very, very small subset of the community under NDA on a private discord for about a year...

And it instead took 8 weeks to be launched. Due to the above mentioned issues with both the vagueness of planned rules, and the severe holes in the implementation as well as debate over the "stigmatization" being applied to unsigned chat messages.

One should also factor in that at this time, a prominent content creator within the community died. Which is never going to go well for "emotional stability" with young fans and likely contributed to some of the vitriol thrown about.

The Java community where much of this stemmed from, also has some trust issues with Mojang/Microsoft over previous debacles such as the ownership of Bukkit, and licencing around obfuscation mappings that were presented as a "here, use these to help with modding" but licenced very much more as a "look, but don't you dare touch".

And finally, Mojang had been, having issues shall we say, with their content release schedule up to that point (tl;dr the "Caves & Cliffs" update was understandably split in two during the start of the pandemic, but then further features from it slipped to the Wild update which even before chat reporting, had it's own drama surrounding "removed content" and reasons given by Mojang for it). Mojang had "used up" a lot of community goodwill before dropping a controversial feature in.

This in no way excuses the doxxing and personal attacks/threats levelled at the employees of Mojang. It was abhorrent and detracted from getting the real issues with this release/feature, resolved.

But at the same time, claiming it was all hysterics washes away alot of the problems with how it was implemented, and the sheer lack of consideration for the optics of adding a feature quickly with little to no public consultation, on a game that has been "public" in it's development for years.

I just don't understand the entitlement present. It's a 10-year-old game. To receive any update should be lauded by the community. To dictate the development cycle of those updates is... pretty odd to me, especially from a hn reader.

Not all updates are good. If it seems like a company is going to publish an update which will break the product for a lot of people, there's nothing wrong with pushing back against it. There is no moral imperative to be thankful that a product is receiving updates regardless of the content of the updates.

What was broken?

If you don't want the update, don't use it...

Here's an excellent comment which describes the issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769764

Staying on an old version in perpetuity is often unrealistic.

Ok.

Entitlement is something that could perhaps be leveraged at the "drama" around the initial release of 1.19, with the removal of two fairly prominent "promised" features in the eyes of the community (a birch forest rework, and an ambient firefly mob) and reasons given were..

subpar in the community's eyes ("concept art is not a guarantee", while true, was worded quite poorly. And the firefly's removed because some IRL are poisonous to frogs, a mob also added in the update.. they had this same issue with chocolate cookies and parrots years back, and both of those are in the game and done in a way to educate players.. they could have just made them not eat them, and give players who search for why a mini biology lesson, as they seem to want to do extracurricular stuff about mangrove swamps already..)

And I did not dictate development cycle... I discussed how they had had issues with the preceding updates to chat reporting, compared to before caves and cliffs where feature creep/scope had not exceeded their capacity to deliver. This was certainly before chat reporting, the main gripe and meme of the community (wild update being memed as caves and cliffs part 3... Etc etc)

And then pointed out the rather concerning, expedited release schedule, for a feature was both poorly communicated, and poorly implemented both in policy vagueness and security issues. Fake security is worse than no security as it induces complacency.

> To receive any update should be lauded by the community.

Patently false, if I worked at Roblox, and updated it to mine crypto, or access the webcam so marketing could run facial emotion analysis on the players... Well that's an update to a game, why are you looking so angry?? It was a free update.

There was a para/social contract between the community and mojang, it was strained by external forces before the chat report update, and broken by it.

We see the fallout of it with the latest update, mojang are much more quiet about features than previously until they are practically finalised.

Microsoft turned every PC user who doesn't use Windows from a first-class player into a second-class player who can't play what's now branded as "Minecraft". It's impossible for Linux and Mac players to play the game with any of the consoles, and there's a good chance you can't play with Windows people thanks to how Microsoft railroads you away from "Minecraft: Java Edition".

They've split the community and shown clear hostility to people who aren't using Windows. What more do you need to conclude that Microsoft is "destroying" Minecraft?

Could you please explain your points?

There used to be a game called Minecraft. It was written in Java, and was the same on Windows, macOS and Linux (and any other platform with a Java runtime). People on all platforms could play the same game with each other. They also made a C++ reimplementation of Minecraft – codenamed "Bedrock" – which they used for the console and phone editions of Minecraft.

Eventually, they released a "Windows 10 Edition", based on the Bedrock code base. This version is incompatible with Linux and macOS, and can't play multiplayer with the Java client.

Later, they renamed the Java client from "Minecraft" to "Minecraft: Java Edition", and renamed "Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition" to "Minecraft". They also started railroading buyers towards this game formally known as "Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition".

As a result, the definitive version of Minecraft, the version someone gets if you just tell them to "buy Minecraft", does not work on Linux or macOS. If you're a Linux or Mac user, and you want to play Minecraft with a friend who uses Windows, you're probably going to find that their game is incompatible with yours. Because as a Linux or Mac user, you don't get to play the version branded as simply "Minecraft". You're off in your own separate world, playing the incompatible game known as "Minecraft: Java Edition".

To add insult to injury, there's nothing technically preventing the game now known as "Minecraft" from working on Linux and macOS. "Minecraft Education" is a product based on the Bedrock code base which is available on Linux (well, ChromeOS) and macOS.

Does that make it clearer?

Seems like you insinuate cross-platform Java to Bedrock play was possible at some point, and now isn't. I don't think that was ever the case.

In any case, I don't see how any of what you described could be characterized as "hostile."

I did not mean to insinuate that playing multiplayer between Java and Bedrock was possible at some point. I mean to say that playing multiplayer "Minecraft" between Linux, Windows and macOS was possible, but is no longer possible, since "Minecraft" is now a product which doesn't work on Linux and macOS.

If you don't see how what I described could be characterized as "hostile", you've either misunderstood something, or we have a different understanding of what "hostile" means.

> we have a different understanding of what "hostile" means.

Indeed.

Pray tell what you call it then:

A company takes a game that had a very lively multiplayer community, replaces the game engine that was based on software that could run on any platform as long as it supported Java to .NET where the only possible platform is Windows. Take everyone who has ever purchased the game and force them to migrate their accounts to a Microsoft account in order to continue playing, then intentionally make the two versions of the game incompatible just to force people to play a watered down "definitive edition" that still lacks many of the features that allowed the community to thrive in the first place while issuing all these updates that essentially equate to "spyware".

Yes, I think the word you are looking for is, in fact, Hostile.

Nitpick: Bedrock edition uses C++ not .NET. Either of these could support Linux in principle (as noted, Bedrock edition runs on ChromeOS over a Linux kernel), but Microsoft doesn't care to facilitate that.

No, it's not the word _I_ am looking for. They still release and support Java Edition. Thereby supporting those users. Therefore, decidedly _not_ hostile.

For what little it's worth, the community has created a plugin for Java edition servers called 'Geyser' which allows bedrock clients to join an java edition server.

(Microsoft obviously have no intention of bridging this divide, but hobbyists manage to do it for free...)

That plug-in helps if you're a Minecraft player and want to play with your friends who play on a Minecraft: Java Edition server with that plug-in. It doesn't help if you're a Minecraft: Java Edition player and want to play with your friends who play Minecraft.

Basically, it just further solidifies Minecraft players as the first-class citizens of the community and Minecraft: Java Edition players as second-class.

Meta comment.

This comment is a great example of doing what you accuse others of:

-- makes grand claims without evidence being presented

-- accuses others of making grand claims without evidence being presented

Whilst also pre-empting any dissent by stating that any counter-arguments are "wild", and that people who aren't on your side are deficient.

It's bad logic and bad rhetoric.

AFAIK the chat reporting systems aren't enabled on servers like 2b2t (not least because 2b2t runs an ancient version of minecraft, but also because servers that want to opt-out can do so using mods or plugins which disable the system, or by enabling "offline" mode.)

Nevertheless, it's a very troubling development and is the main source of my concern for the future of Minecraft. I find Microsoft's excuses for this system wholly unconvincing; Minecraft became the most popular game for all ages despite lacking such reporting systems for years, so obviously it isn't necessary. This reports system is another datapoint in the trend of software corporations going on authoritarian power-trips.

> if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow

They're not ruining it as much as just letting it stagnate in favour of things like Story Mode, Dungeons, and Legends. If they'd put half the energy they've put into those shameless cash grabs into optimising the Java version, it would improve millions of players' daily experience. It should not require a suite of mods to get passable performance.

They are ruining it by trying to control multi player. Users are being banned from the entirety of multiplayer over screen recordings of greifing.

It’s honestly outrageous that MS thinks they should control what happens on other peoples servers.

When my Mojang account was forcibly transferred over to a Microsoft account, I suddenly no longer owned Minecraft.

And since I no longer had access to the email account I had used for the original purchase nine years prior, Microsoft support outright refused to even talk to me, unless I prove ownership beyond all doubt.

That I owned the email address currently linked to the account, and had played the game just a week before, and that I knew the security questions/answers wasn't proof enough for them. And yes I really KNEW all the security answers - as those were stored in my keepass.

They treated me like a criminal, and I never learned whether the game disappeared by accident, or if they removed it intentionally because some algorithm thought I got it illegitimately...

As far as I personally am concerned, they already did ruin Minecraft.

Same. Haven't played Minecraft since then. I won't bother with Microsoft about this. And this from someone who did earn his income with this game.

IMO they already ruined Minecraft by deciding to rewrite it and run with 2 complete seperate editions and only care about the -.NET- Bedrock one.

I thought Bedrock edition was C++?

No idea honestly. The initial launcher updates definitely have been .NET and we're completely broken on Linux. I never went any deeper than accidentally updating the launcher back then.

Bedrock is in C++, and the development workflow is that many features are still first development in Java version, and then redone on the C++ later.

Java version isn't going away, as Bedrock still doesn't support many of the scenarios, and Microsoft doesn't want to lose that userbase.

Minetest, an open source infinite-world block sandbox game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22818192 - April 2020 (1 comment)

Minetest – Open source voxel game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282085 - Oct 2018 (1 comment)

Minetest – A free, open-source voxel game engine and game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12670310 - Oct 2016 (54 comments)

also:

Minetest for the Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33207408 - Oct 2022 (41 comments)

People should start with building a voxel engine as performant as possible that would allow for player count to scale with hardware to eventually allow for millions of players on the same map.

What makes games like minecraft great is the gameplay that naturally emerges from player interaction. This aspect of voxel engines should be actively pushed to the absolute limit.

People in the gaming sector tend to apply new tech to improve old overdone gameplay (like making games more hd) instead of enabling previously impossible experiences.

John Lin's voxel engine showed a lot of promise in this department: https://m.youtube.com/@johnlin9665/videos

Doesn’t seem like many games at all have achieved this. If any. Seems like an extremely difficult problem to try and shard a multi player game on to multiple machines while still being able to interact with everyone.

Niantic gave a talk on the Pokémon Go scaling experience, and yeah. That one even has the advantage of not too many people being in one place.

I'm working on it.

Minetest was the vehicle through which I first introduced my youngest son to programming around 7-8 years ago (iirc). The way his eyes lit up when he wrote some code to change the game and then played it was just magic. He still—as a freshman CS student wrapping up his first year—fondly remembers those magical feelings today.

Came here to ask about just this! May I ask how old he was at the time? I’m considering trying this with our 6 year-old, who is a huge Minecraft fan. Looks to me as though it would probably be beyond him but, on the other hand, I would at least like to try to re-create that “aha!” moment with VS Code on one half of the screen and this on the other.

He was around 11-12 at the time. He and his brother were huge Minecraft fans (they still play all these years later), and he wanted to learn how to change the game like mods did. I worried Java would be a bit much and might get in the way of him just trying some simple things out, and Lua seemed much simpler and approachable for me to help him with. He was also a big superhero fan, so his first 3 modifications were to give himself superpowers. We added the ability to fly like Superman, run fast like the Flash, and jump huge distances like the Hulk. His favorite moment was when he activated the speedforce() and hulk_jump() together and realized he didn’t even need to fly because the speed-running and massive jump moved him further across the map at a faster rate of speed than his superman() function did. :)

Wonderful, love it :) Thanks so much - this’ll be our project this weekend. I’ll set everything up so he can just change a couple variables and see the effect immediately. We’ll see where we get to!

You’re welcome, and I hope you have a ton of fun!

It's so cool to compare this to how I was at 11-12. I never really was affected by mascots or superheroes, never really looked up to anyone. Because of my neurodivergent childhood, I sometimes forget that normal kids are kids. But hearing about someone as old as 11-12 wanting to give themself superpowers to be like their favorite superheroes is just amazing. They are lucky to have someone like you <3

That’s incredibly kind of you, thank you. I think I am really the lucky one.

I still remember Mojang's promise to open source Minecraft.

Instead, he sold it to Microsoft. /o\

For $2.5 billion I would absolutely renege on a promise to open source my code. Every time.

If I was already rich (Like Mojang was), I actually wouldn't.

YMMV.

Notch ended up set for life and distributed out huge sums of cash to all of the employees after the sale who were not rich.

At the end of the day its a video game, not firmware for someones heart implant. If it matters to anyone, they can just write their own video game.

Yes, that's one way to see it.

But Minecraft is likely to be what Notch will be remembered for, yet he doesn't even own the rights to his own work anymore.

If that made him rich, it'd be one thing. But as he was already rich... was it really worth it? It might be something that torments him for the rest of his life.

This has some parallels to Palmer Luckey's Oculus sale to Facebook. We already know he regrets doing that. Some promises were already broken; FB got him really good.

It is unfortunate, but the field psychologists employed by Facebook got him to sell Oculus. Not unlike Faust and Mephistopheles.

People did, that's minetest... and now microsoft has been using apparently bogus copyright complaints to get it taken down. So much for "can just write their own".

>and now microsoft has been using apparently bogus copyright complaints to get it taken down.

That'd be HN front page worthy. How come I haven't heard about this?

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13363#issuecomme...

>The company is AppDetex, they appear to author automated solutions for finding copyright infringement so it's probably a mistake on their part

Yeah, the usual robot DMCA fare any random project may get.

Yes and, the app is down none the less due to the false and defamatory statements made "under penalty of perjury" from an agent being paid by Microsoft.

That's what DMCA counter claims are for.

They can sue if they think they have any grounds. (tip: they actually don't)

Counterplan: accept the $2.5 billion. Spend $10 million to fund the development of an equivalent or better open source voxel game engine. Everyone wins.

His agreement probably prohibits that.

Fund it in secret. Name it "Minetest."

Isn't it Java? It's basically already open source.

It's obfuscated

While it is obfuscated, newer versions provide unobfuscation mappings to make moodders' lifes easier

You typically only do that the the intended API used for modders, would guess that is what is done here?

Not quite the same thing.

There is no official modding API for the Java edition unless that changed some time ago. I remember there being plans for it almost a decade ago now but nothing coming out of it for the Java edition - Bedrock however got modpack support.

Can't be that bad if there's so many mods.

You obviously haven't battled the mod game by rebuilding and fixing your mods from zero every time a new version comes out.

The good tooling is from the community. Not majong and especially not Microsoft.

Open Source is not about having source code.

It is about the license meeting OSI's requirements, which are more or less the same as GNU's four freedoms.

The main problem with Minecraft is how Microsoft, due to Mojang's decision to sell, is at the centre.

This is such an important game to computer history, and it has such huge community. It deserves better than this.

IMHO the community is best served by alternative, actual open-source clients and servers, and it would be healthy to recreate everything Microsoft currently owns.

Minetest is one such effort. This one is from scratch.

The incremental approach is another possible route.

Oh, so I can decompile Minecraft, make a bunch of my own changes, change the name (to avoid trademark issues) and then sell the result? Can you point me in the direction of a license or other legal document which grants me these rights?

That's what it means for something to be open source as opposed to source-available after all.

You can’t do that on open source projects… that’s called stealing. Licenses basically never allow anything like that.

They ... do let you do that. Being able to make changes to the code and redistribute your changes is literally the whole point of open source, and the popular licenses don't contain restrictions on making money (nor could they, if they want to fit the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source).

The permissive open-source licenses (MIT, BSD, ...) let you just take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some proprietary product, and sell that product. The only requirements are usually that you maintain some attribution notice. The MIT license, for example, says this: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software".

The copyleft licenses (GPL, LGPL, ...) lets you take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some product, and sell that product; but you need to provide your product's source code to your customers.

Show me an open source license which prohibits me from taking the source code and selling a product based on it.

The commonly used licenses like GPL and MIT don't put any restrictions on commercial use granted you don't break any of the conditions and limitations.

Theoretically you could even just take any software using any of those licenses, optionally package it up and then commercially redistribute it as is and it would not breach the license. Needless to say people probably wouldn't look at you favorably in that case though.

Brian Acton sold WhatsApp to Facebook, then helped found and fund the Signal Foundation. It's not mutually exclusive.

If I recall that promise only applied if they ever stopped working on, which they clearly haven't.

Correct. Also it was said by a lone developer a couple months after starting a hobby project. To expect that throwaway comment to mean anything after fifteen years and a 2.5 billion dollar acquisition is simply unreasonable.

It was never a promise and it was something to do once the game had died which the game clearly hasn't.

I remember when he promised to develop 0x10c

Which looked amazing. But to be fair would I be suddenly that rich I would probably not find the time to build sophisticated games either.

It is best to think of Minetest as more of a decentralized open source roblox instead of a minecraft clone as one may initially think since it is more of a game engine than a game.

This is a pretty good way to put it. There are some similarities to Garry's Mod as well. All three are moddable with lua, and Garry's Mod's approach to mods on servers where you connect and automatically download what's needed is more similar to what Minetest does than what modded Minecraft does (where you need to prepare the exact right set of mods ahead of time or you can't connect).

I like the way the mineyest ecosystem is progressing. I am a huge fan of Minecraft and we turned it into a family thing running our own server. But the take-over by Microsoft feels like a pain and I really dislike that since the move to Microsoft I now have to grant my teen daughters access via a family page.

Yeah this is really annoying. My son had friends over, I told them about our MC servers (even with Java/Bedrock cross Play!). Cool! Then I spend the next 30 min calling parents and feeling like talking them into letting their kids watch the pron our family server :| I’m not doing that again.

I enjoyed https://veloren.net/ more. Open source too.

I'd say Veloren is closer to Cube World, while Minetest is closer to Minecraft. Both are cool projects, though.

If you like this you may want to also have a look at voxraygames by the irrepressible @Aardappel

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlNTKN4HSJQ

That looks awesome. I'm really looking forward to some high-fidelity voxel engines getting more mature

is this going to be proprietary

The actual game itself, yes. Based on this open source project though which provides the language its written in and core engine tech: https://github.com/aardappel/lobster

Uses lobster programming language apparently.

Yes, for both gameplay and most of the engine.

Thanks for the support :) More here: https://twitter.com/voxraygames

When my daughter gets a little older, I'm going to try setting up a similar project on my home lab: https://veloren.net/

The lineage of voxel miners is quite interesting. MineCraft is obviously trailblazing, but it was preceded by a few others like Infiniminer. I would say I feel bad that early projects like those didn’t make billions from success, but there is a lot to be said about the creative gameplay in MineCraft that change it from being a simple sandbox to a really engaging world.

The creator of Infiniminer is the same dev behind Zachtronics, who made Shenzen I/O and exa punks, for example

TIS-100 is also quite fun

If you like the genre you should check out Colony Survival! It’s a fun voxel game with a tight gameplay loop based around how high can you make number go up though observation.

Minetest is nowhere near Minecraft… but it’s still fun, and I wish the developers the best (especially as Minecraft gets more and more heavy-handed).

I would strongly recommend that anyone playing Minetest get a texture pack, basically any would do, because the stock textures do not leave a good impression.

Minetest is really just a base game and an engine. Look into Mineclone2, a minetest-game.

https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/

I play Minetest 2 with my kids and we have a great time.

I tried that recently but I found the landscape generation to be really poor. I tried all the various generators, to no avail.

It's been a while since I played Minecraft but I can't recall the maps being that poorly constructed.

It really distracted me from the game, to the point I stopped after just a few hours.

Rest was pretty good tho, so a shame.

i found a server with a nice community, which is what keeps me playing. but to start my own world i'd wish for better map generators. more realistic mountains, rivers, climates, etc.

and maybe some powerful tools would be nice, to efficiently build streets or dig new rivers, grow mountains, ... so you can efficiently create a map by hand, or modify a map to add or remove features.

fortunately, new map generators are being worked on, so there is hope for the future.

I agree with the first half of what you said, but for people considering MineClone2, be aware that it doesn't have the same mod support as the base game, and so modifying it doesn't always work well. It also adds some of Minecraft's limitations that were otherwise missing in Minetest, such as a more restrictive height limit in both directions. You can normally dig much much deeper and climb much higher in Minetest than Minecraft, and I think this is one of the cooler parts of Minetest.

MineClone2 is fun if you know Minecraft and you want something ready to play immediately, but if you have a background of playing modded Minecraft, don't expect to be able to take all the cool Minetest mods and slap them over MineClone2. This means you're playing a clone of vanilla Minecraft. For many this isn't very fun anymore. You'll probably want to start from scratch and build on top of the default minetest_game to enjoy all the cool mods out there, such as df_caverns.

When you say "Minetest", are you referring to the default "game" that comes with it? The game engine part is important!

It would be nice if the default "Minetest Game" were less bare bones, since that is the experience most people new to minetest will probably encounter first. Some decisions in "Minetest Game", like broken blocks going straight into your inventory instead of falling to the ground, seem like they're different for the sake of being different; I have a gut feeling the Minetest devs are consciously staying off Mojang's turf.

s/Mojang/Microsoft/

Minetest has the same problem as editors like Vim do - it has only the ingredients for what most people use as the final product, and you have to put them together yourself, with the help of plugins and addons. People will rattle off a list of thirty-odd addons ("this one for monsters, that one a different type of monsters, this one for small animals, this one has small and medium animals, this one adds villagers, this one makes them actually do something, etc."). There's also very sparse info on what addons actually work well with each other, whether the enhanced armor addon will work with this mobs addon, or whether they don't recognize each other, or if the combo will just not let the game start...

In the end, since I mostly play on mobile anyway, I went with this paid fork of this called MultiCraft, that's just install-and-play. It's less than a dollar (at least in my currency), and for someone who just wants a sandbox game to play casually, it turned out to be the much easier, less headache-inducing option. (I believe the PC version of MultiCraft is free to play too, you just have to compile it yourself.)

I've always bounced off of Minetest at the "build a game out of modpacks" stage.

Anyone have recommendations? Nodecore looks fun, am open to others as well.

MineClone2 is somewhat like an older Java version of MC.

You could try joining a public server (I don't have any recommendations, don't play on them much myself) and seeing what mods they use, or just browse the contentdb for stuff that looks cool. This is definitely an issue that makes the game less approachable to new players. It's hard to get the ideal experience of a bunch of cool mods that work well together if you don't already know which mods are good or have a friend hosting a server for you that put the mods together.

Take a look at MultiCraft, a fork. I paid (less than a dollar) for the mobile version, but my understanding is that you can compile the repo code and get a runnable version yourself (whether for PC or Android). It's on Github.

I haven't tried it yet, but Techage looks interesting. Might be as close to GregTech as we can get in Minetest (GregTest?).

As a fan of older minecraft versions I'm looking forward to messing around with this with friends

Older java minecraft is still very much alive and well. There's thousands of servers that still use old versions and have hundreds, sometimes thousands of members online at a time.

A minecraft classic client made in C, with its own launcher. https://www.classicube.net/

Just tried it, the visuals aren't bad, but the player control and inventory management seem like an afterthought. The jumping physics feels especially unrealistic.

android or desktop? mtg, nodecore, or mineclone (and if so, which mineclone)? which texture pack? etc.

It does let you run it without downloading any "games" btw. If that's not the intended experience they shouldn't make that the shortest path UI experience.

but fwiw, I just tried mineclone and at least the jumping physics were better.

That's been a long running debate in the community, whether the "MineTestGame" should be included by default anymore. At some point MTG seemed slated to be even discontinued as a project, but instead it got some fixes for outstanding issues and kept intact.

In my case, when I was starting out, it was a nice way to incrementally add game features only when I was ready for them, with MTG being the base to start from. So I have a bit of a soft spot for it.

I played for a while, and eventually found a nice collection of mods that were all compatible with each other and made the game really fun. I can't remember all the details, but it made the game a bit more fun. Some were additional items (more complete carpet selection, mobs, biomes), some were functionality enhancements (crafting guide), some were for automation (digilines), travel (elevators). It was pretty fun and whatever "game" (set of rules/textures/etc) I did had some very deep caverns to explore.

Is there a mod that adds PNP/NPN style transistors?

I've got Minetest on my machines. Another good one along these lines is Veloren. It's a Rust voxel game along the lines of minecraft and Dwarf Fortress.

https://veloren.net/

never heard of this before looks great

I stopped playing Minecraft years ago, just before endermen were added. I recently had a go at it 6 months ago, and I couldn't get into it. In my mind Minecraft lost its charm of brutal simplicity since MS took over. The spells, the huge diversity of new items its just lost on me.

But I like the way these FOSS clones look, maybe I'll give it a shot later.

Also, screw MS. I purchased Minecraft 4 times for friends to borrow, I don't want an MS account tied to each one, nor do I have time for that hassel.

For me it lost its charm after they added the hunger bar

That was in beta 1.8, iirc.

There is another Minecraft-like called Vintage Story, which I like a lot. I love the effort that the Minetest team is making but the game's development doesn't seem to be going anywhere as of right now due to a lack of direction. I feel being a game that is fully open source is not doing any favors.

I don't know if it's possible under license but it might be able to pick up some steam if a large, for-profit mod came along.

It's completely possible that I'm having a dumb moment, but where can I learn to make games with this engine? I really cannot find a tutorial.

You're right, the documentation is all over the place and pretty hard to find.

https://rubenwardy.com/minetest_modding_book/en/index.html

https://dev.minetest.net/Main_Page

Totally not biased, but that first link is a great place to start.

Note that the process for making games is the same as for making mods - games are a collection of mod(ule)s.

I'll make a note about the docs being hard to find, obviously room to improve here. This page is intended to be the starting page for those interested in modding/game making, it gives an overview and links to other resources: https://dev.minetest.net/Modding_Intro

> Note that the process for making games is the same as for making mods - games are a collection of mod(ule)s.

I think this is what is confusing. If you call it a game engine, I expect it to make... Games. It's just weird is all.

I understand what is a database server and what is a web server but what is a Minecraft server? What does it store? Whole map and state and user accounts? Is there some sort of federation or one has to create an account on every server?

Server is also in Java? Requires GPU as well? Open source servers also exist? What is griefing?

No idea about any of this never played Minecraft.

Edit: Typos and open source

From my own experience running a server for friends:

No federation. For either version of minecraft you have an account you register with microsoft, which among other things provides you with a UUID, allowing users to be identified and authenticated across different servers. The various UUID authentication utilities are not necessary to set up a server, they are just offered for security.

Minecraft servers store world data, NPC states, and player inventories. All server data is unique to that server (e.g players cannot take an inventory from one game server and transfer it to another, or access worlds from different servers)

There are two versions of Minecraft: Java (written in java, only available on PC) and Bedrock (available on all platforms, and also allow cross play between platforms). PC players generally prefer Java as it was the first version and supports modding. The server side of minecraft Java is also written in java. Not sure what the GPU part is referencing.

Minetest in particular is open source, by the fact that the underlying game engine can be modified to create new functionality not available in the base game. In regular Minecraft there is restriction on what exactly a Minecraft server can do and what client-side modifications can be made.

Griefing is basically trolling in game: destroying other player's buildings, repeatedly killing them in game, etc. Some server moderators will allow this, some don't.

Hope this helps :)

Bedrock is only for Windows on PC.

Isn't Bedrock now basically "anything that isn't the Java edition"? Like iOS, consoles, etc.?

Yes, you are correct. Java is the one that's exclusively on desktop and it has "Java" added to the name

Bedrock its just "Minecraft" and includes all the other platforms

Again being a noob on Minecraft, how does Java work for a game like that? I mean performance wise? Whereas traditionally people would write such a thing in some typical game engine.

Performancewise java actually isn't bad. In the middle nineties, java would feel slow compared to e.g. C, but we've come a long way since. Some basic tricks are sticking to fixed arrays, and avoiding angering the garbage collector by repeatedly allocating and deallocating stuff. Dave's garage in recent years did an involved 'which languages are fastest' benchmark, where java was, I think, number 5? It was beaten by Zig, Rust, C and C++, and the numbers of java and C++ were quite similar. (Of course such a test is not generally valid, anything can be optimized to be 'the fastest ever', if there are no limitations on what goes. In that test, they used a prime number sieve).

Usually, Minecraft is sped up by using more clever algorithms(OptiFine), not switching to different languages.

For how Minecraft has performed, in every sense (including on hand-me-down laptops of 6-year olds), java has served well. Of course, using C or C++ might have sped it up by a factor of x2-x5, but it has not been a pain point, to my knowledge.

> avoiding angering the garbage collector by repeatedly allocating and deallocating stuff

One of the places where I believe the Minecraft code falls down hard - it allocates and deallocates tens (maybe hundreds) of MB per second. Basically the kind of "first draft you'd write before optimising things" code.

Things like OptiFine help out by (IIRC) making certain things mutable and cutting down the alloc/reallocs.

> Performancewise java actually isn't bad.

Yeah, I should probably clarify that I don't think Java itself is bad but the way Minecraft uses Java and how Microsoft have put basically zero effort into optimising things (because their cash cow - Bedrock - is written in C++) since they've owned it.

When mods like OptiFine and Sodium that are monkey-patching the bytecode can improve things greatly, it's a strong sign the base is not optimised.

Thank you. I have never played Minecraft but it is a huge phenomenon,a game that's really very popular.

By GPU I meant if server also requires some GPU but seems like from your description that it doesn't.

Thank you again for the detailed answer.

That's right, you don't need a GPU to host a server. In fact, I hosted my server using a 4GB ram raspberry pi on linux, supporting 6 concurrent players at one point without a hitch. The actual server binary only ever had access to about ~2 Gigs of ram at any one time.

Reminds me of Ken Silverman's old projects.

There is also Terasology - a Minecraft-like voxel game with fancy graphics: https://terasology.org/

Does it support an isometric camera? Or a RTS like zoomable camera?

I'm working on a mod for enabling user self-governance in online games, initially with Minetest: modpol.net

I would love for this to reach parity with minecraft. They’ve made so much money off of Minecraft but they never really add anything in updates and they keep adding evil data mining stuff.

An electricity system and machines like modded mc but in a base game would be so good.

Expected

its an interesting project with a lot of promise, but its not something id rather play over minecraft honestly. i hate what microsoft has done with minecraft for sure though.

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