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Comment by throwatdem12311 | Hacker News Reader

My 6 year old likes to make basic obstacle course games and I help him with the coding.

There is ZERO chance I’m doing ID verification or paying a subscription. The entire reason we liked this platform was there was barely any friction.

I will be checking out S&box by the creator of Garry’s mod as an alternative: https://sbox.game/

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The thing that made Roblox actually work for kids wasn't the editor, it was that a kid could send a link and their friend would be playing 10 seconds later. S&box, Hytale, Luanti are all fun but they're all installs, which kills the sharing loop the moment you have one friend on an unsupported platform or a school laptop.

The closest thing to the Roblox distribution model is browser games. I work on browser-based game stuff and the hard part is never authoring, it's the last mile: corporate networks, WebSocket proxies, "my friend has a Chromebook," etc. Godot has a web export now that's genuinely usable for small multiplayer stuff, and it's free. Not as polished as Roblox Studio but the zero-install property is the whole ballgame for kids sharing with friends.

Similar story here with Minecraft.

Luanti + Mineclonia is absolutely excellent open source software.

I get a great sense of peace knowing that my incentives are aligned with the people who made it.

Huge fan of luanti (minetest) as well. My kids never picked it up though because the client controls were not very polished and they got frustrated. Has that improved in the years?

Well, that's configurable. On full games, you just download them from the manager and start a new world with that game in the main menu. For instance, "Glitch" has nothing to do with "NodeCore", nor Mineclonia or Citadel.

TFA:

> Publish for personal use - Anyone on Roblox can continue to publish games for personal use.

I know it is not great... but .. is that sufficient for your kid?

In order to able to be trusted by anyone, the user has to also verify their age. Also not every country has this feature yet, I never estimated my age by Roblox so i am also not trustable or can trust others.

We’ve been getting into doing basic multiplayer stuff (I do the coding), so unfortunately no.

Hytale also a good option, very modding friendly.

I have been checking it out. My kid already loves Minecraft so this would be a good option probably.

But do you let them play games where you have way to verify who published them? Can you at least see why some parents may not want to do this?

I personally vet every single game he plays.

I don’t let him chat with other players (text OR voice) even though I let him play multiplayer games.

We constantly talk about the dangers of online strangers and he is fully aware of “perverts” on Roblox (though he doesn’t know what tha word really means, he understands it as bad guys that want to hurt kids).

I don’t look kindly on parents that won’t do the bare minimum to protect their kids online but want to use the force of the gun on me.

It is extremely hard to fully vet a game made by a bad actor; they can deliberately make the first x-minutes innocent etc. If you tie it to real IDs you have many more tools to keep people acting honestly so you can more effectively vet them.

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