Comment on Minetest breaks the chains of being a Minecraft clone with a new name — Luanti
Alk@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The main thing holding it back as far as I can tell is the dead modding scene. Minecraft has the best modding scene of any game ever, hands down. You don’t even need to compete with that, just have a small modding scene and the game gets way better.
The minecraft modding scene is also a serious longterm threat to microsoft making money off minecraft, so I hope the Luani modding scene continues to grow!
(I don’t think microsoft will necessarily kill java minecraft but microsoft clearly sees minecraft java as a dead end, you are fooling yourself if you think otherwise)
I recognize you and your profile picture from some quite popular minetest mods. :D I have a question regarding making content for Luanti:
I’ve been interested in maybe some day making a game for Luanti, but I don’t really like Lua (I for example imagine that undefined variables evaluating to nil rather than directly throwing an error, identifiers by default being public, and absence of static checking of possibility of null dereference before runtime to be things that can cause quite some annoying bugs). Is there some popular X to Lua transpiler that you’ve heard people using? Something like what Typescript is to JS or Kotlin/Clojure/Scala to Java (not exactly the same thing since they all compile directly to jvm bytecode rather than java, but you get the point).
I hope I’m not insulting you by asking such a question.
I’ve seen typescript being used for modding using typescript-to-lua. See github.com/jordan4ibanez/forgotten-lands and github.com/RepComm/mt-api
Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
It does have a decently-sized modding scene, though? Like, it cannot compete with the popularity of Minecraft and therefore doesn’t have as many modders.
But it has a modding API, which makes it a lot easier to mod and means that the mods don’t break with every new version, so the effective output of those modders is actually pretty good.
Or well, just look at it: content.minetest.net
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 months ago
Funnily enough, as Minetest/Luanti is written in Lua, it should be easy-ish, in theory, to import some of the simpler roblox games.
Then again, good luck bringing people from Java Minecraft or Roblox over to a FOSS alternative. “Nobody’s there”.