Minetest breaks the chains of being a Minecraft clone with a new name — Luanti
Minetest breaks the chains of being a Minecraft clone with a new name — Luanti
Minetest, a voxel game engine created to be something like a Minecraft clone, is finally smashing apart the chains to become more its own unique thing.
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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.
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: https://content.minetest.net
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".
The minecraft modding scene is also a serious longterm threat to microsoft making money off minecraft, so I hope the Luanti 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 Luanti 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
nilrather 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 https://github.com/jordan4ibanez/forgotten-lands and https://github.com/RepComm/mt-api
@Faresh Yeah, Lua definitely does have some weaknesses but I’ve seen worse so it doesn’t stop me from using it.
I’m not aware of any TypeScript-like language for Lua.
I found TypeScriptToLua but I don’t like the idea as those are entirely different languages.But luacheck is relatively popular in the Luanti community for static code analysis and linting.
Thanks! Yeah, typescript was just an example that I gave because it was made to tackle the perceived problems in javascript. I never used it myself and just mentioned it to explain the idea I was getting at.