FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hi! I want to make a survey. The point of the survey is to learn which bugs are considered to be the most serious and/or annoying bugs according to the community. Maybe, just maybe this helps the developers to set priorities (no guarantees). There are over 100 of reported bugs for Minetest.

Which are the most serious unfixed bugs for you?

I mean bugs which are so serious they either break the game for you or just annoy you like hell. If you wish, you can also post a short reason why you think the bug is serious for you.
Please give a short ranking, where the bug which you want to have fixed comes first.
Please keep it short and link to the full bug reports (preferably on GitHub). Don't report new bugs here, post them on GitHub or the forum first. This is a survey.

Thanks for your time. :-)

Hint: Here's a list of unfixed bugs.

__________________________________________________________________________


Here is my personal top 6 list of unfixed bugs as of now:

1. You can corrupt minetest.conf by setting font_path to nonsense value in advanced settings (Minetest can't be started anymore when this happens) (issue 4095)
2. Depth sorting is broken (Over 4 years old!) (issue 95)
3. Minetest sometimes locks cursor to center of screen even if window is not active (issue 3507)
4. disable_jump does not work correctly when sneaking is disabled (issue 2774)
5. Subgame banner is hidden for wide windows (issue 2262)
6. Formspec coordinates are very confusing (issue 3872)

EDIT 1: Two important bugs have been fixed, I updated my list.

1,8,2,4

One thing that annoys me is that the health bar isn't aligned properly with the hotbar. That's not exactly game breaking. And on the plus side, you can use it to recognise minetest forks, legal or illegal.

F7 issue. you can see trough blocks.

also depth sorting transparency bug is disturbing

Indeed designing some GUI with formspecs is pretty much confusing but I guess it is only so annoying for those actually modding. Players may not notice it or simply not care and still have fun.

The stuff around the sneak function has rather become a characteristic of Minetest for me, some pro-tip that makes gameplay unique just like nyan cats and mese - but I guess if you want a more realistic game that has no minetest signiture stuff included, a way to toggle the behavior should be made possible. Note that I said "toggle" not "fix that bug". It seems that the watermark in the top left corner also annoys some people so I guess the aim seems to be to have game that for most of the time does not give a hint ingame that it is minetest. - oh well -

What really annoys me though is the lighting bug with them sometimes quite large shadows. By now I'm not really sure it is a single bug. Maybe it is a collection of unrelated things that have the same optical effect. As I like to take screenshots this is almost a game-stopper for me.

Your number 3, the false setting that will stop Minetest from starting, is a real game breaker though that should be fixed as fast as possible and maybe lead to similar input checks or better fallback routines elsewhere. Sometimes a buggy mod will also stop minetest from loading a world. Maybe this could also be made more robust like loading the world anyways but printing a messege to screen that some mod has not been loaded.

Something I'm not really sure whether it is gone yet is the mapgen and cavegen griefing. As in when mapgen jumps in long after a region has been created and redecorates the area or that cavegen sometimes happens in the air or after plants had been set.

Most other things I would like for Minetest to have or fix could rather be considerd features I guess.
Things like a general mob api or vehicle api (including carts) or stuff to aid installing mods and games or - but I guess that was not your question.

The game recently froze my entire machine to almost a standstill. It took a considerable amount of time to get back to a console to kill it. It may have a connection to running out of disk space (hopefully not hardware problems). That's a serious bug to me. The other points in the list are - like twoelk already said - mostly what makes the game unique.

For me visual bugs and bad performance are the biggest problems. Usually I fly around and build stuff, so gameplay bugs like fall damage don't bother me at all. Depth sorting, lighting bugs and lags are very annoying, but I'm afraid that all of them are really difficult to fix.

I remember something like this one, for a different "game" called FPS creator:

Wuzzy wrote:6. Minetest sometimes locks cursor to center of screen even if window is not active (issue 3507)

Sometimes when trying to load a level (you create levels and then load/test them), the game would crash for seemingly no reason (only happens occasionally), then the cursor would be stuck in the middle of the screen, and the only way to get it un-stuck is to either restart the machine or go to the task manager (yes, windoze; no I don't still use it), navigate to the process and end it, using only the keyboard navigation.

They never fixed it, even though it is 6 years later (I could not find anything related to the issue anywhere else, so it isn't likely that they even know about it). It may be fixed in some new version (all of the old bug reports got moved to a "classic" section, which usually means there's a new overhauled version and they call the older system "classic"), but if it is fixed, I doubt that is because they deliberately tried to fix it, but rather it would have been fixed "by accident".

Notice how the topic name doesn't really have anything to do with the problem; this hinders its visibility to the developers. A topic named "[Bug] Level doesn't load, Cursor gets stuck, can't do anything!" would probably get much more attention than one just named "game testing problem". If you find a problem that is as devastating as this one, don't just name it something like "cant play game pls help!!!1!one", rather name it something like "[Bug] Black screen, Cannot load anything" or whatever is equivalent to the problem that you are actually experiencing - instead of just stating that you are experiencing a problem.

As for the issues, I believe that all of these issues except for 7 and 8 are genuinely game-breaking, because they cause problems that can't be worked around. I don't like these kinds of issues - especially the lack of depth sorting, which (if I remember correctly) is the cause for a huge framerate drop when there are very many caves/tunnels underground and you look in their general direction, even when you're at the surface and they are all under the dirt-grass/sand/whatever.

EDIT: Actually, FPS creator never got a new version. They stopped working on it, and released it (and lots of the model packs) as open-source. Yay for free software! :D
(in the past, there were only a few free model packs; most of them had some cost to be downloaded from their online "store", but the software itself was free of charge)

Being unable to move after less than a minute of play: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/4274

Of course, any ticket I've commented on is personally important to me. :-D
https://github.com/minetest/minetest/is ... s%3Aechosa

Being unable to drag an item of screen without having his gigantic image in the face.

azekill_DIABLO wrote:Being unable to drag an item of screen without having his gigantic image in the face.

I don't really understand. Can you explain this? Is this a new bug (=not reported yet)?

For me the #1 is not a problem, I like it like that (looks unrealistic but after all, almost everything is unrealistic in mintest).

The most annoying bug for me is this one : https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/302 (impossible to use key 7 on AZERTY kbd)

Naj wrote:For me the #1 is not a problem, I like it like that (looks unrealistic but after all, almost everything is unrealistic in mintest).

It is a serious problem because it essentially removes fall damage from the game engine because it can be so easily circumvented, making fall damage almost meaningless. Minetest might as well remove fall damage entirely. This has nothing to do with realism.

For sandbox-style games I agree, this is not really a serious thing as it doesn't matter that much. But for games intended to be challenigng (survival style), game authors probably expect fall damage to work reliably and without glitches.

Yeah, the AZERTY bug looks also pretty bad. But the developers claim it is Irrlicht's fault, not Minetest's.

Talking of my bug i think it's new. when an item (only generated cube) goes out of the screen, it goes to max size and covers the whole screen :/

Wuzzy wrote:It is a serious problem because it essentially removes fall damage from the game engine because it can be so easily circumvented, making fall damage almost meaningless. Minetest might as well remove fall damage entirely. This has nothing to do with realism.

I guess something in between should be fine : not removing the sneak glitch, which is very convenient, put maybe make it slow down the fall a little.

By convenient, I mean, for example, mining using a pit + sneak + /home. This avoids loads of walking/climbing to go up and down, which is very boring (I remember before knowing that trick, the time spent on ladders).

i agree Naj.

Please report new bugs on GitHub or as a new thread in these forums.

yeah. idk if it's a bug at all. kinda normal then.

I am happy to announce that two important bugs just got fixed:

1) Sneaking prevents fall damage (Fixed after only 4 years)
2) Possible to glitch through ceiling by sneaking

And a whole bunch of other sneaking woes.

Wuzzy wrote:survey .. Which are the most serious unfixed bugs for you?
.. break the game for you or just annoy you like hell.

* #1: minetest crashes quite often
** when shift-moving stuff in the inventory
** when pasting text into formspecs (or shortly after that)

* #2-most annoying: picking/dropping stuff in the inventory is 'somewhat buggy/laggy',
resulting in the wrong item picked / dropped in the wrong slot.
Most noticable when moving lots of stuff, e.g. when crafting complex recipes (e.g. bed)

hajo wrote:

Wuzzy wrote:survey .. Which are the most serious unfixed bugs for you?
.. break the game for you or just annoy you like hell.

* #1: minetest crashes quite often
** when shift-moving stuff in the inventory
** when pasting text into formspecs (or shortly after that)

* #2-most annoying: picking/dropping stuff in the inventory is 'somewhat buggy/laggy',
resulting in the wrong item picked / dropped in the wrong slot.
Most noticable when moving lots of stuff, e.g. when crafting complex recipes (e.g. bed)

actually this never happened to me...

azekill_DIABLO wrote:F7 issue. you can see trough blocks.

also depth sorting transparency bug is disturbing

+10 We need to fix these.

To me the major bug in minetest that directly go in the way of my world exploring fun is the one i always experience when i explore my world for too much time :
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13585

no setting have helped, even without additional mods, even editing mapgen.lua to have much less dense forest and jungle, etc..
As it does not happen if i quit Minetest after a long while before the crash happen, then reload it to resume exploration, i guess it's probably things accumulating constantly to explosion/crash in memory instead of being cleaned after a while.
Something i never experienced in minecraft long exploration.

Shift not working right in the Mac builds. This is *super* annoying.

- It keeps shift-clicking from working so no quick-moving items from inventory into chests, etc.
- It adds an extra space when typing into the console (example: if I try to type "pick_stone" it ends up "pick _stone" [space before underscore], and I have to arrow back and manually delete the space)

I submitted an issue on GitHub back in September. I helped do a bit of testing and debugging. Nothing since, though. https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/4531

Wuzzy wrote:1) Sneaking prevents fall damage (Fixed after only 4 years)

False. If i fall on the side of a node (easy to do) i don't get damage. And if i sprint fast with sneak it's nearly impossible to get fall damage. I often use that trick in 4.15.

azekill_DIABLO wrote:

Wuzzy wrote:1) Sneaking prevents fall damage (Fixed after only 4 years)

False. If i fall on the side of a node (easy to do) i don't get damage. And if i sprint fast with sneak it's nearly impossible to get fall damage. I often use that trick in 4.15.

It was fixed after 0.4.15, it's not in a stable release yet.

ok