What's in store?

[brutus]

Hey guys, first i want to say hi im new at this game and im already liking it, second id kinda like to know in what direction are the devs wanting to take this game, also what kinda new mobs are planned for the future, will mobs be able to spawn outside of caves? and what kind of minerals are they planning on putting in the game to be mined.

[Jordach]

From IRC, celeron55 has no more ideas to take the game.

The mods will be the game ideas.

[neko259]

From 0.4, minetest is more an engine than the game. All game features are concentrated in mods.

[celeron55]

Some clarifications or something:

A minetest mod really is just a package of certain kinds of game content and logic, built on the core gameplay. It doesn't care who uses it, for what purpose it used, is it a part of a huge bunch of others or anything. They can be (and indeed are) bundled with the core game, downloaded separately from a site or experimented with locally.

The engine C++ code determines to a high extent how the game feels and what can be done with the plug-in mods. It is unavoidable, and in fact it is good, because it keeps the core game quite consistent and thus keeps Minetest as a single game, not a bunch of random experiments.

Most of the time we should be actually talking about the "Minetest core", not "engine". The core includes (most of) the content of the main Minetest distribution in addition to the engine.

As for the future:

I still manage the content of upstream Minetest. To ease engine development, the content is currently pretty much frozen. Once 0.4 is more mature, I will be managing and making content as usual (which, in 0.4, is mostly defined by mods, and thus is easy to add, remove and experiment with).

For the main Minetest distribution, I will be making sure everything works well as a whole and with the engine, but also aiming for a somewhat unique experience. I have plans to try out some things, but currently almost all of my development efforts go to the engine. Altough all of the time I need to think whether the engine will allow me to make the content I want to make.

Of course I could get incredibly bored with all of this, all of my ideas might fail or I could get so busy on other things that I couldn't work on Minetest anymore. In that case, I don't know how stuff will go. I hope somebody else in here has the resources, abilities and desire to take over the lead.

This project, in any case, is a project where the more you work, the less you get paid. However, it is an interesting challenge in various aspects of game development, open source, project management, community management and stuff like that.

So, the answer to the original question:

1) I choose what is included in the main Minetest distribution
2) However, I am currently pretty much fully booked with engine development. I don't have a list of what to make; I only have rough ideas of how Minecraft could be stripped down and extended, which I will want to try some day. It is called game design, and it is hard and things that actually work are rare.
3) If nothing else seem to work, we can always just cheaply copy Minecraft, altough it is lame.

[neko259]

@celeron55: I think you should move all the game features to default mod, so that it could be replaced by other one, making the game completely different. Different map generator, different recipes, mods, physics. You will still maintain the default mod, but it will be only one way of all existing ones.

Thank you for what you're doing!

[Jordach]

celeron, you made me weep a little.

[randomproof]

@celeron55: I think you should move all the game features to default mod, so that it could be replaced by other one, making the game completely different. Different map generator, different recipes, mods, physics. You will still maintain the default mod, but it will be only one way of all existing ones.

Thank you for what you're doing!

It seems to me that this is the way to go. Move as much game logic to mods and let the engine do the heavy lifting with the graphics. One thing that is is really lacking that I see is adding API calls for some gui functions. I want to be able to add interactive functions to mods, such as interactive NPC with dialog and shops.