Linuxdirk wrote:The lack of communication to the users about CSM.
sofar wrote: We didn't communicate less than normal. All development and discussion is done in the open. Blame yourself instead.
In Linuxdirk's defense, there was no post in the News forum and there wasn't a serious discussion in the forum about this before it has been merged. So many players probably weren't aware. You can't expect that everyone tracks down every single commit of Minetest development in GitHub or to hang around in IRC 24/7. I think it is VERY reasonable to expect that such a gigantic change like client-sided modding deserves
at least a mention in the News forum. But I didn't see any.
While I think it would be unfair to say that there was no communication at all, it clearly could have been better.
sofar wrote:CSM has the potential to massively offload visual and audio features to the client to make the game much more visually and soundwise appealing (ambiance, particles, special effects) to the players. This is good. Minetest is really bleak without many sounds. More particles will make things like fire and torches nicer. We can finally get better fire sounds and not bring the server down with sound packets. Actual Fog. Better footsteps and water splashing, etc.. A lot of the UI can stop relying on the server and we can make better HUD bars, enhance the minimap, make game screen overlays and score panels.
This sounds great on the surface, but there's a HUGE “but”.
But I am worried that Minetest pushes more and more responsibility from the engine to mods. The engine becomes dumber and dumber (read: It has less core features) and the mods must therefore become more and more complex.
Even standard game features like ambient sounds are not considered to be core features. Other examples:
- There is a relatively small amount of builtin chat commands
- There is no default player model
- There is no built-in help system
- The sound system is still rather weak
- There are no mobs. Instead, there are tons of laggy and incompatible mob mods
- Other things you just mentioned
I think it is a mistake to think that client-sided mods will become the “magic bullet” to solve all of these problems.
I think the answer to many (maybe not all) of these problems is not neccessarily adding more Lua scripts, but improving the core features of the engine. Pushing the responsiblity for even such basic features like sounds to the modder does not feel right to me.
Can you give me some examples for use cases which could ONLY be done by client-sided modding, meaning that an engine implementation would be actually the worse idea?
Also, the example “actual fog”. Seriously? Are you suggesting that mods now also have the responsibility for
rendering? Lol, if this trend continues, Minetest will soon be nothing
but Lua. xD
The GUI of Minetest is already pretty bare bones and the engine gives you almost nothing by default. Meaning, without mods, you only have a very crappy default GUI, you have to do almost everything by hand first.
sofar wrote:You seem to be under the misunderstanding that "minetest_game" is supposed to be the end-all super duper multiplayer subgame. It's not. It's never meant to be, although some people want it to be, and some people don't want it to be. It'll never get solved, either, at any rate.
If you don't want to create a great game, why bother? This is a serious question. I still have not been able to understand the point behind Minetest Game.
Also, this argument is invalid because it ignores other subgames which actually want to be serious multiplayer games.
But at least now I take back the security concerns against client-sided modding, knowing that modifying the engine is not much harder either.
This means the real problem is that it is way too easy to cheat either way. Serious multiplayer subgames are not really possible when it is a key element that players are not allowed to know everything. If it is easy to reveal the positions of all ores, for example, it is impossible to make a “mining competition”-style game without it being flooded by cheaters which you can't even detect.
Then the “documentation”:
https://github.com/minetest/minetest/bl ... lua_api.mdSorry, but this looks very very WIP and most of it looks just like copypasted from lua_api.md. Not even the introduction is correct:
Mods are contained and ran solely on the server side. Definitions and media files are automatically transferred to the client.
Also not much about the capabilities of this feature is explained, especially the difference from “normal” modding. Sorry, with this document you can't complain about users ignoring it, because it is not really useful at this stage. Linuxdirk was completely right in complaining about the lack of
proper documentation.
Overall, to be honest, I remain rather skeptical about this client-sided modding thing. But I will wait and see how things will go.