FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I know that it is basically not possible to load an image into the game that was not there (in the textures folder) at time of game launch and mod initialization, even for images only used in the formspec. However, that was the status of things before the minimap was introduced. my question is: since the minimap is now part of core, has something changed to allow the loading of images that were not loaded as textures? I am only interested in doing this in the formspec, but if it is possible to change textures of nodes in the game now, which I doubt, that would be nice to know too...

Work could be done towards allowing the server to push updated or generated images to the clients at runtime. There are problems with that like the fact that the Minetest client has no means to ever delete any images, but even if that isn't solved, it would still allow updating player skins without restarting, or whatnot.

The minimap doesn't relate to this at all.

hmm...
costumer comes into shop on server ingame,
paints a decor on some canvas and
the tailorplayer/npc crafts a playerskin using the just created pixelpic.
The customer puts the newly created skin on and
the tailor makes a screenshot.
The tailor then puts the screenshot into a frame and hangs it into the shop window
for all to see........
droooool


oops - gotta wake up -
seem to have been fallen asleep -
dreaming weird stuff

yes drool.

customer uses an item called a treasure map, it shows up on in the formspec. customer recrafts the treasure map with lemon juice and then uses the map again, new information that was written in invisible ink becomes visible.

customer goes to shop to buy special glasses, when he puts them on the textures in the world change only for him, night vision, thermal, xray, etc.

customer buys some mystery mushroom soup, customer gets sick/high, textures cycle through a rainbow of colours until the customer vomits.

bobomb: the map change an easily be done by switching out the item, but as for the nausea effects, you could either place a hud overlay to simulate that effect or minetest really needs to incorporate shaders to adjust the client-side drawing of the world (stretch, colour, polarize etc).