November was the 2022 Game jam month; there were some great submissions this year! Core devs worked on graphics and gamepad support. In late October, Minetest was used as an urban planning tool to engage students in their community’s planning process.
Engine News
November saw a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements. Android in particular saw quite a few fixes to improve stability.
x2048 has continued to work on graphics by implementing dynamic exposure. This is a feature that simulates eyes adjusting when going from a well-lit area into a cave, allowing for high dynamic range (HDR). This builds upon the work to add post-processing and bloom in 5.7.
v-rob has submitted a work-in-progress version of a GUI replacement. Minetest currently uses formspecs, a custom GUI framework based on Irrlicht GUI. Formspecs are inflexible, hard to use, and generally an all-round poor experience for users and developers. The current formspec and HUD APIs will remain to avoid breaking mods, but the new GUI replacement will supersede these APIs. Replacing formspecs is a huge undertaking and is still a long way off.
rubenwardy has been working on full gamepad support in Minetest. Currently, Minetest’s gamepad support is very broken - it doesn’t work with most hardware. rubenwardy’s first change was to rewrite the gamepad code to use better APIs, this will allow any controller to just work. Next, he started working on using UIs from the gamepad, but this is a bit harder.
2022 Game Jam
November was the month of the 2022 Minetest Game Jam. Participants had 3 weeks to create a new game using the Minetest engine, to win cash prizes and prestige. As the second game jam ever, we weren’t sure how it would turn out. Thankfully, it was a roaring success with 15 submissions.
The games were played and rated by 7 judges and the community. The judge scores were used for the final leaderboard and cash prizes. The community scores were used to choose a community winner; the most liked game that wasn’t in the top 3 of the judge leaderboard.
Some of the entries were made by judges, and so weren’t eligible for prizes. They’re clearly marked in the leaderboard and draw with the nearest non-judge entry.
Below are the winners. Some games stood out with a high degree of polish and gameplay. Some stood out by being intriguing and promising, with novel gameplay. Check out all the submissions on ContentDB.
Thank you to everyone who participated, we had a great time playing your creations!
All prize winners, please do not forget to contact GreenXenith about your prizes.
1st place: Glitch by Wuzzy
Glitch is a gem. At its core, it is a parkour/platformer game, but it’s so much more than that. You play as a bit in a computer system. To strengthen yourself to help save the system, you have to collect electrons, which are floating crystals placed throughout the map. The game has a story that the player is plunged into from the start with an intro and dialog. The endgame feels like a review of everything you learned in the game, while presenting it in a fresh and challenging way.
Congrats to Wuzzy for first place!
2nd Place (Judge Entry): Klots by Warr1024
As a judge entry, Klots was non-competing, and so it shared 2nd place with competitive entries.
Klots is a puzzle game set in space. It skillfully tells a small story without words: the player begins at the site of a UFO wreck, and finds a portal that brings them to a spaceship. Klots are colorful blocks which can be pushed around, and stick to each other. The game involves finding a way to clear each doorway to the next portal. The HUD and animations are innovative and fun.
Congratulations, Warr1024!
2nd Place (Judge Entry), Community Pick: Slidespace by MisterE
Slidespace was another non-competitive judge entry, sharing 2nd place with competitive entries.
Slidespace is a small puzzle game or 3d maze with a simple mechanic: You press space to slide in one direction until you hit something or fall out of the game. The puzzles start simple but quickly increase in difficulty. The graphics are barebones: they let you feel the bleakness and hostility of space.
Congratulations to MisterE for the community pick!
2nd Place: Piranesi by Iarbat
Piranesi is an intriguing non-euclidean space puzzle game. It calls to mind old text-adventure games with its discrete rooms, items to collect, and puzzles to decipher. The player starts outside an imposing house; the only thing to do is to enter it. The trouble begins when you walk down the hall: You turn around and find that the entrance has disappeared. As you wander the shifting halls, read journals left by other adventurers who have left behind their notes of despair and hope. Gather clues and items to help you escape.
Piranesi suffered from crashes in the game jam version, but that did not prevent it from becoming a favorite entry and winning second place for its creative use of space and an intriguing story and puzzle.
Congratulations, Iarbat!
3rd Place: The Secret Story of Spacetravel by Nathan Salapat
In The Secret Story of Spacetravel, you find yourself trapped in a spaceship on low power. Reading the ship logs, you discover that the crew abandoned the vessel but left you a single escape pod. Your goal is to get to the pod, but you are trapped in the ship’s reception hall. The large doors require too much power to operate, and other doors are locked. Use your super sleuthing skills to find a way to increase your security clearance onboard the ship, find the powerbox to power up the large doors, and then make your way to the bridge and to freedom!
The Secret Story of Spacetravel is a solid game of escape room. It has fun journals left by the crew which tell the story of what happened to the ship, and nice models and graphics as well. It does suffer from a lack of diversity in-game mechanics, but for a game jam entry made in three weeks, it does very well.
Congratulations, Nathan!
Mods News
Automobiles Pack
Apercy added a Vespa and a Motorcycle to the Automobiles Pack. Time to hit the open road!
Fishing Boat
Apercy also made a new vehicle mod, Fishing Boat. Like his Blimp, you can walk the deck and use the onboard compass. It also has a horn to toot.
Techage Energy, Storage and Product Extension (TA ESPE)
Techage Energy, Storage and Product Extension (TA ESPE) is a new mod by Debiankaios extending Techage. It adds Lead, Tungsten and Urainium, as well as a method of power generation.
Definition Ripper Mod
Defripper is a mod by Warr1024 which was made as part of the development process of Klots and was publicly released in late November.
It’s a tool for more efficient game development: it grabs community art assets (node definitions, textures and media) from mods without including problematic behavior or other game logic in new games. It also helps prune unused assets, which can shrink download sizes, improve load times and reduce memory usage. It was used to create the scenery nodes in Klots. See the ContentDB description for more details.
Art and Builds
Education
Urban planning workshop with Minetest
On October 25-27, Lemente and Thomate organized a workshop with Minetest for the city of Maubeuge in France. Each day, a group of young citizens between 10 and 16 years old shared ideas to improve the public space in their neighborhood, and then they built these ideas in an in-game map of their city, allowing urban planners to see what young people wanted for their local area and discuss current issues with them.
Server News
Mesecraft Survival Server #1
americas.mesecraft.com:30000
Mesecraft survival server #1 is now in Christmas mode: the game has an automatic Christmas seasonal event that Komodo designed himself. Happy holidays!
A.E.S. Minigames
minetest.eticadigitale.org:30010
👾 THE FIRST A.E.S. Minigames Server ARCADE TOURNAMENT IS HERE! 👾
Feeling nostalgic? Feeling competitive? Well, look no further! Introducing the new free-for-all AES tournament, right before Christmas ❄️ Come have fun and play through all the different arcade minigames in our server: see you there! (ho-ho-ho 🎅)
❓ 20 players, two phases:
1 Direct Elimination on arenas: Bells (20) -> Bowser’s (16) -> Circle (12) -> LostTown (10) -> PetriDish (8)
2 King of the Arcade: the 6 players left compete in all the arcade maps left, gaining 3 points every time they rank 1st place, 2 points for 2nd place and 1 point for 3rd place. The one with the most points at the end wins.
🗓️ December 22, 2023
🕑 19:30 - 21:30, UTC+0
🏆️ a 2 month statue at the center of the lobby + “Arcade champion” label
✍️ How to apply:
Join either the Minetest - A.E.S. server Matrix room or IRC at irc.freeirc.org #minigames-discuss and tell us your in-game nick. and that you are applying for the tournament. Applications close on Sunday, December 18, or when 20 players are reached.
Click here to join the Matrix space. Or here to join irc.
13 spots left, reserve yours!
In Other News
YouTube Video Causes Spike in Minetest Traffic
On Saturday 5th, Bobicraft, a Spanish-language Youtube channel with 5M subscribers, posted a video about Minetest. At the time of writing, it has reached 1.3 million views and is now the most-watched Minetest video, exceeding AntVenom’s views.
rubenwardy has written a detailed write-up of the event, including stats, based on data from ContentDB.
Advanced Trains Content Git Organization
One problem with advanced trains is that it can be hard to collect all the content for it. To help with that, W3RQ01, Blockhead and Orwell96 have made a git organization to collect all the Advanced Trains content in one place, as well as keep some stale adv_trains mods up-to-date.
The collection can be found here.
Blog Updates
We are switching the name of the blog to “Last Month In Minetest” instead of “This Month…” because it better fits what we actually do.
We did not have a post last month for a few reasons. First, I (MisterE) was feeling a bit burned out as I tackle school and other aspects of life.
Secondly, there was little or no content submitted on the GitHub issue tracker. The content submission process (involving making issues on the blog issue tracker for news) makes the editors’ jobs easy, which means the blog creation process is easier and that proper attribution is easier as well.
Additionally, we could use more editors. Currently, the only active editors are rubenwardy, who collects the engine news and checks format and usage, and myself. More editors would mean more diverse content and more reliable content. If you are interested, please contact rubenwardy.
Also, a big thank you to the contributors who used the issue tracker this month! You really helped improve the post!
See you next month; Merry Christmas!
Thanks to our post contributors this month: MisterE, rubenwardy, Apercy, Komodo, Zughy, Giov4, Heather, Lemente, Thomate, Troodon, Keihdra, Kiopy7, Debiankaios, W3RQ01, y5nw.