The main menu gets more love in preparation for the 5.8.0 release, developers come and go, and new shaders are in the works. CTF celebrates its 10th anniversary, and new API mods make their way to ContentDB.
Engine News
As the 5.8.0 release marches closer, more work has been done to improve the main menu. It now uses the latest version of formspec, properly supports hypertext, and uses a button in place of the settings tab. The user experience has been improved with better game bar scrolling, persisting text fields, and asynchronous package loading on the ContentDB page.
Minetest’s newest core developer, grorp, has been hard at work fixing various GUI and rendering issues, improving the user experience, and squashing lots of bugs. 41 commits and counting!
Desour has been busy cleaning up GUI elements, the sound manager, and compiler warnings.
We extend a heartfelt farewell to x2048 as he steps down from engine development, and thank him for his work on bloom, shadow maps, mesh rendering, and numerous other improvements. His sky color, cascaded shadow maps, and batched particle rendering PRs are looking for adopters.
Even more shaders are in development as well. Godrays developed by x2048 (now adopted and in testing) complement bloom and shadows wonderfully. GreenXenith has been working on a highly experimental screen-space reflection shader for water and other materials. It has a long way to go but adds another layer of beauty to the Minetest world.
Games News
Capture the Flag
August 16th, 2023 was Capture the Flag’s 10th anniversary. Capture the Flag is a multiplayer game where two teams of players battle to claim the other team’s flag while defending their own. It is played in a destructible voxel environment, allowing players to build defenses and place traps.
You can find out more about CTF’s history and development in the 10th anniversary blog post.
The game anniversary and 8th anniversary of the official server (ctf.rubenwardy.com:30001) were celebrated from August
16th to September 1st, with fireworks and party hats as cosmetics on the server.
Glitch
The winner of the 2022 Minetest GAME JAM has continued development since then. As of August, Glitch (by Wuzzy) has a weblate where the community can contribute game translations. You can read about the development history of Glitch on Wuzzy’s website.
Mods News
HTTP Blocks
You can send POST and GET requests directly from Minetest using the new HTTPBlocks mod by
56independent! This
Digilines device allows you to construct complex systems that
can talk to web endpoints and request plaintext files, records, and any other raw web data.
The mod, of course, requires HTTP trust to use Minetest’s HTTP API. Future plans include HTML querying using selector blocks, blocks to convert JSON to Lua tables, and maybe websocket support in the distant future.
Unicode Text Rendering
The Unicode Text library by erlehmann is built to
render fixed-width and variable-width GNU Unifont fonts (.hex). UTF-8
text input is converted to a table of pixels that can be written to an image file (such as a
PNG or
TGA). Non-Unicode text can also be written using the
Unifont CSUR font.
By rendering text to a single image server-side, the full range of Unicode can be supported by servers without sending thousands or tens of thousands of textures to Minetest clients. The Unicode Signs mod by cora provides signs that use the Unicode Text library to draw text.
Art and Builds
Server News
Archtec
archtec.niklp.net:30803
The Arctech server recently added chat bridges to Matrix and IRC for more flexible communication while in-game. Their building team has also been working on some cool new creations!
Other News
Keep an eye out for the 2023 Minetest GAME JAM later this year!
Thanks to our post contributors this month: 56independent, erlehmann, GreenXenith, Niklp, rubenwardy.