Minetest 5.9.0 released!

Introduction

Minetest 5.9.0 has been released with performance improvements for rendering and map generation, new graphical effects, and much more.

You can download Minetest from our website. As always, the full changelog can be found here.

Table of Contents

• God Rays
• Rendering Performance
• Multithreaded Custom Mapgen
• Selected Further Highlights
• Outlook

God Rays

As part of x2048’s efforts to improve graphics, Minetest now supports “god rays” (also known as “volumetric lighting”), as shown in the cover image. In order to give modders and game developers full artistic control, Minetest lets mods control this feature, leaving it off by default.

If some of your installed mods or games do not opt-in to god rays yet, you can install ROllerozxa’s volumetric lighting mod to enable it.

Make sure that you have shaders, bloom, and volumetric lighting enabled in settings.

Rendering Performance

There have been improvements to rendering performance, which on some hardware may yield a significant improvement in FPS.

Particle rendering performance in particular has been improved dramatically, enabling modders to create much more elaborate particle effects.

Multithreaded Custom Mapgen

Minetest allows mods and games to take control of map generation, ranging from the spawning of custom structures to entirely custom mapgen.

Up until now, Lua mapgen code was executed on the same thread as the rest of the game, which would be stalled when running expensive computations. This forced modders to compromise on mapgen features to keep lag manageable.

Mods that make use of the new APIs can now take advantage of a separate mapgen thread, enabling more advanced custom mapgen that doesn’t bring the game to a grinding halt.

This lays the groundwork for drastic improvements in mapgen performance if multiple cores are available. ¹

Selected Further Highlights

Some further highlights include:

• Improved Android experience: A short tap is now used to punch entities in-game, making combat much more comfortable. Mods can now control whether they want long or short taps to be used for punching/digging respectively per type of pointed thing (nothing, node or entity). This makes tools like bows or shields usable on mobile.
• More flexible pointability: Mods can now control which tools can be used to point at which nodes or entities, replacing some janky workarounds modders had to employ until now. Nodes or entities can also block pointing, which is useful for barriers or shields.
• The range of items can now be changed by mods at runtime via item metadata.
• Mods can now register L-system trees as decorations.
• The bone override API has been extended with added support for setting scale, the ability to apply overrides relative to the animation and smooth interpolation of properties, which aids modders in creating smoother procedural animations.
• Wear bar color is now fully customizable. Rainbow pickaxes can finally get the wear bar they deserve.

Outlook

Development now resumes on 5.10.0, with many awesome features in the works:

• There has been work on using SDL for input handling and windowing in order to enable cross-platform mouse and keyboard, touchscreen, and gamepad support. This had to be disabled for the 5.9.0 release due to remaining bugs, but interested users can enable it by compiling Minetest themselves.
• Support for the more modern glTF model file format is in progress, which will hopefully reduce the barrier for bringing animated models to Minetest and aid further graphical improvements.
• Even more graphical effects are being worked on.
• The main menu redesign is progressing with a ContentDB redesign.
• “Per-player” entities are in the works.
• Customizable touchscreen controls are being implemented.
• Two different approaches for long needed performance improvements for entities are being developed and tested.

… and many more. Stay tuned for the next release in a few months!

Cover image by luatic.