Introducing Our New Name
blog.minetest.net
After more than a year of public and internal discussions, we're ready to announce our new name!
  • qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    782·
    16 days ago

    I don’t really like the new name yet, but it’s a lot better than Minetest so I really can’t complain.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    22·
    16 days ago

    Man, I saw them initiating discussions around the name like a year ago. I did not expect anything to actually come from that after all this time. But yeah, glad that it did.

    Now we just need a better default font. 🙃

  • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.cc
    42·
    16 days ago

    Did they ever fix the game having a maximum map size of like 10.000 by 10.000? That limitation always seemed to put it at a disadvantage compared to Minecraft, for larger communities

    • mintyogi@lemmy.zipEnglish
      14·
      16 days ago

      Currently, the world dimensions are larger than that (according to the wiki):

      “Minetest’s world is a huge cube with a side length of ca. 60000 blocks. Each dimension (X, Y and Z) ranges from −30912 to 30927.”

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
          24·
          16 days ago

          I find the increased world height much more important. Luanti can generate actual mountains, and caves where you’ll want to bring ladders for your descent.
          It was the first time, I felt like it made sense to build minecarts and intermediate mining bases, because the ores reach far deeper.

          • Mike1576218@lemmy.ml
            4·
            16 days ago

            I played some minetest and then looked at Minecraft. Is minecraft really limited to -64 +256??? I read it a couple of times but still can’t believe it. Ho can a game with °mine° in its name be so limited? More like Buildcraft Imo.

            • Ephera@lemmy.ml
              13·
              16 days ago

              I believe, they increased it a little while ago, so it’s actually -64 to +320 now.

              But yeah, I don’t think anyone’s actually happy about the limited world height. It’s so limited, because of the way Minecraft works on a technical level. It loads the map in chunks, which are just massive pillars, reaching from the bottom of the world all the way to the sky, across the whole 384 blocks.

              As a result, if they increase the world height, they increase how many blocks have to be loaded at once, which increases the lag.
              Luanti doesn’t have this problem, because it uses cubic chunks instead.

        • mintyogi@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          15 days ago

          Yeah, I hear that. Although, I’ve travelled many thousands of blocks in Minecraft worlds, I’ve never travelled tens of thousands, so the limits in Luanti work for me. The increased world depth in Luanti seems more beneficial to me. YMMV

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
          61·
          16 days ago

          It is basically infinite. I would be very surprised if you could reach the end. Having a pregenerated map also makes the game a lot lighter. (At the cost of longer world creation)

          • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            15 days ago

            Yeah I also never reached the end, though I imagine if playing multiplayer, with enough players and time, that then at some point there won’t be any untouched land.

  • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
    21·
    16 days ago

    hope they improve upon it, the old (when the banning was implemented) version of minetest was horrible. I’ll be trying it soon :)

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      9·
      16 days ago

      It has come a long way. These days it doesn’t even come with a game preinstalled. You can play VoxeLibre, Asuna, and so much more. Plus the original Minetest game is still installable. Also there are quite a lot of mods and other content available.

      The only gripes I really have is the security and UI design. Neither are that bad but they could be better.

        • Mike1576218@lemmy.ml
          5·
          16 days ago

          Online play is 100% unencrypted or authenticated. Client executes lua code sent by the server. I hope the code is kinda sandboxed but wouldnt put my hopes up there.

          • orgrinrt@lemmy.world
            3·
            16 days ago

            As far as I’m aware, most of the “dangerous” lua api (io/network etc) is blocked and only available to mods during the startup phase, and not otherwise during runtime.

            But I’m sure there are workarounds. For one, I’ve written mods with rust for it, and you can require and then call any dynamic library through lua, with all of the io and networking you’d want, as long as it is brought in during the init phase. And the mods that do access the “dangerous” api, have to be explicitly given rights to do so (but again, by the server, not the clients) in the config before it works.

            It’s not that bad for the most cases, as long as you trust the server. If playing single player, you personally control which mods get the secure environment access, so at that point it’s entirely your own fault, if you get exploited.

            • Mike1576218@lemmy.ml
              2·
              16 days ago

              I hope they can build on some work from the lua devs. Isolating stuff like that is not always easy. But given lua is used extensively for embedded scripting, there is a good chance they can.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
            21·
            16 days ago

            Also there isn’t necessarily a clean environment between mods. This means one mod could modify another mod.

  • flemtone@lemmy.world
    719·
    16 days ago

    I hope this is a joke cause Luanti sucks, stick with the already well known Minetest.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    58·
    16 days ago

    I actually like the new name. It seems like when a community project renames it always is something even worse than the original name. This is a great name that doesn’t sound silly to say out loud.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
    83·
    16 days ago

    Oh thank god. Minetest was the worst name, and the game is actually pretty cool. It definitely deserves a cool name, and Luanti sounds cool.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    519·
    16 days ago

    It’s nice to see open-source things copying what dot-coms do when they’re bored.

    Wait. No it’s not. It’s actually worrying.

    I worked for a company named essentially “The Portland Office”, and it had that name for 30 years; because, honestly, who cares about a name? The product should stand out.

    • hitwright@lemmy.world
      24·
      16 days ago

      Even if you can objectively see the name as just a name, many people sadly can’t. It is really difficult to recommend others to join, just because they come with the idea that it’s a minecraft clone and since it’s not a clone it feels janky.

      I’m glad they dropped the name for something new.

    • Rogue@feddit.uk
      11·
      15 days ago

      Anything is better than minetest which sounded like a hastily written debugging mod for Minecraft

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
      71·
      16 days ago

      It IS a terrible name. But it also is an over one decade old brand.

      It will be hard to propagate the new name and have it as recognizable as “Minetest”.

      • IcyToes@sh.itjust.works
        6·
        16 days ago

        Those in open source circles will see through places like GamingOnLinux, Lemmy, Reddit and the official IRC/Discord. Those that don’t find out probably are no where near the open source gaming community so it won’t really matter.

    • ouch@lemmy.world
      24·
      16 days ago

      Just tell her that you told them your wife didn’t like the name so they changed it.

    • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      201·
      16 days ago

      I’ve seen it a few times in passing and always assumed it was like, a tech demo or proof of concept.

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
        21·
        16 days ago

        It initially was that. Also the name wasn’t meant to stick around forever.

        But, out of a sudden, between updates, not even the new website URLs ready?

        I don’t follow Minetest development that closely anymore, but last time I checked there were no issues or pull requests on their GitHub, nor something official regarding a name change in the forums.

        This feels like there are just a bunch of people haphazardly deciding there is a new name now.

        • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          6·
          15 days ago

          Here’s a post from May in the Minetest Luanti forums discussing the name change: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?p=425205#p425205

          I’m not going to search further to find the original discussion, but another user in this thread mentions seeing talk of this about a year ago. I agree that it’s not very professional for the new website to be in a less than functional state, but it feels like excitement or decision fatigue may be the culprit, not a rushed process. Then again, it’s an open source video game, not everything has to be “professional” all the time. Meanwhile, enjoy this meme from luanti.org:

          • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
            2·
            15 days ago

            I’m not going to search further to find the original discussion, but another user in this thread mentions seeing talk of this about a year ago.

            There were plenty of those threads and discussions happening during the past few years. This is a constant topic that came up in the forums and sometimes GitHub over and over again.

            • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              2·
              15 days ago

              Yes, and in the last twelve months those discussions clearly accelerated, and that post made it clear the lead/original dev had made their mind up. Which very much negates you saying this was rushed.