I think the opening sequence where the wizard does a short jumping puzzle/parkour while he chats with the light orb works fine and is more engaging than some cutscene that will probably be skipped by a large number of people. You could add an opening cutscene showing the forest in a bad state and a closing one showing the effect of defeating the last boss. But this was a Jam game, so Wuzzy was more busy creating an actual game not a movie.
This mod is really useful for taking pictures of a small scene like a few nodes in a specific arrangement, an advtrains train or a mob. Just enclose it in a green screen (or one of several other colours) and take a screenshot of it. Then in your favourite editor e.g. GIMP, select that colour and turn it into transparency. Instantly isolated! Note: For best results isolating, disable anti-aliasing,
For those interested in my main premise - that you should get the homedecor content in several mods/packs instead of this huge one - I'm pleased to mention a great example in the recently re-released lrfurn from 1F616EMO, which is superior to the version included in Homedecor, unless you really like rounded edges on the arms (that's a no thanks from me!) or really want the colour options available with the Unified Dyes airbrush.
lrfurn was included in the Homedecor Modpack, but that modpack added rounding to the arms on the armchairs, which was a downgrade to the voxel aesthetic if you ask me. This mod stands well on its own - it just runs on base Minetest Game, no other mods, least of all gargantuan packs needed.
The master builder has two functions. It always controls all master builder modules in the digtron. You can open its menu with right-click as long as there is not an item like a digtron module in your hand.
1) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to the same identical node at the same time. To use this mode, you place an item from your inventory in the "Block to build" slot. The item is not removed from your inventory but it is applied to the master builder. Once an item is in this slot, pressing the "Save & Show" button will update every builder module in the entire digtron to place that node. The numbers in the Extrusion, Periodicity and Offset inputs will also be set with the "Save & Show" Button.
2) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to place a copy of the node that is currently in front of it. This is activated with the "Read & Save" button. This is helpful to set the builders up to copy a design. For instance, if you want to build a tower with a digtron, you can build it with full-blocks, stairs and slabs and copy that shape with builder modules. Instead of setting the node and facing on every individual builder module in the entire digtron, you can just copy the first layer of the tower that you already built.
The master builder has two functions. It always controls all master builder modules in the digtron. You can open its menu with right-click as long as there is not an item like a digtron module in your hand.
1) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to the same identical node at the same time. To use this mode, you place an item from your inventory in the "Block to build" slot. The item is not removed from your inventory but it is applied to the master builder. Once an item is in this slot, pressing the "Save & Show" button will update every builder module in the entire digtron to place that node. The numbers in the Extrusion, Periodicity and Offset inputs will also be set with the "Save & Show" Button.
2) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to place a copy of the node that is currently in front of it. This is activated with the "Read & Save" button. This is helpful to set the builders up to copy a design. For instance, if you want to build a tower with a digtron, you can build it with full-blocks, stairs and slabs and copy that shape with builder modules. Instead of setting the node and facing on every individual builder module in the entire digtron, you can just copy the first layer of the tower that you already built.
To answer it myself: No, gl_craft does not supporting clicking to craft all. It uses three buttons, +1, +10 and +100, followed by a final Craft button not an inventory slot. As buttons have no special shift-click behaviour, you can't "Craft all" like the engine's builtin crafting.
Now with 5.8, after some performance improvements with the engine's recipe algoirhtm, you can shift-click to craft many items. Does the mod reflect this currently or does it need an update to support that?
I wouldn't describe it as an alternative but another useful part of a creative mode toolkit. WorldEdit is good for the built environment and repetition; this mod is good for terrain, the natural environment and smooth shapes.
Affero GPL (AGPL) is GPL but with one additional restriction. GPL is basically a sharing licence. If you share code from Secrets of the Moon with others, they have to have the right to read and modify the code themselves too. But since when you play on a server, it doesn't automatically share the code, GPL lets you keep mods "secret" on your server. I don't feel like this is in the spirit of sharing, so I used AGPL for SotM.
Affero GPL's extra restriction is that if you use a modified version of the mod on a server, you need to publish it somewhere online, like GitHub. If you don't modify it, there's no need to share a copy just for using it. And no, I wouldn't count mod.conf as a modification, though some people might view it that way, so it's good you asked.
I'm glad you liked it and found inspiration for your own game. Against the competition in the Game Jam, this definitely didn't hold up. But I tried to be innovative with the mechanics, even if I failed a bit at making an entertaining game.
Some Jam games, particularly the bottom of the ladder, tend to not be very good due to time constraints or bad design. This game, which ranked first, definitely deserves a spot among the top - probably the top. It's not the type of entry that gets played during reviews and barely afterwards. That said, it's also clear that it was made in a fairly short time, in how it takes only a short while to complete.
The game is not hard to understand. It introduces itself with a mysterious narrator, who gives guidance and hints. The difficulty of the puzzles slowly increases. You will need spatial reasoning and some movement skills in order to beat it. It does take a bit of a turn from puzzle elements to parkour in later levels, but it is not really a "hardcore parkour".
I kind of wanted to play freely at the end rather than return straight to the end, but that's alright.
For any returning players: The game had a bug in the post-Jam period due to a reshuffle of the mods. The "restart on same level" feature didn't work due to giving an "unknown item" instead of the usual teleport vials. This has been fixed in the first 2024 release.
The digging is incredibly boring, it has to be agreed. The water pipes are actually a familiar system if you've played with pipeworks before. A lot of the game's content is recycled and sometimes quite chopped versions. The decision to omit the pneumatic tubes and mesecons is somewhat annoying, but I suppose not part of the design.
Aha you're correct, I tested it in singleplayer before and after b20b8cdb6617ca0792896f4255e73b79a3d9938f. Yep, that fixed it. It was true at the time of the original post. I have edited my review.
The telemosaic is intuitive to use and well-documented. You can craft in survival, but it's not cheap and has a limited range. You'll need diamonds and obsidian for the mosaic centre, and some mese to link mosaics. You can keep your telemosaics private as well, it just takes some extra steel (under technic, wrought iron). To extend the range, a lot of obsidian is needed.
Telemosaic is way prettier than Travelnet. It even has a cool teleportation sound. Sure, you can't teleport to many different locations with one mosaic, but I mostly view that as a survival mode feature.
Telemosaic is about as pretty as Teleport Potion. But it has a nice gameplay mechanic where you have to add more mosaic to extend its range, and you have to have visited both ends to set one up, unlike teleport pads that can teleport you anywhere, even into protected areas.
Choose telemosaic to set up your next teleport hub :)
Are you sure it's the projectile HIT sound that has a high frequency problem? I would say if any sound is a problem, it'll be the SHOOT sound since it's much higher pitchde than the hit sound.
I fired the game up again to check. I'm sure it's the hit sound. It makes a clinking/bell noise that has something nasty up in the like 16-24 kHz range, whereas the shoot sound does have some volume in that circa 12-14 kHz range. I'm guessing these numbers not looking at a spectrograph, but anyway, I think a high pass or heavy downward EQ could help a lot.
The very upper end of the spectrum can be hard to hear depending on your age, past noise exposure and level of tinnitus - I'm not presuming anything about your hearing, but that's one reason people can miss these things. What I will say is with my own hearing, I've gotten a bit more tinnitus and lost a bit of the top frequencies over time, but at the same time when something is audible in that range tinnitus seems to make it worse because there's always a whine in my ears up at that range as well.
I couldn't finish the puzzle across from the objective robot. I never tried skipping the corners with NE/NW/SE/SW commands, I assumed it would fall off. I ran out of room a few nodes before the exit.
A lot of games for Minetest, even the relatively well-made ones, feel samey, too derivative. Nothing is ever wholly unique anymore, but Shadow Forest is not the usual fare that I expect out of Minetest. It is truly an game. It's also the first time I've thought "maybe ContentDB needs a souls-like tag", even if that's not the most accurate way to describe Shadow Forest.
You'll be running around at breakneck pace in this game, looking for the collectibles and dodging the baddies. The RPG elements, like Dark Souls, are gained at a campfire and are mostly there to help to help improve your stats if you are struggling. If you're good at the game, or speedrunning, then they're completely optional. You may want some damage upgrades though as the final boss can be a bit of a bullet sponge.
The game is visually and aurally appealing. It has a proper aesthetic going. It has a moral to the story. It has nice and themed level design. The 1.0 Game Jam version had issues with being swamped with infinitely-spawning mobs, and a lot of high frequencies in the staff noises. The 1.1 release leaves the game hard in spots but not unbeatable, and the staff sounds are much better.
Wuzzy is an expert with Minetest and it shows. Shadow Forest makes use of a recent feature that controls the fog distance independent of your settings. It also doesn't let you choose options like creative mode, enable health, and other things that can be left checked the wrong way for playing a Jam Game. One problem I had though was the dialogue didn't word wrap and ran off the right edge of the screen. This is at 1080p resolution fullscreen on my desktop monitor.
In Robot Operator, you sneak into a robotics facility in search of a purported highly advanced and dangerous robot. What you find is a bunch of incredibly rudimentary robot puzzles, which you should ignore, and beeline straight to finding a dangerous one, then exiting with it.
However what I found myself doing was visiting each robot space and completing its puzzle, even though all I should have done is start each robot, and try to pick it up. One puzzle is even uncompletable, as there is not enough space for the number of commands that would be needed to complete it, which is very unsatisfying. This made me reflect on how I have been conditioned to completing objectives in games just because they are there.
Then there are the bugs and things that seem incomplete. You are briefed that the mission is highly dangerous, but all you will find are robot vacuums and little tank droids that won't damage you. I made sure I had creative mode off and damage on, but no damage, not even from stepping on them. The robots tend to get stuck in corners, too. There is something more dangerous than the robots though: falling into one of pits around the robot arenas, and never being able to escape. I assume that's why previous operators died on this mission and not the robots. The bigger problem though is that the robot that is the target has a bug where trying to pick it up with right-click will crash the game, which I had to fix to complete the game.
As with Nathan S.'s 2022 Jam, the visual art is pretty good, but there is not even a footstep sound and in fact the only sound I can recall is a little "whoosh" at the end. The game would really have benefitted from some sounds, which are easily available at places like Freesound.
Hmm, well, the animal would have to be attached to you first somehow, and I'm not sure how either the elevator or the animal code is going to work out how to attach you before you start travelling and unattach you after the elevator stops. At least, not without a bit of architectural mess. I'd probably put it in at the elevator side though. It's definitely possible, but might have emergent behaviour or bad side effects like kidnapping someone's kitty because it strayed too close to the public elevator.
Random messages can be helpful if they push messages out to users who otherwise aren't aware of their content or are new and looking for hints. They quickly get old, boring, repetitive and tend to exacerbate the feeling of loneliness if the server is empty of other players, as you're reminded that you're playing multiplayer and not singleplayer.
I would give the mode a thumbs up if users could opt out. Now that the mod has been updated, I will recommend it to server admins. But personally I'm not a fan of random indiscriminate messaging, so I would opt out after playing on the server for a while.
With 5.8.0 now out, this game ("Minetest Game", or MTG for short) is no longer bundled with every copy of Minetest. This is a victory for an increase in the diversity of games on Minetest the Engine, but I believe there are still plenty of compelling reasons to play this game as what it says on the tin: a modding base.
While there are an increasing number of mods for Mineclone, NodeCore, Exile and others, and those will probably continue to grow, there is still a wealth of mods to be found for this game that are exclusive to it or support maybe one other game. This includes several categories:
Mods with a lot of extra worldgen that could theoretically be presented as their own game, such as Ethereal and Australia, but also integrate nicely with other mods in the MTG ecosystem
Many other mods; see the mods included with forks of MTG for plenty of examples.
This is not to say those mods are guaranteed to stay on MTG forever, but the best way to experience a lot of content made for Minetest is currently to play MTG.
Outside of existing content, I think the longevity of MTG will continue for some time. It is a mostly unopionated, lightweight (detractors may say "content-devoid"), stable game which still gets bug fixes to this day. It has been used for a number of notable forks like MeseCraft and Dreambuilder. Start learning mod-packing and mod writing for Minetest with MTG today!
If we ignore the date separator symbol, you did get 2/3 of the major worldwide numerical date formats, it was just ISO that was missing. I would maybe consider options for formats with month names instead of month numbers e.g. 7 Dec 2023; Dec 7, 2023.
By plugin, I mean "software for (within the framework of, etc.) software", so in the case of a beerchat plugin, that would mean a mod that depends on Beerchat and works within it. It should be possible with the 'override' module of Beerchat. Your mod would optionally-depend on Beerchat, then in the code it would check if there's a modpath for beerchat and then it would act as a Beerchat plugin instead of overriding chat globally.
Translation is usually welcome, though I can only think that it would be just the word "at" between the date and time that gets translated in the context of this mod. I'd question whether the word "at" is even needed. If you adopted the month name idea then you'd translate the month names too.
Timezone info may not be available. DST info is available to Lua from os.time(), but from what I recall of writing Luacontroller code on a server, I had to hardcode the timezone difference from server to UTC time and UTC to local. The best you may be able to do is ask people to put their timezone info into the mod's configuration. Since I mention configuration, the mod didn't namespace its configuration names. The convention is to use a dot, so: better_chat.time_format instead of just time_format. This avoids overlap.
Overriding the default chat experience is okay for a tiny little server where chat is kind of slow and a chat handling mod with a framework may be considered overkill. Bigger servers will want something like Beerchat, with multiple channels and features like channel bans, colourisation, mutes. This could have been a plugin for Beerchat which would offer an even better experience. It's incompatible as-is. Of course, it's no problem to provide a standalone version of the mod as well.
Regardless of complaints about plugins let's focus the review on what the mod provides if you're just going to use it and not use plugins. There are two date formats on offer: mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy. I appreciate that the author wanted to cater to an international audience - those are the most popular formats in the Anglosphere at least. Other countries use other punctuation like - or . for the separators, and this might have helped disambiguation. For instance, the German format is usually dd.mm.yyyy. The fact of using dots instead of slashes could help a new user with at least a little clue on which format is being used.
Timezone is also another issue; the user can't always easily relate the server time to their own. A UTC option may have been a decent option, but it may also just be incumbent on the server to let people know what their timezone is. Some servers are set to UTC and others are set to local time of the datacentre.
This one is good in case you get that petrolhead itch and need to scratch it without leaving Minetest, or maybe you just don't have any decent racing games.
3rd-person camera is definitely recommend. The inside of the car isn't a good view of the road. The visuals of the game also change at night, with the edges of the road lit. Put your own music, podcast or whatever you want on as the game doesn't have any sound of its own.
This will fill the world with random curving roads and give you a car to do drifts and doughnuts in. You can go on quite a long trip along the roads, though sometimes you will find yourself going around in circles. The minimap helps find new roads if you're stuck in a loop.
At the intersections of roads, you'll often have a much wider area, and sometimes somthing approximately shaped like a roundabout. Challenge yourself to see if you do a doughnut and keep up a circle while drifting. You'll need to rapidly tap the A or D keys, or use a gamepad if that's an option for you. For extra swag, you can drive backwards as fast you can can forwards, but of course, the steering will be reversed too!
The game does have higher system requirements than you might expect in Minetest. The Lua code that runs the vehicle physics may not run fast enough on your CPU, especially ones with low base clocks like laptops and phones, and your system may also struggle with generating terrain and driving at the same time. It probably won't work very well in multiplayer, due to both network latency and Minetest running all the vehicles in a single Lua thread. But if you have an adequate system, it can be surprisingly fun.
This is also a much more interesting way to view the Minipeli landscape than just flying over it.
For a special trick, you can open upon the game's game.conf and enable more mapgens. Don't get too excited, it will mostly result in a lot of tunnels and road over water (sometimes water over road too). But it has the occasional nice view.
The author's comment about "not open source" doesn't mean he's saying he doesn't want contributions. He's just saying that he really prefers the term Libre or Free Software, and doesn't like the term "open source" when referring to the licence terms. Read the GNU project's article "open source misses the point" which is linked from the README.
You can still easily make issues and pull requests over on the provided Codeberg link.
I've been playing a fair bit of Hades Revisited recently, and the way the player experience problem with low gravity is solved is by giving you a pair of weighted boots to reduce your jump height. That would probably work for SoTM. Not that SoTM is planned to come back - just a thought.
This mod, based on cheapie's, is even more useful than the original. My personal highlights are the inclusion of the outbox and the fact that you can now /mail <username> and it actually opens the compose form to send that user a mail message.
Mail is pretty much the ideal solution for letting players contact others who are offline, especially administrators and moderators. Of course it may not scale to a huge server, where the admin might end up with two dozen mail messages every time they log in, some of which may be obsolete. But it does work well overall for small to medium servers. With mail mod, you can leave signs on your properties that say things like "If there are any problems or requests, simply /mail Blockhead" and people can leave feedback that you are sure to receive.
For roleplay/realism, I would instead recommend - as an alternative or additional system - everamzah's mailbox mod (or the version in homedecor, if you like the art style and don't need things like post offices). You can send goods, including books, through mailbox, which may be preferable.
I wouldn't recommend /mail, or Minetest in general, as a secure means of communication. The server admin can read the contents of messages easily enough, even if it's not directly included as a mod feature, and the Minetest protocol is (at the time of review) not encrypted. For that purpose I would use an out-of-game system like Matrix, PGP-signed email and so on.
The more advanced function is to use the checks that are built into the mod, as well as writing your own. A good number of scripts are built in to help you find problems, hence the name QA for "Quality Assurance", since those are the kinds of checks that QA testers regularly need to perform. You can find broken recipes, list entities, find redundant-looking items. Some of the QA scripts generate external files such as a graphviz format recipe graph; you could use QA scripts to make your own reports or even prepare data for external programs.
You can write your own QA scripts and add them to the QA block directory. I don't always recommend modifying code, but there's no reason you can't make light fork of the mod to add your own QA scripts. I've found QA scripts helpful for developing mods, such as finding out if a specific data structure is in place that should be there. Running QA scripts isn't a replacement for automated tests with something like mineunit, but it's very helpful when iterating and debugging.
This mod has two main functions: Browsing the global namespace, and running scripts. Even if you only use it for the first, it's still well worth it.
Browsing the global namespace has a lot of useful functions: It's a great way to learn about the environment of Minetest with its data tables of registered items, constants, and also every API, documented or undocumented (mostly the former). Likewise with mods' APIs and data tables that are in the global namespace. Sometimes you spot a global that's not meant to be there and can go fix it - though other tools like Luacheck are meant to help with problems like that as well. Other times you want to look through and check what's registered in terms of ABMs, schematics, entities and so on.
Although the presentation is not as ideal as a specialised view for developers or as easy to read as an Wuzzy's doc mod, you know you're getting the actual data when you view it through the QA Block and can refer to it in your code. You can't find everything with the QA Block of course - a lot of mods have local variables embedded in their code that can't be accessed from outside the mod. But QA block inspects the overall system and global namespace comprehensively.
P.S. In terms of code style, please start reducing the size of your if statements by negating and returning early instead of having a big pyramid of nested ones.
The condition for extended horizontal placement requires you to be with about the 45° mark in terms of deviation from the axis. It's pretty straightforward to use for bridging and nicer than holding sneak continuously. It's quite easy to build in a straight line, but taking a bend requires you to slow down a bit to get the angle around. Still, quite nice.
The vertical extension feature is a bit more finicky. It requires a pretty steep upward pitch to activate and so only really works for pillars that are already 3 nodes tall. You can add another 3 nodes of height easily and the 4th by jumping (reach according to Minetest Game creative mode). Given the narrow viewing conditions for vertical extension I'm not sure the sneak key should be necessary.
The meaning of the crosshair extensions is probably discoverable by a player who is playing on a server, by them just going and placing. The vertical extension is not as discoverable since it requires sneak (but perhaps shouldn't as I mentioned).
There is also a rate limit on placement of 0.3 seconds. This seems like a pretty sensible default but for very fast building of bridges could lead to a player falling off. I think a visual indication of when the extension is ready would help.
The other visual change I would make is that, at least in my 1080 display, the distance from the central cross to the arrows/brackets around the crosshair is slightly off-kilter, with a longer distance on the left than the right, around 1-2 pixels depending on exact window size.
The other other change I would make is to add the node's placement sound in when it's placing with the extended placement functionality. That would be much nicer since it's currently missing. If it were possible, animating the hand would be welcome - I'm not sure if it is.
Thank you for your gracious response and taking feedback. Looking back, I am not sure what versions I had at the time of the review and I have checked again and found that version-10 is as you say now, which is good. I have edited my review.
Sorry that I did not go in detail about how there are instructions on how to add builds. I just think that many of the target users of The Build Spawner are not the type to delve into the source code and make their own schematics. I could be wrong. Friendlier tools will benefit everyone, so thank you for considering them.
The mod includes, at the time of writing, 7 builds for spawning. Some of those that are mentioned in the ContentDB description, such as the Mall, are actually only referred to because the description seems to be a copy-and-paste job from the author's earlier mod "The Build Spawner" for Minetest Game. Go and read my review for a detailed explanation of why this mod and its original cousin are not much more helpful than just having the schematics in your world directory, and what a good mod would have.
I appreciate that the author wanted to provide support for more than one game. Care was taken to select the right equivalent nodes for Mineclone2, which is not always a straight 1:1 mapping. However, care should have been taken to port over all of the schematics from the original and keep the collection up to date - adding any new schematics for one to the other. The schematics for this game do look better, though that's in part because the base texture pack of Mineclone2 is a bit nicer than Minetest Game.
What I would like to see from the author in terms of functionality from the original mod - previews, rotation and so on - I mentioned in the earlier review. What I would like to see additionally now that multi-game support is considered, is a library mod from the author and an API. It would be relatively easy to make a core library that registers schematics, and has the functions for placement previews, player-made schematic saving, and so on. Then each pack mod would be as easy to add, with fewer lines of code, just a name, icon name, placement offset and so on.
I could definitely recommend the mod(s)/pack if at least some of these issues with useability and completeness were addressed. Making builds, placing them into a collection, sharing your builds, placing your builds again later should all be straightforward, and people will have all of that if the Build Spawner mods are improved.
The inclusion of coloured 'concrete' blocks doesn't make a case for itself properly. There are numerous mods that add colourful and even recolourable blocks. There is no texture on the concrete. The bakery uses the concrete but wool is used in others and seems like a better generic substitute. The concrete is just there, probably because the author thought they would be useful to themselves and others at some point.
This review was also prompted after prior experience and noticing it in the recently updated section. The recent version is noted by the author as adding protection checks for placement. A previous version of this review stated that the protection checks were removed, but I double-checked today against the author's comment and noticed they were actually added. Perhaps the version was replaced or I had the wrong download; anyway it's good now. Going beyond protection checks, The mod never did seem appropriate for multiplayer anyway, as placing the schematics requires no privilege, so could easily mess people up even faster than standard building speed. I would add a privilege setting to the mod so server owners can nominate a privilege. The default could be interact to keep existing functionality, but it could be tied to a higher privileges like creative.
"Cutscenes are important" - why?
I think the opening sequence where the wizard does a short jumping puzzle/parkour while he chats with the light orb works fine and is more engaging than some cutscene that will probably be skipped by a large number of people. You could add an opening cutscene showing the forest in a bad state and a closing one showing the effect of defeating the last boss. But this was a Jam game, so Wuzzy was more busy creating an actual game not a movie.
This mod is really useful for taking pictures of a small scene like a few nodes in a specific arrangement, an advtrains train or a mob. Just enclose it in a green screen (or one of several other colours) and take a screenshot of it. Then in your favourite editor e.g. GIMP, select that colour and turn it into transparency. Instantly isolated! Note: For best results isolating, disable anti-aliasing,
I used this mod to make all the transparent-background images for Advtrains Supplemental packages - https://content.minetest.net/users/advtrains_supplemental
For those interested in my main premise - that you should get the homedecor content in several mods/packs instead of this huge one - I'm pleased to mention a great example in the recently re-released lrfurn from 1F616EMO, which is superior to the version included in Homedecor, unless you really like rounded edges on the arms (that's a no thanks from me!) or really want the colour options available with the Unified Dyes airbrush.
lrfurn
was included in the Homedecor Modpack, but that modpack added rounding to the arms on the armchairs, which was a downgrade to the voxel aesthetic if you ask me. This mod stands well on its own - it just runs on base Minetest Game, no other mods, least of all gargantuan packs needed.The master builder has two functions. It always controls all master builder modules in the digtron. You can open its menu with right-click as long as there is not an item like a digtron module in your hand.
1) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to the same identical node at the same time. To use this mode, you place an item from your inventory in the "Block to build" slot. The item is not removed from your inventory but it is applied to the master builder. Once an item is in this slot, pressing the "Save & Show" button will update every builder module in the entire digtron to place that node. The numbers in the Extrusion, Periodicity and Offset inputs will also be set with the "Save & Show" Button. 2) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to place a copy of the node that is currently in front of it. This is activated with the "Read & Save" button. This is helpful to set the builders up to copy a design. For instance, if you want to build a tower with a digtron, you can build it with full-blocks, stairs and slabs and copy that shape with builder modules. Instead of setting the node and facing on every individual builder module in the entire digtron, you can just copy the first layer of the tower that you already built.
The master builder has two functions. It always controls all master builder modules in the digtron. You can open its menu with right-click as long as there is not an item like a digtron module in your hand.
1) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to the same identical node at the same time. To use this mode, you place an item from your inventory in the "Block to build" slot. The item is not removed from your inventory but it is applied to the master builder. Once an item is in this slot, pressing the "Save & Show" button will update every builder module in the entire digtron to place that node. The numbers in the Extrusion, Periodicity and Offset inputs will also be set with the "Save & Show" Button. 2) You can use the master builder to set every builder module to place a copy of the node that is currently in front of it. This is activated with the "Read & Save" button. This is helpful to set the builders up to copy a design. For instance, if you want to build a tower with a digtron, you can build it with full-blocks, stairs and slabs and copy that shape with builder modules. Instead of setting the node and facing on every individual builder module in the entire digtron, you can just copy the first layer of the tower that you already built.
To answer it myself: No, gl_craft does not supporting clicking to craft all. It uses three buttons, +1, +10 and +100, followed by a final Craft button not an inventory slot. As buttons have no special shift-click behaviour, you can't "Craft all" like the engine's builtin crafting.
Now with 5.8, after some performance improvements with the engine's recipe algoirhtm, you can shift-click to craft many items. Does the mod reflect this currently or does it need an update to support that?
I wouldn't describe it as an alternative but another useful part of a creative mode toolkit. WorldEdit is good for the built environment and repetition; this mod is good for terrain, the natural environment and smooth shapes.
Hi, thanks for asking.
Affero GPL (AGPL) is GPL but with one additional restriction. GPL is basically a sharing licence. If you share code from Secrets of the Moon with others, they have to have the right to read and modify the code themselves too. But since when you play on a server, it doesn't automatically share the code, GPL lets you keep mods "secret" on your server. I don't feel like this is in the spirit of sharing, so I used AGPL for SotM.
Affero GPL's extra restriction is that if you use a modified version of the mod on a server, you need to publish it somewhere online, like GitHub. If you don't modify it, there's no need to share a copy just for using it. And no, I wouldn't count mod.conf as a modification, though some people might view it that way, so it's good you asked.
I hope your game project goes well :)
"No audio" - did you mean "no music"? Or did you accidentally mute the game?
I'm glad you liked it and found inspiration for your own game. Against the competition in the Game Jam, this definitely didn't hold up. But I tried to be innovative with the mechanics, even if I failed a bit at making an entertaining game.
..just in case you wanted to test what a mod does when there's absolutely no other mods present, not even Devtest or Minetest Game mods.
Some Jam games, particularly the bottom of the ladder, tend to not be very good due to time constraints or bad design. This game, which ranked first, definitely deserves a spot among the top - probably the top. It's not the type of entry that gets played during reviews and barely afterwards. That said, it's also clear that it was made in a fairly short time, in how it takes only a short while to complete.
The game is not hard to understand. It introduces itself with a mysterious narrator, who gives guidance and hints. The difficulty of the puzzles slowly increases. You will need spatial reasoning and some movement skills in order to beat it. It does take a bit of a turn from puzzle elements to parkour in later levels, but it is not really a "hardcore parkour".
I kind of wanted to play freely at the end rather than return straight to the end, but that's alright.
For any returning players: The game had a bug in the post-Jam period due to a reshuffle of the mods. The "restart on same level" feature didn't work due to giving an "unknown item" instead of the usual teleport vials. This has been fixed in the first 2024 release.
The digging is incredibly boring, it has to be agreed. The water pipes are actually a familiar system if you've played with pipeworks before. A lot of the game's content is recycled and sometimes quite chopped versions. The decision to omit the pneumatic tubes and mesecons is somewhat annoying, but I suppose not part of the design.
Aha you're correct, I tested it in singleplayer before and after b20b8cdb6617ca0792896f4255e73b79a3d9938f. Yep, that fixed it. It was true at the time of the original post. I have edited my review.
The telemosaic is intuitive to use and well-documented. You can craft in survival, but it's not cheap and has a limited range. You'll need diamonds and obsidian for the mosaic centre, and some mese to link mosaics. You can keep your telemosaics private as well, it just takes some extra steel (under technic, wrought iron). To extend the range, a lot of obsidian is needed.
Telemosaic is way prettier than Travelnet. It even has a cool teleportation sound. Sure, you can't teleport to many different locations with one mosaic, but I mostly view that as a survival mode feature.
Telemosaic is about as pretty as Teleport Potion. But it has a nice gameplay mechanic where you have to add more mosaic to extend its range, and you have to have visited both ends to set one up, unlike teleport pads that can teleport you anywhere, even into protected areas.
Choose telemosaic to set up your next teleport hub :)
I fired the game up again to check. I'm sure it's the hit sound. It makes a clinking/bell noise that has something nasty up in the like 16-24 kHz range, whereas the shoot sound does have some volume in that circa 12-14 kHz range. I'm guessing these numbers not looking at a spectrograph, but anyway, I think a high pass or heavy downward EQ could help a lot.
The very upper end of the spectrum can be hard to hear depending on your age, past noise exposure and level of tinnitus - I'm not presuming anything about your hearing, but that's one reason people can miss these things. What I will say is with my own hearing, I've gotten a bit more tinnitus and lost a bit of the top frequencies over time, but at the same time when something is audible in that range tinnitus seems to make it worse because there's always a whine in my ears up at that range as well.
And thanks again for the great game :D
I couldn't finish the puzzle across from the objective robot. I never tried skipping the corners with NE/NW/SE/SW commands, I assumed it would fall off. I ran out of room a few nodes before the exit.
A lot of games for Minetest, even the relatively well-made ones, feel samey, too derivative. Nothing is ever wholly unique anymore, but Shadow Forest is not the usual fare that I expect out of Minetest. It is truly an game. It's also the first time I've thought "maybe ContentDB needs a souls-like tag", even if that's not the most accurate way to describe Shadow Forest.
You'll be running around at breakneck pace in this game, looking for the collectibles and dodging the baddies. The RPG elements, like Dark Souls, are gained at a campfire and are mostly there to help to help improve your stats if you are struggling. If you're good at the game, or speedrunning, then they're completely optional. You may want some damage upgrades though as the final boss can be a bit of a bullet sponge.
The game is visually and aurally appealing. It has a proper aesthetic going. It has a moral to the story. It has nice and themed level design. The 1.0 Game Jam version had issues with being swamped with infinitely-spawning mobs, and a lot of high frequencies in the staff noises. The 1.1 release leaves the game hard in spots but not unbeatable, and the staff sounds are much better.
Wuzzy is an expert with Minetest and it shows. Shadow Forest makes use of a recent feature that controls the fog distance independent of your settings. It also doesn't let you choose options like creative mode, enable health, and other things that can be left checked the wrong way for playing a Jam Game. One problem I had though was the dialogue didn't word wrap and ran off the right edge of the screen. This is at 1080p resolution fullscreen on my desktop monitor.
Good game, I give it a 5/7.
In Robot Operator, you sneak into a robotics facility in search of a purported highly advanced and dangerous robot. What you find is a bunch of incredibly rudimentary robot puzzles, which you should ignore, and beeline straight to finding a dangerous one, then exiting with it.
However what I found myself doing was visiting each robot space and completing its puzzle, even though all I should have done is start each robot, and try to pick it up. One puzzle is even uncompletable, as there is not enough space for the number of commands that would be needed to complete it, which is very unsatisfying. This made me reflect on how I have been conditioned to completing objectives in games just because they are there.
Then there are the bugs and things that seem incomplete. You are briefed that the mission is highly dangerous, but all you will find are robot vacuums and little tank droids that won't damage you. I made sure I had creative mode off and damage on, but no damage, not even from stepping on them. The robots tend to get stuck in corners, too. There is something more dangerous than the robots though: falling into one of pits around the robot arenas, and never being able to escape. I assume that's why previous operators died on this mission and not the robots. The bigger problem though is that the robot that is the target has a bug where trying to pick it up with right-click will crash the game, which I had to fix to complete the game.
As with Nathan S.'s 2022 Jam, the visual art is pretty good, but there is not even a footstep sound and in fact the only sound I can recall is a little "whoosh" at the end. The game would really have benefitted from some sounds, which are easily available at places like Freesound.
Hmm, well, the animal would have to be attached to you first somehow, and I'm not sure how either the elevator or the animal code is going to work out how to attach you before you start travelling and unattach you after the elevator stops. At least, not without a bit of architectural mess. I'd probably put it in at the elevator side though. It's definitely possible, but might have emergent behaviour or bad side effects like kidnapping someone's kitty because it strayed too close to the public elevator.
Doesn't your mobs mod let you pick up your cat with right-click? Maybe with a net or lasso? Or is that not the point?
Random messages can be helpful if they push messages out to users who otherwise aren't aware of their content or are new and looking for hints. They quickly get old, boring, repetitive and tend to exacerbate the feeling of loneliness if the server is empty of other players, as you're reminded that you're playing multiplayer and not singleplayer.
I would give the mode a thumbs up if users could opt out. Now that the mod has been updated, I will recommend it to server admins. But personally I'm not a fan of random indiscriminate messaging, so I would opt out after playing on the server for a while.With 5.8.0 now out, this game ("Minetest Game", or MTG for short) is no longer bundled with every copy of Minetest. This is a victory for an increase in the diversity of games on Minetest the Engine, but I believe there are still plenty of compelling reasons to play this game as what it says on the tin: a modding base.
While there are an increasing number of mods for Mineclone, NodeCore, Exile and others, and those will probably continue to grow, there is still a wealth of mods to be found for this game that are exclusive to it or support maybe one other game. This includes several categories:
This is not to say those mods are guaranteed to stay on MTG forever, but the best way to experience a lot of content made for Minetest is currently to play MTG.
Outside of existing content, I think the longevity of MTG will continue for some time. It is a mostly unopionated, lightweight (detractors may say "content-devoid"), stable game which still gets bug fixes to this day. It has been used for a number of notable forks like MeseCraft and Dreambuilder. Start learning mod-packing and mod writing for Minetest with MTG today!
If we ignore the date separator symbol, you did get 2/3 of the major worldwide numerical date formats, it was just ISO that was missing. I would maybe consider options for formats with month names instead of month numbers e.g.
7 Dec 2023
;Dec 7, 2023
.By plugin, I mean "software for (within the framework of, etc.) software", so in the case of a beerchat plugin, that would mean a mod that depends on Beerchat and works within it. It should be possible with the 'override' module of Beerchat. Your mod would optionally-depend on Beerchat, then in the code it would check if there's a modpath for beerchat and then it would act as a Beerchat plugin instead of overriding chat globally.
Translation is usually welcome, though I can only think that it would be just the word "at" between the date and time that gets translated in the context of this mod. I'd question whether the word "at" is even needed. If you adopted the month name idea then you'd translate the month names too.
Timezone info may not be available. DST info is available to Lua from
os.time()
, but from what I recall of writing Luacontroller code on a server, I had to hardcode the timezone difference from server to UTC time and UTC to local. The best you may be able to do is ask people to put their timezone info into the mod's configuration. Since I mention configuration, the mod didn't namespace its configuration names. The convention is to use a dot, so:better_chat.time_format
instead of justtime_format
. This avoids overlap.Good luck with the project :)
Overriding the default chat experience is okay for a tiny little server where chat is kind of slow and a chat handling mod with a framework may be considered overkill. Bigger servers will want something like Beerchat, with multiple channels and features like channel bans, colourisation, mutes. This could have been a plugin for Beerchat which would offer an even better experience. It's incompatible as-is. Of course, it's no problem to provide a standalone version of the mod as well.
Regardless of complaints about plugins let's focus the review on what the mod provides if you're just going to use it and not use plugins. There are two date formats on offer:
mm/dd/yyyy
anddd/mm/yyyy
. I appreciate that the author wanted to cater to an international audience - those are the most popular formats in the Anglosphere at least. Other countries use other punctuation like-
or.
for the separators, and this might have helped disambiguation. For instance, the German format is usuallydd.mm.yyyy
. The fact of using dots instead of slashes could help a new user with at least a little clue on which format is being used.Timezone is also another issue; the user can't always easily relate the server time to their own. A UTC option may have been a decent option, but it may also just be incumbent on the server to let people know what their timezone is. Some servers are set to UTC and others are set to local time of the datacentre.
This one is good in case you get that petrolhead itch and need to scratch it without leaving Minetest, or maybe you just don't have any decent racing games.
3rd-person camera is definitely recommend. The inside of the car isn't a good view of the road. The visuals of the game also change at night, with the edges of the road lit. Put your own music, podcast or whatever you want on as the game doesn't have any sound of its own.
This will fill the world with random curving roads and give you a car to do drifts and doughnuts in. You can go on quite a long trip along the roads, though sometimes you will find yourself going around in circles. The minimap helps find new roads if you're stuck in a loop.
At the intersections of roads, you'll often have a much wider area, and sometimes somthing approximately shaped like a roundabout. Challenge yourself to see if you do a doughnut and keep up a circle while drifting. You'll need to rapidly tap the A or D keys, or use a gamepad if that's an option for you. For extra swag, you can drive backwards as fast you can can forwards, but of course, the steering will be reversed too!
The game does have higher system requirements than you might expect in Minetest. The Lua code that runs the vehicle physics may not run fast enough on your CPU, especially ones with low base clocks like laptops and phones, and your system may also struggle with generating terrain and driving at the same time. It probably won't work very well in multiplayer, due to both network latency and Minetest running all the vehicles in a single Lua thread. But if you have an adequate system, it can be surprisingly fun.
This is also a much more interesting way to view the Minipeli landscape than just flying over it.
For a special trick, you can open upon the game's game.conf and enable more mapgens. Don't get too excited, it will mostly result in a lot of tunnels and road over water (sometimes water over road too). But it has the occasional nice view.
The author's comment about "not open source" doesn't mean he's saying he doesn't want contributions. He's just saying that he really prefers the term Libre or Free Software, and doesn't like the term "open source" when referring to the licence terms. Read the GNU project's article "open source misses the point" which is linked from the README.
You can still easily make issues and pull requests over on the provided Codeberg link.
PR was merged, review invalidated
This mod looks like it actually uses formspec inventories instead of buttons, which should make it function way better honestly.
I've been playing a fair bit of Hades Revisited recently, and the way the player experience problem with low gravity is solved is by giving you a pair of weighted boots to reduce your jump height. That would probably work for SoTM. Not that SoTM is planned to come back - just a thought.
This mod, based on cheapie's, is even more useful than the original. My personal highlights are the inclusion of the outbox and the fact that you can now
/mail <username>
and it actually opens the compose form to send that user a mail message.Mail is pretty much the ideal solution for letting players contact others who are offline, especially administrators and moderators. Of course it may not scale to a huge server, where the admin might end up with two dozen mail messages every time they log in, some of which may be obsolete. But it does work well overall for small to medium servers. With mail mod, you can leave signs on your properties that say things like "If there are any problems or requests, simply /mail Blockhead" and people can leave feedback that you are sure to receive.
For roleplay/realism, I would instead recommend - as an alternative or additional system - everamzah's mailbox mod (or the version in homedecor, if you like the art style and don't need things like post offices). You can send goods, including books, through mailbox, which may be preferable.
I wouldn't recommend /mail, or Minetest in general, as a secure means of communication. The server admin can read the contents of messages easily enough, even if it's not directly included as a mod feature, and the Minetest protocol is (at the time of review) not encrypted. For that purpose I would use an out-of-game system like Matrix, PGP-signed email and so on.
The more advanced function is to use the checks that are built into the mod, as well as writing your own. A good number of scripts are built in to help you find problems, hence the name QA for "Quality Assurance", since those are the kinds of checks that QA testers regularly need to perform. You can find broken recipes, list entities, find redundant-looking items. Some of the QA scripts generate external files such as a graphviz format recipe graph; you could use QA scripts to make your own reports or even prepare data for external programs.
You can write your own QA scripts and add them to the QA block directory. I don't always recommend modifying code, but there's no reason you can't make light fork of the mod to add your own QA scripts. I've found QA scripts helpful for developing mods, such as finding out if a specific data structure is in place that should be there. Running QA scripts isn't a replacement for automated tests with something like mineunit, but it's very helpful when iterating and debugging.
This mod has two main functions: Browsing the global namespace, and running scripts. Even if you only use it for the first, it's still well worth it.
Browsing the global namespace has a lot of useful functions: It's a great way to learn about the environment of Minetest with its data tables of registered items, constants, and also every API, documented or undocumented (mostly the former). Likewise with mods' APIs and data tables that are in the global namespace. Sometimes you spot a global that's not meant to be there and can go fix it - though other tools like Luacheck are meant to help with problems like that as well. Other times you want to look through and check what's registered in terms of ABMs, schematics, entities and so on.
Although the presentation is not as ideal as a specialised view for developers or as easy to read as an Wuzzy's doc mod, you know you're getting the actual data when you view it through the QA Block and can refer to it in your code. You can't find everything with the QA Block of course - a lot of mods have local variables embedded in their code that can't be accessed from outside the mod. But QA block inspects the overall system and global namespace comprehensively.
Review concludes in a comment
P.S. In terms of code style, please start reducing the size of your if statements by negating and returning early instead of having a big pyramid of nested ones.
The condition for extended horizontal placement requires you to be with about the 45° mark in terms of deviation from the axis. It's pretty straightforward to use for bridging and nicer than holding sneak continuously. It's quite easy to build in a straight line, but taking a bend requires you to slow down a bit to get the angle around. Still, quite nice.
The vertical extension feature is a bit more finicky. It requires a pretty steep upward pitch to activate and so only really works for pillars that are already 3 nodes tall. You can add another 3 nodes of height easily and the 4th by jumping (reach according to Minetest Game creative mode). Given the narrow viewing conditions for vertical extension I'm not sure the sneak key should be necessary.
The meaning of the crosshair extensions is probably discoverable by a player who is playing on a server, by them just going and placing. The vertical extension is not as discoverable since it requires sneak (but perhaps shouldn't as I mentioned).
There is also a rate limit on placement of 0.3 seconds. This seems like a pretty sensible default but for very fast building of bridges could lead to a player falling off. I think a visual indication of when the extension is ready would help.
The other visual change I would make is that, at least in my 1080 display, the distance from the central cross to the arrows/brackets around the crosshair is slightly off-kilter, with a longer distance on the left than the right, around 1-2 pixels depending on exact window size.
The other other change I would make is to add the node's placement sound in when it's placing with the extended placement functionality. That would be much nicer since it's currently missing. If it were possible, animating the hand would be welcome - I'm not sure if it is.
Thank you for your gracious response and taking feedback. Looking back, I am not sure what versions I had at the time of the review and I have checked again and found that version-10 is as you say now, which is good. I have edited my review.
Sorry that I did not go in detail about how there are instructions on how to add builds. I just think that many of the target users of The Build Spawner are not the type to delve into the source code and make their own schematics. I could be wrong. Friendlier tools will benefit everyone, so thank you for considering them.
The mod includes, at the time of writing, 7 builds for spawning. Some of those that are mentioned in the ContentDB description, such as the Mall, are actually only referred to because the description seems to be a copy-and-paste job from the author's earlier mod "The Build Spawner" for Minetest Game. Go and read my review for a detailed explanation of why this mod and its original cousin are not much more helpful than just having the schematics in your world directory, and what a good mod would have.
I appreciate that the author wanted to provide support for more than one game. Care was taken to select the right equivalent nodes for Mineclone2, which is not always a straight 1:1 mapping. However, care should have been taken to port over all of the schematics from the original and keep the collection up to date - adding any new schematics for one to the other. The schematics for this game do look better, though that's in part because the base texture pack of Mineclone2 is a bit nicer than Minetest Game.
What I would like to see from the author in terms of functionality from the original mod - previews, rotation and so on - I mentioned in the earlier review. What I would like to see additionally now that multi-game support is considered, is a library mod from the author and an API. It would be relatively easy to make a core library that registers schematics, and has the functions for placement previews, player-made schematic saving, and so on. Then each pack mod would be as easy to add, with fewer lines of code, just a name, icon name, placement offset and so on.
I could definitely recommend the mod(s)/pack if at least some of these issues with useability and completeness were addressed. Making builds, placing them into a collection, sharing your builds, placing your builds again later should all be straightforward, and people will have all of that if the Build Spawner mods are improved.
The inclusion of coloured 'concrete' blocks doesn't make a case for itself properly. There are numerous mods that add colourful and even recolourable blocks. There is no texture on the concrete. The bakery uses the concrete but wool is used in others and seems like a better generic substitute. The concrete is just there, probably because the author thought they would be useful to themselves and others at some point.
This review was also prompted after prior experience and noticing it in the recently updated section. The recent version is noted by the author as adding protection checks for placement. A previous version of this review stated that the protection checks were removed, but I double-checked today against the author's comment and noticed they were actually added. Perhaps the version was replaced or I had the wrong download; anyway it's good now. Going beyond protection checks, The mod never did seem appropriate for multiplayer anyway, as placing the schematics requires no privilege, so could easily mess people up even faster than standard building speed. I would add a privilege setting to the mod so server owners can nominate a privilege. The default could be interact to keep existing functionality, but it could be tied to a higher privileges like creative.