As my review points out, another game with more-or-less the same content also requires less resources.
Mineclonia required(past tense) less resources after the removal of the newly introduced music.
And AncientMariner raised an important point about performance. I tried MineClone2 on my Core 2 Duo laptop before he took over, and I simply decided the hardware was too dated. But after he profiled various pain points and improved the game, that old laptop can now run the game very well. Even with the added music, the game performed well on the old laptop (with 4GB RAM). And with Minetest 5.8.0, the RAM problem is gone.
You can certainly be disingenuous with unaware people, but not with those who know full well how you mispresent important differences between the two projects.
Many other games for Minetest run perfectly fine on that computer.
Games will a lot less content require less resources, which is why they're better on low-RAM devices. You know this, so why do you sound like you're unaware of it?
you decided that it is acceptable to make MineClone2 crash on devices on which it used to run fine.
As a software developer you know that the minimum requirements of a project can't always stay at the same level if you want more features. Minetest versions older than 5.8.0 load all the music into RAM, uncompressed. That's why removing the music is a workaround for people who want to play MineClone2 on devices with 2GB RAM on older Minetest releases.
We didn't know when exactly the sound rework PR would be shipped, but we knew it would come. We had a surge of great contributions for our soundtrack, so we welcomed it in our game at the right time. The soundtrack makes MineClone2 a very nice experience, and with the latest Minetest the RAM usage went back down - only the currently playing song is loaded into RAM, then unloaded (as far as I know). Do you really not know this?
none of the Android users complaining in MineClone2 issue #3874 are affiliated with Mineclonia.
That thread makes it obvious that old and heavily modded Android ROMs require less RAM but most people have no clue how to install such ROMs, or can't because their devices aren't supported. I believe you knew that without me pointing it out. So why do you play the ignorant card if you don't want to look bad?
Hi, the answer is yes, we can lower the bottom of the Overworld, but not that deep. The engine (Minetest) offers worlds the size of a cube with roughly 60000 blocks, without supporting multiple dimensions with their own coordinates. This means that games like MineClone2 can simulate different dimensions by stacking/layering them in the 60k by 60k cube.
In MineClone2, the Overworld is created from Y -62 up, all the way to the top of what Minetest offers. The Nether goes 128 blocks above Y -29067, and the End goes from Y -27073 up to 2000 blocks below the Overworld. So to be 100% sure this change doesn't break existing worlds if some players decided to use all the vertical space of the End to build stuff, the bottom of the Overworld can only be moved down by 2000 blocks. Of course, that's still pretty good (and a lot) for most players. Currently there's interest in lowering the bottom of the Overworld to match the newer Minecraft limits. But when, that's up to the contributors who prioritize it over other features and bug fixes, of which there are more than plenty in demand. :)
Inventory items can turn into other items in new MineClone2 versions
The decision to do it like that is temporary, to help people through the change, and the conversion won't be possible for long.
Texture names are not stable
They are stable, they don't need further renaming, and mods can easily be updated for this. If a mod gets abandoned, or the maintainer doesn't care to handle a one-time change, then it's on them.
So making two big points about two low-impact changes and that are no longer true makes no sense. And maintaining compatibility with old versions of mods that are not even updated to run without warnings or errors with the most recent Minetest versions is not a net gain.
We can easily make a way longer list of engine changes that forced a lot of people to update their mods for various reasons, from texture clipping, explicit item descriptions being required, new vectors, changes in image format or font support, mod dependency enforcement, various deprecations, etc. Progress sometimes comes at a cost, but most of these are small and easy to deal with.
As with everything, it's a great idea not to use outdated stuff. And people who choose to do so can also contribute with compatibility updates, considering we're talking about open source software. You can't expect a handful of developers to be both productive and work at standards at or above those in the industry.
Hi, the mobs walking on water is indeed an issue that will be fixed - it just had a lower priority compared to stability and performance work. But the time will come. :)
By reach distance, do you mean the player's reach? Or that of the mobs?
You can run by using the key assigned to Aux1. It's not intuitive, but this is an engine features, and something that Minetest would have to change. It might be a good idea for Minetest to allow customizing the Aux key labels.
I just checked the MineClone2 Discord server, and there's no mention of problems related to blue screens. I also checked the Minetest Discord server, and I went back a few years and found no problems related to blue screens either. So it's more likely that you have a problem with Windows, maybe drivers, or something else running on your system.
You can check the basic info about your hardware by right-clicking This PC, and choosing Properties. On the right side of that window you will find information about your Processor, and Installed memory (RAM). On the left side of the window you can find Device Manager, where you will find a list of the hardware available in your computer.
If there are issues with the installed drivers, Device Manager will show a yellow warning sign with an exclamation mark inside. But even if you don't have devices marked as problematic, you should at least check driver availability for your graphics card under Display adapters. Open that, right-click your graphics card, and click Update driver.
Of course, many things can go wrong with an operating system and its drivers, so it's best to have the latest updates installed. But ultimately, if there's nothing you can do about your Windows 10, you might want to try a Linux-based operating system like Linux Mint. It's a free operating system having a look and feel similar to Windows, and is great for people new to "Linux stuff". :) If you want to try it out, we can talk about it.
I hope this will be easy to solve for your Windows 10, though, because Minetest and MineClone2 should just work.
Hi, I've recently done a lot of testing on older hardware, and the game runs quite smoothly with MineClone2 v0.83 on my 14 year old laptop (Core 2 Duo T9550 with 4GB RAM and an SSD). I use Linux Mint on it, so clearly that means no blue screens. But blue screens can happen for plenty of reasons - even bad wifi drivers, which happened to me on that very laptop with Windows 7.
I've seen Minetest crashing, but it's so rare (maybe twice a year) that it's of no real concern. If you want some help troubleshooting this problem, I need some information about your hardware and software.
what does the blue screen say when the problem happens? (it could hint at a driver issue)
what Windows version do you use?
how much RAM do you have?
what versions of Minetest and MineClone2 do you have?
It goes without saying that MTG and Minetest shouldn't have to try doing what MineClone2 does. A lot of Minecraft players use some kind of mods, so there's obviously interest for more than what Minecraft has to offer. It's hard to say when we'll reach feature parity, or get close enough, but even we want to offer more than the vanilla Minecraft experience. For now, that's a low priority side project that will become a modpack.
With a small team it's just impossible to pay attention to everything in short term - performance, stability, features, multiplayer, modding, documentation, translations, etc. But constant work will keep things moving in the right direction. And with help from new contributors we'll be able to improve faster.
After some testing I bumped into a few issues. Mapgen v7, all flags enabled - including Floatlands.
I noticed some issues have been reported on GitHub, last year. It's probably best if I report this here, just in case it's more visible for you.
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ACTION[Server]: [Creatura] Spawned a draconis:fire_dragon at (1207,1567,-233)
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: ServerError: AsyncErr: Lua: Runtime error from mod '??' in callback luaentity_Step(): ...inetest/games/mineclone2/mods/HUD/mcl_inventory/init.lua:186: bad argument #1 to 'get_player_by_name' (string expected, got userdata)
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: stack traceback:
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: [C]: in function 'get_player_by_name'
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: ...inetest/games/mineclone2/mods/HUD/mcl_inventory/init.lua:186: in function 'is_creative_enabled'
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: /home/nicu/.minetest/mods/draconis/api/behaviors.lua:144: in function 'find_target'
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: /home/nicu/.minetest/mods/draconis/api/behaviors.lua:1194: in function 'get_score'
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: /home/nicu/.minetest/mods/creatura/mob_meta.lua:1150: in function '_execute_utilities'
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: /home/nicu/.minetest/mods/creatura/mob_meta.lua:937: in function 'on_step_old'
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ERROR[Main]: ...mes/mineclone2/mods/ENVIRONMENT/mcl_void_damage/init.lua:24: in function <...mes/mineclone2/mods/ENVIRONMENT/mcl_void_damage/init.lua:23>
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ACTION[Server]: [doc] Wrote player data into /home/nicu/.minetest/worlds/_Draconis-test/doc.mt.
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ACTION[Server]: singleplayer leaves game. List of players:
2023-04-14 00:56:39: WARNING[Server]: ScriptApiBase::objectrefGetOrCreate(): Pushing ObjectRef to removed/deactivated object, this is probably a bug.
2023-04-14 00:56:39: ACTION[Main]: Server: Shutting down
Someone wanted to try this with MineClone2 and the game wouldn't start. After I added the item string aliases below (in nodes.lua), the game started.
-- Compatibility with MineClone2 item strings --
if minetest.get_modpath("mcl_core") then
minetest.register_alias("default:steel_ingot", "mcl_core:iron_ingot")
minetest.register_alias("default:steelblock", "mcl_core:ironblock")
minetest.register_alias("default:goldblock", "mcl_core:goldblock")
minetest.register_alias("default:furnace", "mcl_furnaces:furnace")
minetest.register_alias("default:ice", "mcl_core:ice")
end
I don't know if this is enough for all the functionality of this mod, but if it is, you might consider adding it, to make it easier for others to have fun with it. :)
Mesehub, the platform we currently use for our code, has been having some performance issues lately and we plan moving to Codeberg sometime soon (no clear date when). So trying to fix the e-mail problem is probably not the best thing we can do now. If you want to get in there, you could make a fresh Github account and use that to link to Mesehub - useful until we migrate.
You could also created a Codeberg account and upload your work there, as we can pull in code from other online git repositories. Your Codeberg user will also be useful after we move.
Hi, @Shadow_8472. There is indeed a problem with emails not going through. Try logging in anyway, even without confirming your e-mail address. If that doesn't work, and you have a Github account, you can use that to login.
Resources come and go, and items can get lost on death or in lava, so having alternatives can be useful even after you get access to better resources. But it's also nice when you can give away the lower tier tanks to someone who has none - 10-20 uses are still very useful compared to having no tank. :)
@lord_of_the_dumpster: Right, I forgot about the recent addition of skins. Even if not identical, the default templates look quite similar to Steve and Alex. Thanks for pointing that out.
@lord_of_the_dumpster: We care about copyright, and as we're not copyright lawyers, it's impossible to tell how our project would stand against copyright claims. But from your comments it's obvious that you're not a lawyer either, which makes me wonder why are you so sure about your claims.
About names, if you look in a dictionary, you'll find nether as the "world below" or underground. So it's not invented by Mojang and neither is the End. Dimensions are also not a Minecraft invention. Mob names, sure, they exist as such because this is a game focused on a Minecraft-like experience. And as I mentioned in the issue that you pointed to, there are plenty of differences between MineClone2 and Minecraft, and there will be more.
About Steve, it looks nothing like our male character - ours has a different look and colors, and even facial hair. Maybe you looked at someone's game that has Minecraft textures. The maintainers have always cared about copyright and removed the proprietary images when found.
Sure you can create a user in our issue tracker, but if you really care about the right thing, you first need to understand that its contributors already care about not breaking copyright, and this is a work of love for gaming, for the sake of learning programming, for the community around it, etc. If you want to actually help, be very specific on the issues you bring up, so we can address them. Vague concerns don't help.
Omg... is there a way to put an icon there? I assume it's obvious to anyone that it would make sense. Otherwise "pixel hunting" would be a good extra label for the game. :P
Anyway, getting water is my next roadblock. I got a lava bucket, now all I'm missing is water for a cobblestone generator. :)
As far as I can tell from the recipes, I would need snow, but the weather never changed. I wonder if I should build very high to get snow, but how high would that need to be? Going up hundreds or thousands of nodes just to find out that's not the way is unappealing.
Also, there's a custom recipe that indicates making dirt_with_snow from dirt. This is another one requiring an icon, and I think many others do. Now that I know about the missing image, I'll look for hints there. But then I have no idea how I could pick up such nodes - dirt with grass or snow -, because they turn into regular dirt when mined. I'll have to experiment, but man... a lot of grinding and guessing here. I hope this can be improved.
There's no information about that in the crafting recipes, and there are 3 alloy furnaces. I have no idea which one is the good one for this, or perhaps better. The first one seems the only one easy to make at this point, but the broken recipe should be fixed anyway.
P.S. If the alloy furnaces are the only way to make bronze, by design, this should be mentioned in the crafting guide. Can you add an icon for the first alloy furnace as other crafting recipes have the "Cooking" one?
The beginning can be quite a grind - expect a few hours of resource gathering and eyeballing the recipe guide for a path forward.
Like pretty much all Skyblock games, your hand won't be held, so you have to follow the recipe guide and build a strategy on that. And oh, boy... it's not easy to begin with. But once you craft some resources, you can use quicker recipes to multiply them, which is welcome. In such cases, make sure you manage your inventory properly so you don't have to take the long path to getting more of some resource. :)
I found 2 issues, one of them actually breaking the progression at this time. I filed bug reports in the issue tracker for both. The bad one is being unable to craft bronze ingots, which is an intermediary step towards getting a bucket, so you can later get water and lava. So right now making a cobblestone generator doesn't seem possible, and it took me a few hours to get here. :P Ooof, and I was actually close.
Thanks for the game, I'll follow the updates and resume my progress once bronze will become available.
I just waited for my tree to grow while making a small platform around it, taking time to explore the many crafting recipes and figure out how to craft my way forwards. :P Now I have an island with 20 saplings and 7 spaces between each, so I don't lose leaves (which I use as fuel in the furnace :P)
Anyway, I'll share some details in my own review. But make sure you check out the recipes, because it's all there. Cumbersome, but there.
Mineclonia required (past tense) less resources after the removal of the newly introduced music.
And AncientMariner raised an important point about performance. I tried MineClone2 on my Core 2 Duo laptop before he took over, and I simply decided the hardware was too dated. But after he profiled various pain points and improved the game, that old laptop can now run the game very well. Even with the added music, the game performed well on the old laptop (with 4GB RAM). And with Minetest 5.8.0, the RAM problem is gone.
You can certainly be disingenuous with unaware people, but not with those who know full well how you mispresent important differences between the two projects.
Games will a lot less content require less resources, which is why they're better on low-RAM devices. You know this, so why do you sound like you're unaware of it?
As a software developer you know that the minimum requirements of a project can't always stay at the same level if you want more features. Minetest versions older than 5.8.0 load all the music into RAM, uncompressed. That's why removing the music is a workaround for people who want to play MineClone2 on devices with 2GB RAM on older Minetest releases.
We didn't know when exactly the sound rework PR would be shipped, but we knew it would come. We had a surge of great contributions for our soundtrack, so we welcomed it in our game at the right time. The soundtrack makes MineClone2 a very nice experience, and with the latest Minetest the RAM usage went back down - only the currently playing song is loaded into RAM, then unloaded (as far as I know). Do you really not know this?
That thread makes it obvious that old and heavily modded Android ROMs require less RAM but most people have no clue how to install such ROMs, or can't because their devices aren't supported. I believe you knew that without me pointing it out. So why do you play the ignorant card if you don't want to look bad?
Thanks for your comment! :) I just released version 1.1 to support the Wooden Bucket mod.
Hi, the answer is yes, we can lower the bottom of the Overworld, but not that deep. The engine (Minetest) offers worlds the size of a cube with roughly 60000 blocks, without supporting multiple dimensions with their own coordinates. This means that games like MineClone2 can simulate different dimensions by stacking/layering them in the 60k by 60k cube.
In MineClone2, the Overworld is created from Y -62 up, all the way to the top of what Minetest offers. The Nether goes 128 blocks above Y -29067, and the End goes from Y -27073 up to 2000 blocks below the Overworld. So to be 100% sure this change doesn't break existing worlds if some players decided to use all the vertical space of the End to build stuff, the bottom of the Overworld can only be moved down by 2000 blocks. Of course, that's still pretty good (and a lot) for most players. Currently there's interest in lowering the bottom of the Overworld to match the newer Minecraft limits. But when, that's up to the contributors who prioritize it over other features and bug fixes, of which there are more than plenty in demand. :)
The decision to do it like that is temporary, to help people through the change, and the conversion won't be possible for long.
They are stable, they don't need further renaming, and mods can easily be updated for this. If a mod gets abandoned, or the maintainer doesn't care to handle a one-time change, then it's on them.
So making two big points about two low-impact changes and that are no longer true makes no sense. And maintaining compatibility with old versions of mods that are not even updated to run without warnings or errors with the most recent Minetest versions is not a net gain.
We can easily make a way longer list of engine changes that forced a lot of people to update their mods for various reasons, from texture clipping, explicit item descriptions being required, new vectors, changes in image format or font support, mod dependency enforcement, various deprecations, etc. Progress sometimes comes at a cost, but most of these are small and easy to deal with.
As with everything, it's a great idea not to use outdated stuff. And people who choose to do so can also contribute with compatibility updates, considering we're talking about open source software. You can't expect a handful of developers to be both productive and work at standards at or above those in the industry.
Hi, the mobs walking on water is indeed an issue that will be fixed - it just had a lower priority compared to stability and performance work. But the time will come. :)
By reach distance, do you mean the player's reach? Or that of the mobs?
You can run by using the key assigned to
Aux1. It's not intuitive, but this is an engine features, and something that Minetest would have to change. It might be a good idea for Minetest to allow customizing the Aux key labels.I just checked the MineClone2 Discord server, and there's no mention of problems related to blue screens. I also checked the Minetest Discord server, and I went back a few years and found no problems related to blue screens either. So it's more likely that you have a problem with Windows, maybe drivers, or something else running on your system.
You can check the basic info about your hardware by right-clicking
This PC, and choosingProperties. On the right side of that window you will find information about yourProcessor, andInstalled memory (RAM). On the left side of the window you can findDevice Manager, where you will find a list of the hardware available in your computer.If there are issues with the installed drivers,
Device Managerwill show a yellow warning sign with an exclamation mark inside. But even if you don't have devices marked as problematic, you should at least check driver availability for your graphics card underDisplay adapters. Open that, right-click your graphics card, and clickUpdate driver.Of course, many things can go wrong with an operating system and its drivers, so it's best to have the latest updates installed. But ultimately, if there's nothing you can do about your Windows 10, you might want to try a Linux-based operating system like Linux Mint. It's a free operating system having a look and feel similar to Windows, and is great for people new to "Linux stuff". :) If you want to try it out, we can talk about it.
I hope this will be easy to solve for your Windows 10, though, because Minetest and MineClone2 should just work.
Hi, I've recently done a lot of testing on older hardware, and the game runs quite smoothly with MineClone2 v0.83 on my 14 year old laptop (Core 2 Duo T9550 with 4GB RAM and an SSD). I use Linux Mint on it, so clearly that means no blue screens. But blue screens can happen for plenty of reasons - even bad wifi drivers, which happened to me on that very laptop with Windows 7.
I've seen Minetest crashing, but it's so rare (maybe twice a year) that it's of no real concern. If you want some help troubleshooting this problem, I need some information about your hardware and software.
Thanks! :)
It goes without saying that MTG and Minetest shouldn't have to try doing what MineClone2 does. A lot of Minecraft players use some kind of mods, so there's obviously interest for more than what Minecraft has to offer. It's hard to say when we'll reach feature parity, or get close enough, but even we want to offer more than the vanilla Minecraft experience. For now, that's a low priority side project that will become a modpack.
With a small team it's just impossible to pay attention to everything in short term - performance, stability, features, multiplayer, modding, documentation, translations, etc. But constant work will keep things moving in the right direction. And with help from new contributors we'll be able to improve faster.
After some testing I bumped into a few issues. Mapgen v7, all flags enabled - including Floatlands.
I noticed some issues have been reported on GitHub, last year. It's probably best if I report this here, just in case it's more visible for you.
Someone wanted to try this with MineClone2 and the game wouldn't start. After I added the item string aliases below (in
nodes.lua), the game started.I don't know if this is enough for all the functionality of this mod, but if it is, you might consider adding it, to make it easier for others to have fun with it. :)
Mesehub, the platform we currently use for our code, has been having some performance issues lately and we plan moving to Codeberg sometime soon (no clear date when). So trying to fix the e-mail problem is probably not the best thing we can do now. If you want to get in there, you could make a fresh Github account and use that to link to Mesehub - useful until we migrate.
You could also created a Codeberg account and upload your work there, as we can pull in code from other online git repositories. Your Codeberg user will also be useful after we move.
Hi, @Shadow_8472. There is indeed a problem with emails not going through. Try logging in anyway, even without confirming your e-mail address. If that doesn't work, and you have a Github account, you can use that to login.
Resources come and go, and items can get lost on death or in lava, so having alternatives can be useful even after you get access to better resources. But it's also nice when you can give away the lower tier tanks to someone who has none - 10-20 uses are still very useful compared to having no tank. :)
250K smashed :)
229888
1000 more in 5 days. Not bad, could be a lot better, and I'm sure it will. :)
228888 downloads. :)
This has already been solved.
@lord_of_the_dumpster: Right, I forgot about the recent addition of skins. Even if not identical, the default templates look quite similar to Steve and Alex. Thanks for pointing that out.
@lord_of_the_dumpster: We care about copyright, and as we're not copyright lawyers, it's impossible to tell how our project would stand against copyright claims. But from your comments it's obvious that you're not a lawyer either, which makes me wonder why are you so sure about your claims.
About names, if you look in a dictionary, you'll find nether as the "world below" or underground. So it's not invented by Mojang and neither is the End. Dimensions are also not a Minecraft invention. Mob names, sure, they exist as such because this is a game focused on a Minecraft-like experience. And as I mentioned in the issue that you pointed to, there are plenty of differences between MineClone2 and Minecraft, and there will be more.
About Steve, it looks nothing like our male character - ours has a different look and colors, and even facial hair. Maybe you looked at someone's game that has Minecraft textures. The maintainers have always cared about copyright and removed the proprietary images when found.
Sure you can create a user in our issue tracker, but if you really care about the right thing, you first need to understand that its contributors already care about not breaking copyright, and this is a work of love for gaming, for the sake of learning programming, for the community around it, etc. If you want to actually help, be very specific on the issues you bring up, so we can address them. Vague concerns don't help.
@Arkatron: water mobs that end up on land can be pushed in water, then punched down to enter the water. :P It's not really nice, but it works.
Thanks! I finally have water. :)
Omg... is there a way to put an icon there? I assume it's obvious to anyone that it would make sense. Otherwise "pixel hunting" would be a good extra label for the game. :P
Anyway, getting water is my next roadblock. I got a lava bucket, now all I'm missing is water for a cobblestone generator. :)
As far as I can tell from the recipes, I would need snow, but the weather never changed. I wonder if I should build very high to get snow, but how high would that need to be? Going up hundreds or thousands of nodes just to find out that's not the way is unappealing.
Also, there's a custom recipe that indicates making
dirt_with_snowfromdirt. This is another one requiring an icon, and I think many others do. Now that I know about the missing image, I'll look for hints there. But then I have no idea how I could pick up such nodes - dirt with grass or snow -, because they turn into regular dirt when mined. I'll have to experiment, but man... a lot of grinding and guessing here. I hope this can be improved.There's no information about that in the crafting recipes, and there are 3 alloy furnaces. I have no idea which one is the good one for this, or perhaps better. The first one seems the only one easy to make at this point, but the broken recipe should be fixed anyway.
P.S. If the alloy furnaces are the only way to make bronze, by design, this should be mentioned in the crafting guide. Can you add an icon for the first alloy furnace as other crafting recipes have the "Cooking" one?
The beginning can be quite a grind - expect a few hours of resource gathering and eyeballing the recipe guide for a path forward.
Like pretty much all Skyblock games, your hand won't be held, so you have to follow the recipe guide and build a strategy on that. And oh, boy... it's not easy to begin with. But once you craft some resources, you can use quicker recipes to multiply them, which is welcome. In such cases, make sure you manage your inventory properly so you don't have to take the long path to getting more of some resource. :)
I found 2 issues, one of them actually breaking the progression at this time. I filed bug reports in the issue tracker for both. The bad one is being unable to craft bronze ingots, which is an intermediary step towards getting a bucket, so you can later get water and lava. So right now making a cobblestone generator doesn't seem possible, and it took me a few hours to get here. :P Ooof, and I was actually close.
Thanks for the game, I'll follow the updates and resume my progress once bronze will become available.
I just waited for my tree to grow while making a small platform around it, taking time to explore the many crafting recipes and figure out how to craft my way forwards. :P Now I have an island with 20 saplings and 7 spaces between each, so I don't lose leaves (which I use as fuel in the furnace :P)
Anyway, I'll share some details in my own review. But make sure you check out the recipes, because it's all there. Cumbersome, but there.