I noticed your signs in this pack use the group oddly_breakable_by_hand to make them easily removable. I just thought you should be aware (in case you weren't), there is a group not_blocking_trains as well, which signs, signals, TCBs and so on use to indicate that trains should be allowed through.
Maybe your signs should use not_blocking_trains and maybe not, depending on how you intend them to be used, such as whether you use Advtrains 'forgiving collision' mode.
Just to be clear, that would be groups = {oddly_breakable_by_hand=2,not_blocking_trains=1}, in your Lua files.
I wouldn't go as far as to say it's a "fault" if a mod's horn doesn't loop well. Advtrains only has definitions for one horn sound, so a mod can't have both a horn with a good sound envelope for manual playback/playback of a fixed length and a horn that loops seamlessly when held.
Right-click the crate. It should make a creaking sound.
Dig the packed crate and it should go into your inventory.
The unpacking part:
Move to where you want to uncrate the digtron and place the crate into the world.
Right-click the full crate. if successful. If unsuccessful, it should make a warning beep and give a feedback message on the digtron core's mouseover text ("infotext"). For instance, there might not be enough room or the area might be protected by another player.
In Backrooms Test you will be navigating your way through eerily familiar but ultimately senseless and meaningless areas. I would say less "landscape" and more "corridorscape". You find your way from one to another, usually in order but sometimes to one that is not listed.
Everything is made of repeated structures that are familiar in shape but ultimately their arrangement and they way they form into totality makes no sense. It is made of parts of the built human environment, but never arranged in any logical way. There are doors, but only a few actually operate. Some of them could only possibly lead to a cupboard, but then, it would be a cupboard with doors on both sides. There are deceptive corridors and walkways that lead to dead ends. The place is not the product of design; it frustrates attempts to understand it as a useful design.
As you wander the corridors the first time, you discover a natural progression of levels. You complete a cycle. It begins again. But sometimes, the cycle is a bit different, and you end up in a different level you haven't seen before. You have no true idea of how many levels there are. They are numbered, but are there gaps? Could there really be that many levels? There is only one way to be sure: to look at the source code, but there is no going back from shattering the illusion. Perhaps though, adding your own level is part of adding your own part to the collective human dreamscape?
Sometimes, you see the sky. Sometimes it is lit, sometimes it is dark. But there is never any sun or moon. There is a morning and an evening of a sort, but no sunrise and no sunset. The idea of day and night, is just another broken, distorted reflection instead of the familiar reality.
The experience is like a dream, and ultimately you are permanently lost in a place that should not exist, cannot exist, but through a video game is imagined to exist anyway. It would be maddening to stay and "play" forever, but it's worth a visit to ponder.
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.
Seems a bit odd that the mod would be released into a deprecated state. Will future updates move it into an "actively maintained" state?
Hi and welcome to the Minetest modding scene,
I noticed your signs in this pack use the group
oddly_breakable_by_handto make them easily removable. I just thought you should be aware (in case you weren't), there is a groupnot_blocking_trainsas well, which signs, signals, TCBs and so on use to indicate that trains should be allowed through.Maybe your signs should use
not_blocking_trainsand maybe not, depending on how you intend them to be used, such as whether you use Advtrains 'forgiving collision' mode.Just to be clear, that would be
groups = {oddly_breakable_by_hand=2,not_blocking_trains=1},in your Lua files.Regards
The castles screenshot is from Hometown Server, see https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?p=437552#p437552 for the details of how I recreated it and a link to an 8K resolution version.
Diamonds, an allotrope of carbon don't glow. Mese might be radioactive and so might emit light, but it's also a fictional material.
Why not just say it's pretty?
I wouldn't go as far as to say it's a "fault" if a mod's horn doesn't loop well. Advtrains only has definitions for one horn sound, so a mod can't have both a horn with a good sound envelope for manual playback/playback of a fixed length and a horn that loops seamlessly when held.
2024-08-01: Updated to mention fancy_travelnet which the mt-mods team decided to make into its own mod.
I hope you asked gpcf before using screenshots from LinuxForks, since it clearly features Spawn subway station.
This isn't the first WAILA/HWYLA style mod and it's a text-based one. The predecessors were WiTT and a fork: https://content.minetest.net/packages/?q=witt
That shouldn't be a problem unless your inventory is full.
How to move a digtron by crating it:
The unpacking part:
In Backrooms Test you will be navigating your way through eerily familiar but ultimately senseless and meaningless areas. I would say less "landscape" and more "corridorscape". You find your way from one to another, usually in order but sometimes to one that is not listed.
Everything is made of repeated structures that are familiar in shape but ultimately their arrangement and they way they form into totality makes no sense. It is made of parts of the built human environment, but never arranged in any logical way. There are doors, but only a few actually operate. Some of them could only possibly lead to a cupboard, but then, it would be a cupboard with doors on both sides. There are deceptive corridors and walkways that lead to dead ends. The place is not the product of design; it frustrates attempts to understand it as a useful design.
As you wander the corridors the first time, you discover a natural progression of levels. You complete a cycle. It begins again. But sometimes, the cycle is a bit different, and you end up in a different level you haven't seen before. You have no true idea of how many levels there are. They are numbered, but are there gaps? Could there really be that many levels? There is only one way to be sure: to look at the source code, but there is no going back from shattering the illusion. Perhaps though, adding your own level is part of adding your own part to the collective human dreamscape?
Sometimes, you see the sky. Sometimes it is lit, sometimes it is dark. But there is never any sun or moon. There is a morning and an evening of a sort, but no sunrise and no sunset. The idea of day and night, is just another broken, distorted reflection instead of the familiar reality.
The experience is like a dream, and ultimately you are permanently lost in a place that should not exist, cannot exist, but through a video game is imagined to exist anyway. It would be maddening to stay and "play" forever, but it's worth a visit to ponder.
"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.
lrfurnwas 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_formatinstead 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/yyyyanddd/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.