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 Luanti, 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 Luanti. 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 Luanti 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.
This mod includes WorldEdit format schematics for several builds, presumably the author's work. The builds are standard block game fare, nothing particularly exciting or realistic. People with a few hours' experience in any block game could put similar builds together. There is a decent selection of buildings that would be expected in a town: Towers and houses, shops, a hospital, a restaurant and so on.
The building spawner items are named in an orderly scheme but have random choice of capitalisation and use of underscores. The dimensions of the building are noted. The art for the spawner items is basic representative of the concept sometimes. However the same icons are reused many times, so you have no real idea what a spawner is just by looking at your hotbar.
The main issue I have with this project is that it's marketed as a helpful mod. However, the value proposition is the schematics themselves and having nifty items to hold them. The actual placing is just as hard as having your own copy of the schematics installed in your world directory and using worldedit's //load to place them yourself. The author's only tweak compared to doing that is to offset the placement position slightly.
This mod dissapoints me with what it could be. It could include previews and help when placing the schematic, so you don't place it over the top of something else accidentally. It could give you handy tools to rotate and flip the preview along axes. These are the sorts of tools we know are possible in Minetest with mods like Edit. It could give you an easy tool to save your own schematics, and probably even have custom images for them. Instead it's just a pack of builds and the most rudimentary tool conceivable to spawn them with.
The streetbuilder mod lets you set up a number of points designated as a road, configure the parameters like what nodes and dimensions to use, and goes and builds it for you. That chat command interface is quite workable for anyone used to using advanced commands like, say, WorldEdit. Keeping the README file handy is handy.
The street will build out in one fell swoop when you are ready for it to. It can cut through terrain, which is handy but potentially dangerous at the same time (and irreversible). It can also place bridge piers underneath it. The mod applies a spline curve easing between the points of the road, which is quite helpful and much better than a simple straight line. It will also emerge (load) any unloaded areas on the road while it is building, so you can trust it with making long distance roads and highways. Doing those longer roads may cause the server to lag for some time as it's not done as a background job or spaced out over time in chunks.
My main complaints with the mod are mostly with pushing the limits. It generally behaves quite well.
I can't seem to build a path without a border node, only one with air cut out of the sides. This is particularly bad for 1-node-wide lanes.
The pier nodes always seem to be placed at least 3 nodes under the street, even when it's above solid ground. This is debatable, but should probably be configurable.
The setting for the pier node uses the word "piersnode". I'll forgive the author for being not a native speaker (as best I know).
Setting a new pier node and re-building the road will only replace the old piers up to 3 nodes deep. Of course, this could cause problems with e.g. stone piers, but that is an adversarial case. In general you want to replace the old pier node.
The controls can be a little confusing, as you're not told you need to hold Sneak to get off the bike, and might try punching the bike. Lag doesn't help with this, as the server has to acknowledge your keypress. Jump will cause you to wheelie. There is also a feature where a long fall (approx >6 m) will cause you to "stack" the bike and fall off it.
The bike can't travel up a full metre of height difference at once, and it travels faster on paved surfaces. Thus, it encourages the building of sloped and paved roads, and corners that aren't too sharp, but not overbuilding on roads for the sake of roads at the same time. I find it creates a much nicer built environment than making roads for car mods.
The physics model is decent at best. Turning sharp corners can be difficult, so you need to slow. The bike's brakes are not very good, except for dismounting which apparently instantly stops it. Wheelie-ing will improve the turning radius which doesn't make much sense but is helpful for turning street corners. Also you can wheelie when stopped..
The bike is best used on a nearby server in your region or singleplayer. You can really suffer in multiplayer if there is a high ping to the server, e.g. Australia to Germany. Also if the server struggles to load the blocks fast enough - though it's a pretty poor server in that cae. In case of lag, it can actually work out slower than walking. This is basically a limitation of Minetest as it stands.
The artwork works fine within the limitations of usual Minetest, i.e. no knees. It is skinsdb compatible. The recolouring feature is nice. Some people may find the helmet a bit unnecessary, depending on their bike culture.
The bike can also be stolen easily. Put it back in your inventory when done riding! Maybe I'll make a bike lock mod one day...
No, it would probably just take a long time to brute force the hash used, especially since it's not a standard hardware-accelerated hash like SHA256. That's probably not great for a chat command that runs synchronously, but it could start an async worker. It would of course be better to record the original text seed, but that's not possible without changing the main menu's code.
Useless
To a computer. For a human, if the seed is a word it's easier to remember. Anyway it was just me trying to come up with a potential use.
Not if it's disabled
Debug menu disabled? Disabled by what? I'm looking through the settings, I can't see any place to disable it. In-game it's under F5 on my PC, and a button on my phone.
The seed is already display in the game's F5 debug menu. I would have liked some kind of extra on top of this, maybe an algorithm to try to reverse the seed hashing that's applied when you start the world with a string seed. I can almost see a use case if the chat command were locked behind the server priv and the server software was modded to lie about/omit the seed info that gets sent to clients. Still, not particularly useful as it is.
Edit: Apparently some games/mods can hide the debug menu with HUD flags. This is useful for those cases, I suppose.
WiTT is great for encouraging people not to use F5 to show node names as much.
This version manages to improve on the previous mod, but it is still imperfect. It doesn't draw lava or water sources, just shows their name. It also doesn't seem to handle nodes with alternative drawtypes like plantlike, meshes, liquids or nodeboxes.
PandoraBox has a fork/patch on top of the Basic Trains Japanese Wagon which can feed you oxygen while onboard, so it's all possible. It's probably better to leave it to another mod anyway; AdvTrains usually assumes an environment with earth gravity and an atmosphere.
AdvTrains Livery Tools fulfills the brief for just about every discussion put forward so far about livery features for AdvTrains, and does so in such an intuitively designed, user-friendly way. Marnack has achieved here what many have discussed but not actually gone and done.
Before Livery Tools, the best we had was doxygen_spammer's Multi-component liveries (part of doxy's Minitram). That involved the use of the external dependency on Bike Mod, and an arduous process of memorising and recalling a few "special" numbers on the Bike Painter to apply special painting functions. No more! With Livery Tools, it's all laid out in an intuitive formspec with so many presets to help you along and an instant preview.
Livery Tools is survival-friendly, with a crafting recipe provided for Minetest Game (the only really support game for AdvTrains) to craft its core item, the Livery Designer Tool. The Designer Tool has four tabs:
The Current Livery tab is a simple preview/descriptive formspec
The editor tab is the main tab you will be using. One simply selects a template, basically a set of shaped layers, and then what paint to apply to all of those layers. There are preset colour names plus a great colour selector dialogue. here you can also get template information or save the livery to apply it again to another wagon.
The Saved Livery tab lets you quickly apply the same livery you just made to more wagons.
Predefined Liveries is great to apply liveries that the mod author or others have made, which is great for inspiration. One of the really great features stands out here, which is the ability to apply liveries from 3rd-party packs to your wagons.
Livery Tools brings us the ability for in-depth customisation for those who want it, plus the ability to make templates to inspire. It's a creative breakthrough, and I can' t recommend it enough.
Should this review maybe have been posted under "Komodo" instead? Not faulting the review at all. I'm refraining from posting any reviews as "AdvT. Supplemental" myself as I'm not sure about the integrity of doing so.
Based on previous work for InterCity/Nightline carriages originally made for LinuxForks Moretrains, Marnack presents us with a whole new world of customisation in this mod which is the first to have support for his AdvTrains Livery Tools mod. Unlike most carriages, which at most offer the ability to change a single colour, this set is customisable in-depth.
Classic Coaches also comes with a great set of features that are better than many AdvTrains mods: Door animations, crafting recipes, livery customisation and internationalisation support.
I recommend Classic Coaches to anyone who wants a quality set of diesel/electric locomotive-hauled passenger carriages that stands well on its own, and enthusiasts who want to customise their rolling stock. Players could create customisations on this solid foundation to add company logos to their rolling stock easily and use them in a variety of colour options.
I can't recommend Classic Coaches in a few niche scenarios. First, drawing these coaches is more computionally expensive than using flat textures due to the number of overlayed and colorised textures present on each wagon, so maybe avoid them if you are playing on a potato, or a tightly constrained server (the server must calculate the texture strings to apply when a carriage pops into viewing range of a player). You can use the mod without AdvTrains Livery Tools if you want.
It can be hard to discern when to grant certain advtrains-related privileges, especially given the lack of protection checks for privileged users, who can then go on to abuse them. The interlocking privilege by default will let players modify TCB information in any area of the world, even ones they can't build in. This, for example, could let the wrong people remove interlocking from a section and cause a denial of service or crash.
This mod will restrict TCBs and some signals (compatibility not guaranteed) to make it only possible to modify them if the user has permission to modify the area. This does mean you may need to operate your server in a different way than you currently do. It may not be suitable in 100% of cases either. For instance, say you have a public railway network and deputies, helpers and so on who are meant to be able to help troubleshoot issues like stuck trains. Those deputies need to be given protected area access to key parts ofthe railway infrastructure so they can do their duties.
Don't worry about locking admins or high-level railway staff out of signals either. The mod at time of review also does not obey the protection_bypass privilege (this is not something the engine does by default, kind of annoyingly), however it does grant access to anyone with the train_admin privilege (which also grants access to place, destroy and drive all trains as defined in the core modpack of AdvTrains.)
Lastly, this mod should hopefully be made obsolete, but the author is quite right in his current comment that it is just not timely to get changes into AdvTrains at the time of writing.
While the presentation is kind of a wall of text, in-game presents the best place that this information could be provided. While the AdvTrains train catalogue tries to do its best at providing information on all train content that is available, it is subject to becoming out of date as well. With this mod installed, the information is generated from the actual data of the train as it was registered with AdvTrains, making it impossible for it to be out of date.
A great feature that is included is a 3D preview of what each wagon looks like that can be orbited with the mouse/touch controls. Finally, you can find out what the bottom of every train looks like. I know you want to.
This is billed as still a Work in Progress, but there are only some minor improvements I would make: some headings, since variation of the text size helps navigability, and maybe some kind of split between more basic and more advanced information sections. Also the use of proper item names instead of itemstrings and give the speeds in the internally-used m/s (this is the unit technically already used without being named; technically a node per second is only a m/s by convention, but anyway..) as well as km/h and maybe mi/h (mph) if we want to be generous.
Without this mod, rotating the camera around to see better from inside a train can be very annoying, as the game feels like it is fighting you quite often. With it installed, you get to rotate the view while driving or a passenger.
Even better, the mod sets the position of the camera properly. Now rotating your view around won't orbit your camera in a big arc around a central point, instead you get what you would intuitively expect: the view rotates while you stay fixed in your seating position.
Further, this mod properly enables wagons have front and rear driver's seats, something that didn't make sense when you had to stick the player's view close to the centre of the wagon to let them look well enough out both sides and still be able to escape by right-clicking the wagon's hitbox.
Of course one day maybe we can hope that we won't need this mod, because it only exists due to a deficiency in the game engine. But it's very good to use right now.
Excess baggage left in the game hinders it: the airlock and the engineer's toolbox should both have been scrapped/commented out. The airlock I found particularly bad because I accidentally played with damage disabled, and so I went around exploring and got stuck. I think you can force damage on, which would be much better. The engineer's tools had me thinking there was a second puzzle after the first repair puzzle, but all I had to do was find the exit. I don't want to spoil its location for anyone reading.. but it would have been way easier to find if doors would easily indicate to you whether they have enough power to open. As the game exists, you need to re-check doors regularly to know if you can access them now, due to power and security restrictions.
The importance of sound can hardly be understated. I know the Jam was a great opportunity for Nathan to practice his asset creation skills, but it's pretty rough to have made high resolution textures with stable diffusion only to have zero walking or door sounds. Sounds really take a game from something happening on a computer screen (visual) to a much better experience (audio-visual). Things like the computer boot time would be more intuitive if a sound played in the interval between right-click and boot finishing. I think the Jam's wording discouraged asset re-use but personally I re-used the Minetest Game sounds and was very happy to have them compared to no sound in my entry.
Lastly, I watched Nathan's post-Jam review video/livestream before writing. He was dismissive of the accessibility issue with red text - which is not a problem with colourblindess, because it's not about hue, but it's an issue with simple colour contrast. There are accessibility guidelines about colour contrast for good reasons.
A lot of the time spent on this game, SSS for short, definitely went on the development of original assets. Those are good and at times you somewhat forget you are playing a block game. The game's story is a solid middle score, not bad, not great. Its puzzles are not satisfying and the game leans too heavily into its randomisation features. Nathan (game's author) probably also should have cut some content rather than leaving it in the submission, because a half-baked feature is often worse than not having it.
The game has persistence issues. In SSS, the items you find around the ship are decided randomly and also do not persist permanently. The ship's power status can also be reset by logging in. This leads to a very poor sense of direction and guidance, as if you are never quite sure how to follow a chain of logic to complete the game. It is also possible to accidentally skip loads of content, such as speedrunning the route to the end after (game event that is a spoiler) instead of waiting; or by getting lucky and collecting many ID cards at once, then proceeding to an area with a 2-3 security level gap from your last important door.
The game leans too heavily into randomisation. The loot randomisation has many nonsense results, such as finding officer ID cards in the Cadets' quarters or my personal favourite, a brownie in one of the captain's filing cabinets. I know the game development had limited time, but I think statically placing the objects would have worked better in the Jam Time; that way they could be placed logically.
Digging downwards isn't that helpful if you know that the geology goes in biomes yes. I'm not sure how to address this without adding to the wall of text. The instructions need an overhaul to more step-by-step instead of the information dump at the start, and there might be an instruction trigger for going too deep "Your mission doesn't require deep excavation" and a reminder when your inventory is getting full or your charger is empty to return to base.
Thanks for bug (1), I hadn't spotted that one before nor other reviewers. Almost everyone seems to have hit (2) annoyingly enough it's quite common to spam click apparently..
Insane Protestor greets you with a big load of content warning tags when you view it on ContentDB, and fair enough. It's an edgy kind of a game, but not really particularly so when you get down to it. You're first presented with a happy upbeat soundtrack, which plays throughout and provides a kind of sinister juxtaposition to the violence and destruction of the actual game. It definitely has a story, with pictures and all, though who you are ends up mattering little in the violence and destruction that follows.
Insane protestor seems to revolve around one core gameplay goal: fill the destruct-o-meter. Unfortunately, doing this won't actually achieve anything. Nor will dying cause a lose condition: you will just respawn in your apartment, destruct-o-meter still rising. You will soon end up pursuing other goals like trying to explore the city. That there's an item dupe if you reload the game doesn't matter so when victory is nonexistent anyway (perhaps there's a message in that fact). The city is somewhat lacklustre, but at least it has been filled with a good number of assets from a lot of mods. Thanks to Insane Protester I know know xdecor has a good toilet model, for instance, or there's a fire extinguisher mod.
Even disregarding the lack of a win condition, the game is just not smooth either. Buildings are mazes, and your speed sends you careening down every stairwell to take fall damage. There are many ways to crash the game by right-clicking nodes or the intro formspec. The combat is unsatifying because both weapons are bad: the pipe bomb always seems to damage you no matter how far you throw it, and the throwable firebomb doesn't seem to actually deal any damage.
Lacking good architecture, good code, good story beyond the introduction and good gameplay elements means I can only recommend Protest as a 5 minute thing you play just to be edgy for a bit and to see what stuff there is out there for Minetest in various mods.
Thanks! Yes, I tried to make good use of the Minetest features I know, like the sliding doors which were inspired by scifinodes and the charger which had to be "in-world" and not just a formspec. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
You've hit the jackhammer crash bug which is unfortunately common. It's on the list to defnitely fix after the Jam even though I don't know if I'll develop the game further.
Thanks for appreciating the texturing effort, it was great learning anyway. Earth somehow turned out really good :)
Mapgen had to get cut due to time constraints, I started late in the Jam. I had it planned that the highlands (moon rock biome) would have rougher terrain than the basalt mare, and the whole thing would be dotted with craters. But it was the night (& morning Australian time) and I was rushing just to get a 'minimum viable' out the door, so default terrain it had to be. As it is, I got the biome definitions wrong. Moon ice should have stayed as an ore in the highlands biome rather than being its own biome too, I just had the strange idea I had 4 quadrants on the Voronoi so I needed 4 biomes or something.. (ideally the ice would live inside craters in colder or southerly biomes).
I had planned the game as a story-driven game in the first place, driving a moon buggy, discovering secret moon bases and research projects, but that all got cut due to time constraints. I knew that 'collect stuff' would work well enough to get an actual game out, and justified the "plot" around it. As Zughy discovered, you can get the instructions again if you reload the world, or did that not trigger properly for you?
Thanks for the hint about world-aligned textures, I'll probably put that in after the Jam.
..also did you finish the game? Your review seems to omit any mention of whether you got to/liked the ending...
Yes it was good to learn about the moon's geology as I made the project. Sadly there was no time to actually incorporate secrets, so the 'secret', if there is any, is the material analysis, which in the game's story takes place after the game actually ends..
I'm aware of the crash as it happened to me several times in development. I'm not sure how I can avoid it outside of filling the code with nil checks, but if I can fix it I might learn a fair bit about Minetest.
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 Luanti, 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 Luanti. 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 Luanti 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.
This mod includes WorldEdit format schematics for several builds, presumably the author's work. The builds are standard block game fare, nothing particularly exciting or realistic. People with a few hours' experience in any block game could put similar builds together. There is a decent selection of buildings that would be expected in a town: Towers and houses, shops, a hospital, a restaurant and so on.
The building spawner items are named in an orderly scheme but have random choice of capitalisation and use of underscores. The dimensions of the building are noted. The art for the spawner items is basic representative of the concept sometimes. However the same icons are reused many times, so you have no real idea what a spawner is just by looking at your hotbar.
The main issue I have with this project is that it's marketed as a helpful mod. However, the value proposition is the schematics themselves and having nifty items to hold them. The actual placing is just as hard as having your own copy of the schematics installed in your world directory and using worldedit's
//loadto place them yourself. The author's only tweak compared to doing that is to offset the placement position slightly.This mod dissapoints me with what it could be. It could include previews and help when placing the schematic, so you don't place it over the top of something else accidentally. It could give you handy tools to rotate and flip the preview along axes. These are the sorts of tools we know are possible in Minetest with mods like Edit. It could give you an easy tool to save your own schematics, and probably even have custom images for them. Instead it's just a pack of builds and the most rudimentary tool conceivable to spawn them with.
Review concludes in a comment
The streetbuilder mod lets you set up a number of points designated as a road, configure the parameters like what nodes and dimensions to use, and goes and builds it for you. That chat command interface is quite workable for anyone used to using advanced commands like, say, WorldEdit. Keeping the README file handy is handy.
The street will build out in one fell swoop when you are ready for it to. It can cut through terrain, which is handy but potentially dangerous at the same time (and irreversible). It can also place bridge piers underneath it. The mod applies a spline curve easing between the points of the road, which is quite helpful and much better than a simple straight line. It will also emerge (load) any unloaded areas on the road while it is building, so you can trust it with making long distance roads and highways. Doing those longer roads may cause the server to lag for some time as it's not done as a background job or spaced out over time in chunks.
My main complaints with the mod are mostly with pushing the limits. It generally behaves quite well.
The controls can be a little confusing, as you're not told you need to hold Sneak to get off the bike, and might try punching the bike. Lag doesn't help with this, as the server has to acknowledge your keypress. Jump will cause you to wheelie. There is also a feature where a long fall (approx >6 m) will cause you to "stack" the bike and fall off it.
The bike can't travel up a full metre of height difference at once, and it travels faster on paved surfaces. Thus, it encourages the building of sloped and paved roads, and corners that aren't too sharp, but not overbuilding on roads for the sake of roads at the same time. I find it creates a much nicer built environment than making roads for car mods.
The physics model is decent at best. Turning sharp corners can be difficult, so you need to slow. The bike's brakes are not very good, except for dismounting which apparently instantly stops it. Wheelie-ing will improve the turning radius which doesn't make much sense but is helpful for turning street corners. Also you can wheelie when stopped..
The bike is best used on a nearby server in your region or singleplayer. You can really suffer in multiplayer if there is a high ping to the server, e.g. Australia to Germany. Also if the server struggles to load the blocks fast enough - though it's a pretty poor server in that cae. In case of lag, it can actually work out slower than walking. This is basically a limitation of Minetest as it stands.
The artwork works fine within the limitations of usual Minetest, i.e. no knees. It is skinsdb compatible. The recolouring feature is nice. Some people may find the helmet a bit unnecessary, depending on their bike culture.
The bike can also be stolen easily. Put it back in your inventory when done riding! Maybe I'll make a bike lock mod one day...
No, it would probably just take a long time to brute force the hash used, especially since it's not a standard hardware-accelerated hash like SHA256. That's probably not great for a chat command that runs synchronously, but it could start an async worker. It would of course be better to record the original text seed, but that's not possible without changing the main menu's code.
To a computer. For a human, if the seed is a word it's easier to remember. Anyway it was just me trying to come up with a potential use.
Debug menu disabled? Disabled by what? I'm looking through the settings, I can't see any place to disable it. In-game it's under F5 on my PC, and a button on my phone.
The seed is already display in the game's F5 debug menu. I would have liked some kind of extra on top of this, maybe an algorithm to try to reverse the seed hashing that's applied when you start the world with a string seed. I can almost see a use case if the chat command were locked behind the server priv and the server software was modded to lie about/omit the seed info that gets sent to clients. Still, not particularly useful as it is.
Edit: Apparently some games/mods can hide the debug menu with HUD flags. This is useful for those cases, I suppose.
WiTT is great for encouraging people not to use F5 to show node names as much.
This version manages to improve on the previous mod, but it is still imperfect. It doesn't draw lava or water sources, just shows their name. It also doesn't seem to handle nodes with alternative drawtypes like plantlike, meshes, liquids or nodeboxes.
PandoraBox has a fork/patch on top of the Basic Trains Japanese Wagon which can feed you oxygen while onboard, so it's all possible. It's probably better to leave it to another mod anyway; AdvTrains usually assumes an environment with earth gravity and an atmosphere.
AdvTrains Livery Tools fulfills the brief for just about every discussion put forward so far about livery features for AdvTrains, and does so in such an intuitively designed, user-friendly way. Marnack has achieved here what many have discussed but not actually gone and done.
Before Livery Tools, the best we had was doxygen_spammer's Multi-component liveries (part of doxy's Minitram). That involved the use of the external dependency on Bike Mod, and an arduous process of memorising and recalling a few "special" numbers on the Bike Painter to apply special painting functions. No more! With Livery Tools, it's all laid out in an intuitive formspec with so many presets to help you along and an instant preview.
Livery Tools is survival-friendly, with a crafting recipe provided for Minetest Game (the only really support game for AdvTrains) to craft its core item, the Livery Designer Tool. The Designer Tool has four tabs:
Livery Tools brings us the ability for in-depth customisation for those who want it, plus the ability to make templates to inspire. It's a creative breakthrough, and I can' t recommend it enough.
Should this review maybe have been posted under "Komodo" instead? Not faulting the review at all. I'm refraining from posting any reviews as "AdvT. Supplemental" myself as I'm not sure about the integrity of doing so.
Based on previous work for InterCity/Nightline carriages originally made for LinuxForks Moretrains, Marnack presents us with a whole new world of customisation in this mod which is the first to have support for his AdvTrains Livery Tools mod. Unlike most carriages, which at most offer the ability to change a single colour, this set is customisable in-depth.
Classic Coaches also comes with a great set of features that are better than many AdvTrains mods: Door animations, crafting recipes, livery customisation and internationalisation support.
I recommend Classic Coaches to anyone who wants a quality set of diesel/electric locomotive-hauled passenger carriages that stands well on its own, and enthusiasts who want to customise their rolling stock. Players could create customisations on this solid foundation to add company logos to their rolling stock easily and use them in a variety of colour options.
I can't recommend Classic Coaches in a few niche scenarios. First, drawing these coaches is more computionally expensive than using flat textures due to the number of overlayed and colorised textures present on each wagon, so maybe avoid them if you are playing on a potato, or a tightly constrained server (the server must calculate the texture strings to apply when a carriage pops into viewing range of a player). You can use the mod without AdvTrains Livery Tools if you want.
It can be hard to discern when to grant certain advtrains-related privileges, especially given the lack of protection checks for privileged users, who can then go on to abuse them. The interlocking privilege by default will let players modify TCB information in any area of the world, even ones they can't build in. This, for example, could let the wrong people remove interlocking from a section and cause a denial of service or crash.
This mod will restrict TCBs and some signals (compatibility not guaranteed) to make it only possible to modify them if the user has permission to modify the area. This does mean you may need to operate your server in a different way than you currently do. It may not be suitable in 100% of cases either. For instance, say you have a public railway network and deputies, helpers and so on who are meant to be able to help troubleshoot issues like stuck trains. Those deputies need to be given protected area access to key parts ofthe railway infrastructure so they can do their duties.
Don't worry about locking admins or high-level railway staff out of signals either. The mod at time of review also does not obey the protection_bypass privilege (this is not something the engine does by default, kind of annoyingly), however it does grant access to anyone with the train_admin privilege (which also grants access to place, destroy and drive all trains as defined in the core modpack of AdvTrains.)
Lastly, this mod should hopefully be made obsolete, but the author is quite right in his current comment that it is just not timely to get changes into AdvTrains at the time of writing.
While the presentation is kind of a wall of text, in-game presents the best place that this information could be provided. While the AdvTrains train catalogue tries to do its best at providing information on all train content that is available, it is subject to becoming out of date as well. With this mod installed, the information is generated from the actual data of the train as it was registered with AdvTrains, making it impossible for it to be out of date.
A great feature that is included is a 3D preview of what each wagon looks like that can be orbited with the mouse/touch controls. Finally, you can find out what the bottom of every train looks like. I know you want to.
This is billed as still a Work in Progress, but there are only some minor improvements I would make: some headings, since variation of the text size helps navigability, and maybe some kind of split between more basic and more advanced information sections. Also the use of proper item names instead of itemstrings and give the speeds in the internally-used m/s (this is the unit technically already used without being named; technically a node per second is only a m/s by convention, but anyway..) as well as km/h and maybe mi/h (mph) if we want to be generous.
Without this mod, rotating the camera around to see better from inside a train can be very annoying, as the game feels like it is fighting you quite often. With it installed, you get to rotate the view while driving or a passenger.
Even better, the mod sets the position of the camera properly. Now rotating your view around won't orbit your camera in a big arc around a central point, instead you get what you would intuitively expect: the view rotates while you stay fixed in your seating position.
Further, this mod properly enables wagons have front and rear driver's seats, something that didn't make sense when you had to stick the player's view close to the centre of the wagon to let them look well enough out both sides and still be able to escape by right-clicking the wagon's hitbox.
Of course one day maybe we can hope that we won't need this mod, because it only exists due to a deficiency in the game engine. But it's very good to use right now.
Excess baggage left in the game hinders it: the airlock and the engineer's toolbox should both have been scrapped/commented out. The airlock I found particularly bad because I accidentally played with damage disabled, and so I went around exploring and got stuck. I think you can force damage on, which would be much better. The engineer's tools had me thinking there was a second puzzle after the first repair puzzle, but all I had to do was find the exit. I don't want to spoil its location for anyone reading.. but it would have been way easier to find if doors would easily indicate to you whether they have enough power to open. As the game exists, you need to re-check doors regularly to know if you can access them now, due to power and security restrictions.
The importance of sound can hardly be understated. I know the Jam was a great opportunity for Nathan to practice his asset creation skills, but it's pretty rough to have made high resolution textures with stable diffusion only to have zero walking or door sounds. Sounds really take a game from something happening on a computer screen (visual) to a much better experience (audio-visual). Things like the computer boot time would be more intuitive if a sound played in the interval between right-click and boot finishing. I think the Jam's wording discouraged asset re-use but personally I re-used the Minetest Game sounds and was very happy to have them compared to no sound in my entry.
Lastly, I watched Nathan's post-Jam review video/livestream before writing. He was dismissive of the accessibility issue with red text - which is not a problem with colourblindess, because it's not about hue, but it's an issue with simple colour contrast. There are accessibility guidelines about colour contrast for good reasons.
A lot of the time spent on this game, SSS for short, definitely went on the development of original assets. Those are good and at times you somewhat forget you are playing a block game. The game's story is a solid middle score, not bad, not great. Its puzzles are not satisfying and the game leans too heavily into its randomisation features. Nathan (game's author) probably also should have cut some content rather than leaving it in the submission, because a half-baked feature is often worse than not having it.
The game has persistence issues. In SSS, the items you find around the ship are decided randomly and also do not persist permanently. The ship's power status can also be reset by logging in. This leads to a very poor sense of direction and guidance, as if you are never quite sure how to follow a chain of logic to complete the game. It is also possible to accidentally skip loads of content, such as speedrunning the route to the end after (game event that is a spoiler) instead of waiting; or by getting lucky and collecting many ID cards at once, then proceeding to an area with a 2-3 security level gap from your last important door.
The game leans too heavily into randomisation. The loot randomisation has many nonsense results, such as finding officer ID cards in the Cadets' quarters or my personal favourite, a brownie in one of the captain's filing cabinets. I know the game development had limited time, but I think statically placing the objects would have worked better in the Jam Time; that way they could be placed logically.
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Digging downwards isn't that helpful if you know that the geology goes in biomes yes. I'm not sure how to address this without adding to the wall of text. The instructions need an overhaul to more step-by-step instead of the information dump at the start, and there might be an instruction trigger for going too deep "Your mission doesn't require deep excavation" and a reminder when your inventory is getting full or your charger is empty to return to base.
Thanks for bug (1), I hadn't spotted that one before nor other reviewers. Almost everyone seems to have hit (2) annoyingly enough it's quite common to spam click apparently..
Insane Protestor greets you with a big load of content warning tags when you view it on ContentDB, and fair enough. It's an edgy kind of a game, but not really particularly so when you get down to it. You're first presented with a happy upbeat soundtrack, which plays throughout and provides a kind of sinister juxtaposition to the violence and destruction of the actual game. It definitely has a story, with pictures and all, though who you are ends up mattering little in the violence and destruction that follows.
Insane protestor seems to revolve around one core gameplay goal: fill the destruct-o-meter. Unfortunately, doing this won't actually achieve anything. Nor will dying cause a lose condition: you will just respawn in your apartment, destruct-o-meter still rising. You will soon end up pursuing other goals like trying to explore the city. That there's an item dupe if you reload the game doesn't matter so when victory is nonexistent anyway (perhaps there's a message in that fact). The city is somewhat lacklustre, but at least it has been filled with a good number of assets from a lot of mods. Thanks to Insane Protester I know know xdecor has a good toilet model, for instance, or there's a fire extinguisher mod.
Even disregarding the lack of a win condition, the game is just not smooth either. Buildings are mazes, and your speed sends you careening down every stairwell to take fall damage. There are many ways to crash the game by right-clicking nodes or the intro formspec. The combat is unsatifying because both weapons are bad: the pipe bomb always seems to damage you no matter how far you throw it, and the throwable firebomb doesn't seem to actually deal any damage.
Lacking good architecture, good code, good story beyond the introduction and good gameplay elements means I can only recommend Protest as a 5 minute thing you play just to be edgy for a bit and to see what stuff there is out there for Minetest in various mods.
Thanks! Yes, I tried to make good use of the Minetest features I know, like the sliding doors which were inspired by scifinodes and the charger which had to be "in-world" and not just a formspec. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
You've hit the jackhammer crash bug which is unfortunately common. It's on the list to defnitely fix after the Jam even though I don't know if I'll develop the game further.
Thanks for appreciating the texturing effort, it was great learning anyway. Earth somehow turned out really good :)
Mapgen had to get cut due to time constraints, I started late in the Jam. I had it planned that the highlands (moon rock biome) would have rougher terrain than the basalt mare, and the whole thing would be dotted with craters. But it was the night (& morning Australian time) and I was rushing just to get a 'minimum viable' out the door, so default terrain it had to be. As it is, I got the biome definitions wrong. Moon ice should have stayed as an ore in the highlands biome rather than being its own biome too, I just had the strange idea I had 4 quadrants on the Voronoi so I needed 4 biomes or something.. (ideally the ice would live inside craters in colder or southerly biomes).
I had planned the game as a story-driven game in the first place, driving a moon buggy, discovering secret moon bases and research projects, but that all got cut due to time constraints. I knew that 'collect stuff' would work well enough to get an actual game out, and justified the "plot" around it. As Zughy discovered, you can get the instructions again if you reload the world, or did that not trigger properly for you?
Thanks for the hint about world-aligned textures, I'll probably put that in after the Jam.
..also did you finish the game? Your review seems to omit any mention of whether you got to/liked the ending...
Yes it was good to learn about the moon's geology as I made the project. Sadly there was no time to actually incorporate secrets, so the 'secret', if there is any, is the material analysis, which in the game's story takes place after the game actually ends..
I'm aware of the crash as it happened to me several times in development. I'm not sure how I can avoid it outside of filling the code with nil checks, but if I can fix it I might learn a fair bit about Minetest.