I think it's mostly a matter of direction, MCL2's development goal is richer functionality and experience, so it often introduces destructive changes and bugs, while Mineclonia's goal is stability and low footprint
From my point of view, Mineclonia proves that you can add functionality without breaking things. Their ContentDB page has the claim “More features but more than 15k lines of code less” … and if I am not hugely mistaken the reason that they can make this claim is clever refactoring (“doing more with less“) and avoiding creation of pointless busywork (e.g. MineClone2 devs telling authors of mods they should update their mods whenever the devs break something a mod relies on).
IMO part of it is a difference in maintainer/dev attitude.
just explicitly tell them the difference in the focus of the two projects
I thought I already did in the first post: One project has a history of breaking user worlds, mods, and texture packs – even in cases in which the breakage was not necessary for new features to be added and even when someone (e.g. me) suggested a way to eliminate breakage … and even in situations in which literally doing nothing would have been a valid alternative. The other project has generally avoided doing such things, as far as I know.
Games will a lot less content require less resources
As my review points out, another game with more-or-less the same content also requires less resources.
Please accept that some people (e.g. me) value not alienating users and modders a lot more than you do.
Edit: I am not going to discuss specific issues with you any further. The reason for my bad review is not the mere existence of game-breaking bugs … but that the current MineClone2 development team a) does not fix those bugs b) keeps introducing new bugs in similar ways c) spends a lot of time explaining why those bugs are totally okay to have and should not be fixed – even if all it would take to fix such a bug would be a simple git revert.
Edit 2: IMO you should be glad that there is a competing project that works better – it should leads to less complaining in your issue tracker about bugs you are never going to fix.
it seems you're unofficial spokesperson for the Mineclonia project
I am very much not a spokesperson for the current Mineclonia.
We don't really support devices less than 2gb of ram […]
Did you know that I play Minetest on an old Thinkpad with 2GB of RAM?
Many other games for Minetest run perfectly fine on that computer.
if you do, eventually the world gets big and it goes pop
I did not know that this could happen. Do you have any proof to back up that assertion?
We also don't feel removing music is a good experience, and the benefits are questionable for most.
There exist various ways of handling music that do not result in crashes, e.g. making it a separate mod or making music opt-in for players.
By the way, no amount of arguing will change the fact that you decided that it is acceptable to make MineClone2 crash on devices on which it used to run fine. If you look at my other reviews of packages on ContentDB, you can see that usually maintainers respond by addressing the actual issues (e.g. by fixing bugs or explaining where I was mistaken in cases where I complained about stuff that I misunderstood).
Just to point it out: The best result you could achieve by discussing my motivations is making me look bad – but it does not change the reality in which Mineclonia needs a lot less resources to deliver a comparable experience to MineClone2.
Edit:
I've seen very little mention of crashes other than from yourself or those involved in the Mineclonia project.
AFAIK none of the Android users complaining in MineClone2 issue #3874 are affiliated with Mineclonia.
I am done here. Anyone interested in why MineClone2 crashes do not get fixed can just read that issue.
Are you going to add a disclosure to your review that you used to be a maintainer for Mineclonia with the maintainers there and are friends with them?
No amount of friendship could make me change my mind about which software I would recommend, everything else being the same. Consider the following: If I was friends with you, I would still not recommend MineClone2 in its current state.
Fact is that MineClone2 crashes on devices on which Mineclonia does not. This has nothing to do with me being friends with cora – but it has everything to do with one of these games requiring a lot more resources than the other, for little gain. As I see it, you are simply not interested in supporting devices with 2GB of RAM or less and the other team is. I updated my review not because of my friendship with cora, but because I noticed that people complained that MineClone2 does not run on their device anymore and I thought that the highest-rated negative review on the highest-rated Minetest game is a good way to point out a suitable alternative that is more lightweight.
FYI: The old Mineclonia I worked on is a fork of MineClone2 that just shares the name with the new Mineclonia (the one on ContentDB), both are forked from MineClone2 at different points in time. I believe that the improvements that it had that are part of the new Mineclonia are also part of MineClone2 … as they were either ported to MineClone2 before the new Mineclonia was forked or not ported at all.
The basic gameplay is still about as boring as vanilla Minetest Game … but world generation details, node textures, models, all the parts of Parity of the Minor Bearing [alpha] that seem actually finished just look incredible. The crafting interface still needs some work, but already offers the simplicity of Repixture. If this is what passes for ”unpolished and jank”, Sumianvoice (the author) has admirable standards. I like the explicit anti-grind stance in the README a lot!
Nevertheless … I can not recommend this game, simply because of the author's warning:
Expect […] game-breaking, world corrupting updates to happen indiscriminately and at random.
Other game and mod developers, take note: This is what being honest to users looks like.
@Sumianvoice I hope you finish this. When/if you do, I plan to adjust my review.
I am sorry, I misunderstood the (admittedly, ambiguous) description. I thought that the item_magnet mod was a “tool for picking up items from the ground without having to click on each item”. This is why I tried to walk near/over each item. I have read the source code now and realize that this interpretation was wrong: The mod adds a “tool for picking up items from the ground without having to click on each item”. Again: Sorry!
This texture pack is one of my favourites. It contains clean and bright (but not too bright) textures with a consistent look that makes great use of straight lines. The textures mostly seem like they belong together – and some textures even look amazing on their own, like the active furnace.
The only improvement I can imagine right now would need bumpmapping support in Minetest to support this style more – especially the carpet, leaves and wood textures strongly imply a three-dimensional surface structure but can not actually present that look without engine support.
As the creator of the unicode_text mod that ucsigns uses I may be a bit biased, but this is exactly the kind of signs mod that I made unicode_text for.
As the description correctly states, with this mod you can have text on signs that Minetest can not even render in its interface using the fonts it comes with. As this includes the text input fields that players use to write on signs, this mod is best used with the standard font set to GNU Unifont and the fallback font set to GNU Unifont Upper. This font combination does not account for any CSUR glyphs, but it seems to be a limitation of Minetest that users can not stack an arbitrary amount of fallback fonts.
In the case that users find it difficult to input some Unicode characters, one can use ucsigns to create a mod that translates ASCII sequences into Unicode (or CSUR) characters. An example of this is cora's sitelen_pona_signs mod which uses a simple translation table to let users input ASCII syllables that are then transformed to sitelen pona CSUR codepoints, so that signs show sitelen pona glyphs instead.
Mobs in Animalia are smoothly animated and fit the basic Minetest experience. In contrast to other complex mobs mods, none of them seem to be too weird – e.g. they are neither very big nor very small. The models and textures of Animalia follow a consistent style, and mobs interact with each other in ways that make sense, e.g. owls hunt rats.
I have noticed more occasional performance issues with Animalia than with some other mods that provide less sophisticated animal mobs. I rarely experienced more than an mild framerate drop from time to time when playing Minetest in singleplayer mode though. Therefore I suspect calculating nice mob behaviour is computationally expensive in some ways.
I suggest to install the Leads mod along Animalia to tether domesticated animals to fenceposts.
Upon spawning or occasionally afterwards, a mime mob disguises itself as a node or entity that is close to it. The disguise is almost perfect for nodes (as entities are not shaded exactly like nodes … players can still figure out which sand or dirt node is really a mime) and perfect for non-animated entities. When copying animated entities though, mimes do not mimic the idle animations – they stand perfectly still instead. That sheep statue over there? Yep, that's a mime in disguise.
When attacking, a mime mob shoots globs of glue that can disorient and immobilize (and possibly drown?) a player. Once a player got out of the glue, a mime may have changed its disguise again. Fortunately, mimes are easy to kill if a player can dodge their glue attacks.
The Leads mod allows players to create interesting rope structures: Using the lead on two different fence nodes creates a rope connection between them. To use the Leads mod with mobs you need a mod that adds mobs, like Animalia. Right click a mob with the lead to tether it to yourself and then right click a fence node to tether the mob to a fence. In both cases, you can click an existing lead to destroy it.
A mob tethered using a lead is slowly drawn towards the object it is tethered to, if it does not move against that direction fast enough. Additionally, leads seem to have a maximum length and can break if overextended. In gameplay terms this means that players can only tether slow animals permanently: While Animalia cows and sheep and even frogs are easy to tether permanently, owls eventually break free (e.g. when hunting) and foxes run away fast enough to break the lead almost immediately. Gameplay and lore match here in my opinion; obviously it is easier to tether slow-moving (domesticated) than fast-moving (predatory) animals.
Criticism:
The lead looks bad when connecting to rail-type fences. This seems like the only major flaw.
It does not work to click the fence first and then click the mob, only the other way around.
As long as a player is holding a lead, they can not destroy an existing tethered connection.
You can not tether mobs to other mobs. Then again, would that really be a useful feature?
Many animal mobs in Wilhelmines Animal World are territorial – i.e. if they see an animal of a different type they attack them. Mobs can also attack players.
Mobs have multiple animations, e.g. for standing, walking, attacking. Usually the mobs move a bit slow (even when attacking), but that seems normal for Minetest mobs.
The mod also adds trophies that look like they are made out of hunted and killed animal mobs, e.g. a decorative bear head.
I noticed one bug: Some animal mobs seem to drop an item to spawn a new one when they die. Dropping spawn items destroys immersion; otherwise the mod is fine.
I can't adjust it slightly, because of limitations of 4-bit RGBI palette.
You could give grass nodes some kind of dithering patterns.
You could cheat on the palette coloring a tiny bit to make the plants visible.
You could upscale your textures a lot and then add a 1 pixel wide dark outline at specific edges, keeping the general look.
You could complain on this PR that you want the comic outline, which will be intentionally removed in Minetest 5.8.0 if it goes through – and engineer your texture pack to trigger them when filtering is activated: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pull/14016
Anyway, if this texture pack was intentionally made to look awful then I guess bad reviews should not bother you.
The RPG16 texture pack features a lovely and consistent style and not only delivers what was advertised, but exceeds my expectations (set by most other texture packs) in several ways.
Each texture looks purpose-made – for example, the icons for similar tools are not just recolorings.
Caveat: Textures look both brighter and a bit less saturated than in most other texture packs.
The brightness is why this texture pack is not my default texture pack; I find it too joyful.
I am sorry it does not work. I no longer play much Minetest. I will see what I can do to fix.
Please file a proper bug report here: https://git.minetest.land/erlehmann/xmaps/issues
Please tell me which version of Minetest you use and include a screenshot so I can help.
From my point of view, Mineclonia proves that you can add functionality without breaking things. Their ContentDB page has the claim “More features but more than 15k lines of code less” … and if I am not hugely mistaken the reason that they can make this claim is clever refactoring (“doing more with less“) and avoiding creation of pointless busywork (e.g. MineClone2 devs telling authors of mods they should update their mods whenever the devs break something a mod relies on).
IMO part of it is a difference in maintainer/dev attitude.
I thought I already did in the first post: One project has a history of breaking user worlds, mods, and texture packs – even in cases in which the breakage was not necessary for new features to be added and even when someone (e.g. me) suggested a way to eliminate breakage … and even in situations in which literally doing nothing would have been a valid alternative. The other project has generally avoided doing such things, as far as I know.
As my review points out, another game with more-or-less the same content also requires less resources.
Please accept that some people (e.g. me) value not alienating users and modders a lot more than you do.
Edit: I am not going to discuss specific issues with you any further. The reason for my bad review is not the mere existence of game-breaking bugs … but that the current
MineClone2development team a) does not fix those bugs b) keeps introducing new bugs in similar ways c) spends a lot of time explaining why those bugs are totally okay to have and should not be fixed – even if all it would take to fix such a bug would be a simplegit revert.Edit 2: IMO you should be glad that there is a competing project that works better – it should leads to less complaining in your issue tracker about bugs you are never going to fix.
I am very much not a spokesperson for the current
Mineclonia.Did you know that I play Minetest on an old Thinkpad with 2GB of RAM?
Many other games for Minetest run perfectly fine on that computer.
I did not know that this could happen. Do you have any proof to back up that assertion?
There exist various ways of handling music that do not result in crashes, e.g. making it a separate mod or making music opt-in for players.
By the way, no amount of arguing will change the fact that you decided that it is acceptable to make
MineClone2crash on devices on which it used to run fine. If you look at my other reviews of packages on ContentDB, you can see that usually maintainers respond by addressing the actual issues (e.g. by fixing bugs or explaining where I was mistaken in cases where I complained about stuff that I misunderstood).Just to point it out: The best result you could achieve by discussing my motivations is making me look bad – but it does not change the reality in which
Mineclonianeeds a lot less resources to deliver a comparable experience toMineClone2.Edit:
AFAIK none of the Android users complaining in
MineClone2issue #3874 are affiliated withMineclonia.I am done here. Anyone interested in why
MineClone2crashes do not get fixed can just read that issue.No amount of friendship could make me change my mind about which software I would recommend, everything else being the same. Consider the following: If I was friends with you, I would still not recommend
MineClone2in its current state.Fact is that
MineClone2crashes on devices on whichMinecloniadoes not. This has nothing to do with me being friends with cora – but it has everything to do with one of these games requiring a lot more resources than the other, for little gain. As I see it, you are simply not interested in supporting devices with 2GB of RAM or less and the other team is. I updated my review not because of my friendship with cora, but because I noticed that people complained thatMineClone2does not run on their device anymore and I thought that the highest-rated negative review on the highest-rated Minetest game is a good way to point out a suitable alternative that is more lightweight.FYI: The old
MinecloniaI worked on is a fork ofMineClone2that just shares the name with the newMineclonia(the one on ContentDB), both are forked fromMineClone2at different points in time. I believe that the improvements that it had that are part of the newMinecloniaare also part ofMineClone2… as they were either ported toMineClone2before the newMinecloniawas forked or not ported at all.Thank you. I shall retry the mod and update my review accordingly!
These are my most important complaints about the crafting interface in
Parity of the Minor Bearing [alpha]:That being said, I really like how the crafting interface avoids all the “put these items into the grid” robot work.
I do not want to take much part in development of your game, but if you want me as a playtester, message me.
The basic gameplay is still about as boring as vanilla
Minetest Game… but world generation details, node textures, models, all the parts ofParity of the Minor Bearing [alpha]that seem actually finished just look incredible. The crafting interface still needs some work, but already offers the simplicity ofRepixture. If this is what passes for ”unpolished and jank”, Sumianvoice (the author) has admirable standards. I like the explicit anti-grind stance in the README a lot!Nevertheless … I can not recommend this game, simply because of the author's warning:
Other game and mod developers, take note: This is what being honest to users looks like.
@Sumianvoice I hope you finish this. When/if you do, I plan to adjust my review.
The
item_magnetmod adds the item magnet, a tool craftable with 5 lumps of iron in a ”V” shape ifMinetest Gameis installed.Using the item magnet picks up all items inside the configured radius instantly and adds wear if anything was picked up.
When you want to blow up part of the world using TNT, the item magnet is useful to gather the remains.
This mod becomes much more useful in games in which dug nodes drop as items.
I am sorry, I misunderstood the (admittedly, ambiguous) description. I thought that the
item_magnetmod was a “tool for picking up items from the ground without having to click on each item”. This is why I tried to walk near/over each item. I have read the source code now and realize that this interpretation was wrong: The mod adds a “tool for picking up items from the ground without having to click on each item”. Again: Sorry!Okay!
This texture pack is one of my favourites. It contains clean and bright (but not too bright) textures with a consistent look that makes great use of straight lines. The textures mostly seem like they belong together – and some textures even look amazing on their own, like the active furnace.
The only improvement I can imagine right now would need bumpmapping support in Minetest to support this style more – especially the carpet, leaves and wood textures strongly imply a three-dimensional surface structure but can not actually present that look without engine support.
This mod adds “ghost” nodes that look like normal dirt or glass but have no collision box.
While it seems to work perfectly on a technical level, I think that is just bad game design.
Yes, nodes like these make it possible to prank other players. No, I do not find that funny.
As the creator of the
unicode_textmod thatucsignsuses I may be a bit biased, but this is exactly the kind of signs mod that I madeunicode_textfor.As the description correctly states, with this mod you can have text on signs that Minetest can not even render in its interface using the fonts it comes with. As this includes the text input fields that players use to write on signs, this mod is best used with the standard font set to GNU Unifont and the fallback font set to GNU Unifont Upper. This font combination does not account for any CSUR glyphs, but it seems to be a limitation of Minetest that users can not stack an arbitrary amount of fallback fonts.
In the case that users find it difficult to input some Unicode characters, one can use
ucsignsto create a mod that translates ASCII sequences into Unicode (or CSUR) characters. An example of this is cora'ssitelen_pona_signsmod which uses a simple translation table to let users input ASCII syllables that are then transformed to sitelen pona CSUR codepoints, so that signs show sitelen pona glyphs instead.Mobs in
Animaliaare smoothly animated and fit the basic Minetest experience. In contrast to other complex mobs mods, none of them seem to be too weird – e.g. they are neither very big nor very small. The models and textures ofAnimaliafollow a consistent style, and mobs interact with each other in ways that make sense, e.g. owls hunt rats.I have noticed more occasional performance issues with
Animaliathan with some other mods that provide less sophisticated animal mobs. I rarely experienced more than an mild framerate drop from time to time when playing Minetest in singleplayer mode though. Therefore I suspect calculating nice mob behaviour is computationally expensive in some ways.I suggest to install the
Leadsmod alongAnimaliato tether domesticated animals to fenceposts.Upon spawning or occasionally afterwards, a mime mob disguises itself as a node or entity that is close to it. The disguise is almost perfect for nodes (as entities are not shaded exactly like nodes … players can still figure out which sand or dirt node is really a mime) and perfect for non-animated entities. When copying animated entities though, mimes do not mimic the idle animations – they stand perfectly still instead. That sheep statue over there? Yep, that's a mime in disguise.
When attacking, a mime mob shoots globs of glue that can disorient and immobilize (and possibly drown?) a player. Once a player got out of the glue, a mime may have changed its disguise again. Fortunately, mimes are easy to kill if a player can dodge their glue attacks.
I expected this mod to let me pick up items or dug nodes without clicking them, but it did not do that (or anything).
Even with a range of 10 (What is the unit here?) not a single item got picked up when I walked over it.
For debugging: I have tested this mod with Minetest 5.8.0-dev and
Minetest Game.The
Leadsmod allows players to create interesting rope structures: Using the lead on two different fence nodes creates a rope connection between them. To use theLeadsmod with mobs you need a mod that adds mobs, likeAnimalia. Right click a mob with the lead to tether it to yourself and then right click a fence node to tether the mob to a fence. In both cases, you can click an existing lead to destroy it.A mob tethered using a lead is slowly drawn towards the object it is tethered to, if it does not move against that direction fast enough. Additionally, leads seem to have a maximum length and can break if overextended. In gameplay terms this means that players can only tether slow animals permanently: While
Animaliacows and sheep and even frogs are easy to tether permanently, owls eventually break free (e.g. when hunting) and foxes run away fast enough to break the lead almost immediately. Gameplay and lore match here in my opinion; obviously it is easier to tether slow-moving (domesticated) than fast-moving (predatory) animals.Criticism:
I have changed my rating to “neutral”. I would still not recommend this texture pack to anyone, but I would no longer recommend not using it.
Thanks for fixing the grass visibility issue!
Many animal mobs in
Wilhelmines Animal Worldare territorial – i.e. if they see an animal of a different type they attack them. Mobs can also attack players.Mobs have multiple animations, e.g. for standing, walking, attacking. Usually the mobs move a bit slow (even when attacking), but that seems normal for Minetest mobs.
The mod also adds trophies that look like they are made out of hunted and killed animal mobs, e.g. a decorative bear head.
I noticed one bug: Some animal mobs seem to drop an item to spawn a new one when they die. Dropping spawn items destroys immersion; otherwise the mod is fine.
I guess we agree! It is settled then. :D
Happy to help!
Keep in mind that the question that ContentDB asks is not about your texture pack being funny.
The question relevant for a review being positive/neutral/negative is “Do you recommend this?” – and no, I do not.
Anyway, if this texture pack was intentionally made to look awful then I guess bad reviews should not bother you.
I only looked at the source code very casually. It looks generally okay, but you should probably use a linter like
luacheck.My best advice would be: Publish your mod on a platform like Mesehub and link the source code and issue tracker here
This would allow you to make new releases by just using
git tag, because ContentDB has automation regarding that.I see you have fixed it. I wish you success with your mod.
Wait, did you choose 5.7 as the maximum version now? I can not find the mod in the content tab … maybe because I am using MInetest 5.8.0-dev?
Consider the following: Minetest 5.8.0 is going to be released soon and I think you might not want it that the new release does not show your mod.
I have not – but if you do not know about compatibility, it seems safest to me to not limit it to any version.
I think if it does not work with a Minetest version, users of the mod will complain about it sooner or later.
If a mod is version-limited, users with a different Minetest version will not find it in the content tab IIRC.
This mod is limited to Minetest version 5.5 … I have looked at the source code a bit and found no reason for that.
While it may have been tested with that version of Minetest, this looks like a mistake by the package maintainer.
The
RPG16texture pack features a lovely and consistent style and not only delivers what was advertised, but exceeds my expectations (set by most other texture packs) in several ways.Each texture looks purpose-made – for example, the icons for similar tools are not just recolorings.
Caveat: Textures look both brighter and a bit less saturated than in most other texture packs.
The brightness is why this texture pack is not my default texture pack; I find it too joyful.
I used this mod to successfully have Animalia mobs spawn in the world of Backrooms Test.
Unfortunately, it did not fit mood-wise, since Animalia mobs are peaceful and also spawn in groups.
I appreciate the effort though; “glue mods” like this one are both needed and often under-appreciated.
@Wuzzy as of xcam release 2023-11-25, you can vary photo size, rendering distance and supersampling. All of these should affect performance.
Setting supersampling to 1 (from 4) should immediately make the photo rendering 4 times as fast, but the photo looks more pixelated.
With photo size at or below 80×80 and supersampling set to 1 the
/snapcommand take less than a second on a T60.Please tell me which photo-taking speed with which settings you deem acceptable performance-wise.
Any chance though that you could adjust the color of the grass plantlike notes slightly so that they are actually visible on dirt with grass?
Making textures that are extremely ugly is okay IMO, but making stuff difficult to see for those with contrast vision issues (like me) is not.
Not only does this mod do what it says, it manages to put the carpet node and the stair node into the same space visually.
This means that players can remove the stairs after placing the carpet to create carpet-only stairways with this technique.
As a result of the trickery, placing a node directly above the carpet does not work; it gets placed one node-height higher.
I found a single rendering bug: The corner stair carpet partially overlaps the corner stairs; this overlap leads to z-fighting.
I understand it now.
However, I still stand by my assertion that I would not recommend this texture pack.
Are you saying this joke of a texture pack is not funny or that I did not understand the joke? If the latter, please explain what the joke is.
The idea to make nodes smaller by making the player bigger seems nice.
This game design choice makes non-cuboid nodes like stairs and slabs largely unnecessary.
The inventory is innovative: You can click on a colored node in inventory to see nodes in various shapes that have that color.
Several things do not work well. If all of those were fixed, I would recommend the game:
Could you add that trash cell please? I also had this problem.
I expected something I would consider funny.
Not being able to see plantlike nodes because of poor color choices in a texture pack is something I consider not funny.
To the person who rated this “unhelpful”: Which part of my review did you not find helpful?
I think the fact that plantlike nodes become invisible is kinda important for a texture pack.
But then again I know I have issues with contrast vision – so maybe you think it is wrong?