Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

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> Let's hope this becomes Minetest's time to shine.

Yes! I've been waiting for this forever. The first time I ran Minetest on a crappy laptop years ago it was as smooth as butter and I couldn't help but think, "Why is no one playing this?!"

I think the primary reason very few people play Minetest is because of marketing and piss poor default gameplay. If you just run Minetest without adding any of the (nearly built-in) mods you'll get an odd-looking Minecraft-like world stuck in "creative mode" (which is boring). If, however, you take the time (lots of time) to fiddle around with it and put together a collection of decent mods it becomes a good game!

The fact that it is written in C and has a proper modding API (in Lua!) should be drawing people in like crazy but for some reason it isn't.

I think the primary reason very few people play Minetest is because of marketing and piss poor default gameplay.

I agree. "Vanilla" Minetest needs monsters, villages, villagers, fortresses, more ores, more items, etc. in order to compete with "vanilla" Minecraft.

It's so very close to being a Minecraft killer...but there seems to be strong resistance to adding more to the base game.

Unfortunately, right now, every query about vanilla Minetest being a little "barren" results in replies like, "Install some mods." sigh

This is actually an opportunity. Minetest is free software (LGPL). Someone needs to fork it, put a little bit of polish into it, load some mods into the default distro, and publish it as "MinecraftKiller v1.0" in a mass-marketable, easy-to-install fashion. Console ports would also be ideal, as they were instrumental to Minecraft's success.

I think in theory this is Voxeland's selling point - it's meant to be Minetest but with an actual, out-the-box game experience that doesn't rely on mods.

Cool, I didn't know about Voxelands. It is, however, apparently still GPL licensed, whereas Minetest relicensed to LGPL a few years back. I also don't think a fork is really the right direction here; Minetest needs distros that come pre-bundled with all the fun stuff, not split communities and duplicated effort.

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