this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Minetest community
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Minetest is an infinite-world block sandbox game and a game engine, inspired by Infiniminer, Minecraft and the like.
The community is about the great and open source sandbox game writed in Lua, Minetest.
Feel free to call players for a multiplayer game or publish your project of a mod and everthing related.
Download the game. Check out the wiki.
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Minetest suffers from the same thing most open source projects suffer from; it's "good enough" for a programmer to enjoy.
It just doesn't have the polish to compare to the real thing.
Great you can add mods, but there are a million little 'attention to detail' things that don't exist, or won't exist.
As a game dev, I have to say this kind of criticism is too vague to be of any use
Things like horrible lighting engine, textures that were made by an amateur which lack depth, horrible world generation with lack of the types of layering that MC uses, the requirement to MOD it before it hits feature-for-feature parity, and even then, badly.
The reason why my feedback is vague, is because I would probably write a dozen pages worth of shit. It's one of those 'death by a thousand papercuts' situations. The little things add up to the whole thing just feeling like shit. Movement, acceleration, graphics, world generation, UI elements, the barebones nature of the freshly installed game, textures that repeat HEAVILY, shadow-pop-in, chunk pop-in, fog, I could go on for days.
So you installed Minetest Game, the modding base, with no mods and are mad it's not Minecraft, got it. Minetest Game isn't about cloning MC, it's about building your own game out of mods. If you want a Minecraft clone, that's what Voxelforge and Mineclonia are for.
Personally I couldn't care less -- I don't like Minecraft (and am not a big fan of Minetest Game either) and am far more interested in original voxel games that are not joined at the hip to bad design decisions made by Notch and/or Microsoft just because Minecraft did it. (Looking at you, crafting grid)
Then don't play it then? This is a Minetest community.
It isn't suppose to be Minecraft. It is a separate game engine with lots of games and mods
Then why is the title "Why I prefer Minetest to Minecraft"?
Because that's the exact comparison being made here. It's built to emulate minecraft. To say it's not is a bald-faced lie. This excuse is constantly used when people point out how terrible it replicates the thing it's clearly trying to replicate.
You can't just use this excuse when people point out how bad it is. You can't even pretend it's better, because it really just isn't.
Voxelibre is built to emulate minecraft.
Minetest as of it's current release series is more an engine for games in the same genre as minecraft.
Maybe Minestest should make a better case of showcasing these games built on top then.
~~It initially started as Minetest clone but it hasn't tried to be one for many years.~~ There are mods that try but not all of them do. There are a lot of mods and games for it on contentdb.
The video doesn't say that Minetest is a Minecraft clone. The title doesn't say that either. You can prefer chess to checkers without checkers being a chess clone.
Also with that same logic you could say Minecraft is just a Infiniminer clone. For that matter you could argue that any voxel based game is a Infiniminer clone. Think Veloren, cube world, Roblox and the like.
Edit:
I also forgot to mention that Minetest predates Minecraft (Minecraft is from 2011 and Minetest is from 2010)
Minecraft was available to play since 2009 btw. It just wasn't finished till 2011. Minetest absolutely took inspiration from it.
Minecraft has become the defacto standard to compare to because it is the most popular. Infiniminer only has voxel building, but Minecraft isn't a clone of it because it became more popular, and took the idea MUCH further. It refined it, and made it better.
Minetest is a cheap half-assed recreation of that. If their idea is to be Minecraft -- but extensible via API/LUA programming, they have a long way to go. There's a 30 min tutorial for Godot that would put you about where Minetest sits right now in terms of quality.
I'm pretty sure that's not how that works