For those of you who enjoy sandbox voxel games like Minecraft, check out Minetest which just had a major update.
For those not familiar, Minetest is more than a game. It's a game engine, that has a basic Minecraft-like package and it's highly configurable with all sorts of entire game packs made for it.
The biggest feature of this release is the "online content repository" which contains games, mods, texture packs and so on. This is actually pretty awesome! Allowing you to browse, download and get playing as easily as possible. You can find it in-game by hitting the Content tab up top and then tap the Browse online content button to get here:
It does need some improvements though, namely mod packs that depend on others don't seem to get installed with them. When testing some out, I had to manually search and install (using the game system above) each one they needed. Still, a decent step towards making Minetest a whole lot better.
Activating downloads mods is quite simple too, on your world list you just need to hit Configure and then enable whatever mods you wish for that particular world:
Minetest 5.0 also introduces new modding options, renames "subgame" to "game", has automatic jumping and Carpathian map generation.
What's great about Minetest, is that even with quite a few mods installed on my rather low-end Intel notebook the performance was really good. There's quite a lot of settings you can adjust to suit your needs too, good stuff.
They have downloads for most kinds of Linux distributions, which you can find here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
You're never too old to appreciate a game like this! :D
GustyGhost Mar 6, 2019
You can see the full changelog here: https://dev.minetest.net/Changelog#0.4.16_.E2.86.92_5.0.0
Looking forward to returning to Minetest soon then.
Because the game is still in alpha since it is not feature complete and has bugs.
So why change from 0.4.16 to 5.0 it hasn't even reached 1.0 yet :D
Also here is a link to all the new features of this version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8sXbYzWPP4
Last edited by coeseta on 6 March 2019 at 3:01 pm UTC
link
Basically it's a recognition that the core API is stable and has been for some time, and adoption of a more consistent versioning system without the baggage that a "1.0" release (assumption that it's "complete", etc.) generally carries with it.
A few months ago I actually set up a MT server to mess around with. I just created a secondary server with 5.0 along with some mods from the in-game browser and I must say it looks nice.
Can't wait to spend some time on it!
Quoting: GuestHopefully it's feature-rich enough to at least be capable of being a vanilla Minecraft replacement. The core devs might not want to base their versioning around that but that's what most gamers are going to come there for, to see Minetest be at least capable of what vanilla Minecraft is.The Mineclone game/mod Swiftpaw mentions is tantalizingly close to being good enough. If it's the one I'm thinking of, the redstone implementation is laggy (unfortunately I suspect that's inherent to the way Minetest does mods), and friendly mobs spawn at random - rather than there being large areas of pigs, sheep, horses etc., they're all mixed together - but at times, when I tried it a few months ago, I almost forgot I wasn't playing the real thing.
Get:2 http://ppa.launchpad.net/minetestdevs/stable/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 minetest amd64 5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1 [7,982 kB]
Fetched 9,533 kB in 4s (2,379 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package libirrlicht1.8:amd64.
(Reading database ... 504674 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libirrlicht1.8_1.8.4+dfsg1-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libirrlicht1.8:amd64 (1.8.4+dfsg1-1) ...
Preparing to unpack .../minetest_5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking minetest (5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/minetest_5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1_amd64.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/share/doc/minetest/lua_api.txt.gz', which is also in package minetest-data 0.4.16+repack-4
dpkg-deb: error: paste subprocess was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/minetest_5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Quoting: GuestQuoting: TuxgamerI'm getting and error updating minetest to 5.0 using the ubuntu/mint ppa
Get:2 http://ppa.launchpad.net/minetestdevs/stable/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 minetest amd64 5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1 [7,982 kB]
Fetched 9,533 kB in 4s (2,379 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package libirrlicht1.8:amd64.
(Reading database ... 504674 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libirrlicht1.8_1.8.4+dfsg1-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libirrlicht1.8:amd64 (1.8.4+dfsg1-1) ...
Preparing to unpack .../minetest_5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking minetest (5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/minetest_5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1_amd64.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/share/doc/minetest/lua_api.txt.gz', which is also in package minetest-data 0.4.16+repack-4
dpkg-deb: error: paste subprocess was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/minetest_5.0.0-ppa0~ubuntu18.04.1_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
You could always try the flatpak instead, since it's distro-agnostic.
https://flatpak.org/setup/Ubuntu/
Follow that to install flatpak, then I think it's just a:
flatpak install flathub net.minetest.Minetest
Thank you!
BloodaxeNOR Mar 6, 2019
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