Is this an out-of-season April Fools’ joke?
I don’t really like the new name yet, but it’s a lot better than Minetest so I really can’t complain.
This is good news! Anyone here played it recently? How far has the game come in terms of content compared to Minecraft or Vintage Story?
it’s just a framework, it depends on the mods you use. you can use mineclone2 if you want all the features of minecraft
Btw, mineclone2 also rebranded as Voxelibre, months ago, and for the same reasons. Voxelibre now actively moves away from copying Minecraft exactly.
If you want the closest copy (and my personal recommendation) check out Mineclonia.
Mobs kinda suck, because the engine has no native mob API.
There are great mapgens who take advantage of the 1000’s of blocks world height.
1000s*
How are you guys pronouncing this?
Personally, I’ve found it sounds kind of nice when said like “Loon tea”.
It’s finnish, so like it’s written. Foreign concept for english speakers, I know.
Loo-wun-tee?
The german way
Luh-Anti?
deleted by creator
It just looks like “Loo wan tee” to me.
Edit: Actually, just read the article, and considering the name Luanti is a mix between the Finnish word “creation” and the LUA programming language; and I’m preeetty sure LUA is pronounced “loo-wah” or “lew-ah”, I think the Luanti pronunciation is more likely to be “loo-wun-tee”.
never thought i’d see mintest rebranding itself (if rebrand is the correct word at all anyway)
Man, I saw them initiating discussions around the name like a year ago. I did not expect anything to actually come from that after all this time. But yeah, glad that it did.
Now we just need a better default font. 🙃
I actually like the new name. It seems like when a community project renames it always is something even worse than the original name. This is a great name that doesn’t sound silly to say out loud.
this is ok. minetest was an awful name.
for those of you without the patience to read a blogpost, the new name’s actually a bit of wordplay.
“Luanti” is a wordplay on the Finnish word luonti (“creation”) and the programming language Minetest Luanti employs for games and mods, Lua. The goal was to avoid yet another plain English word (good luck finding something unique…) and highlight the core principles of the project. The fusion of celeron55’s Finnish nationality and the platform’s focus on content creation resulted in the birth of “Luanti”.
IMO, the worst thing about “Minetest” is that it sounded like it was just a test creation, a prototype or experiment. It’s certainly well beyond that now. The announcement introduction mentions people associate it with being a Minecraft clone or alpha release, but even further, to me the name initially gave me the impression it was [still] someone’s small hobby project. ‘Luanti’ is much better.
On this note, another thing I appreciate is what they said about “Free” and “Libre”: those names are great for saying “This is a free/libre/open clone of [x]”, and that’s what I’ll think when I see it. Software like LibreOffice aims to support Microsoft Office documents, OpenRTC2 and OpenTTD are for people who want to see those games pretty-faithfully cloned, even if extended. Luanti is not OpenMinecraft.
Tbh Luanti is a pretty clever wordplay
Plus it sounds Italian
I don’t think it was that bad. I think the new name is better though
Oh thank god. Minetest was the worst name, and the game is actually pretty cool. It definitely deserves a cool name, and Luanti sounds cool.
I was so scared it was going to be something silly.
Literally just yesterday my wife learned of Minetest’s existence and said it was a terrible name
Just tell her that you told them your wife didn’t like the name so they changed it.
It IS a terrible name. But it also is an over one decade old brand.
It will be hard to propagate the new name and have it as recognizable as “Minetest”.
Those in open source circles will see through places like GamingOnLinux, Lemmy, Reddit and the official IRC/Discord. Those that don’t find out probably are no where near the open source gaming community so it won’t really matter.
“good news honey, they heard your complaint and renamed it”
I’ve seen it a few times in passing and always assumed it was like, a tech demo or proof of concept.
It initially was that. Also the name wasn’t meant to stick around forever.
But, out of a sudden, between updates, not even the new website URLs ready?
I don’t follow Minetest development that closely anymore, but last time I checked there were no issues or pull requests on their GitHub, nor something official regarding a name change in the forums.
This feels like there are just a bunch of people haphazardly deciding there is a new name now.
the new name is equally terrible, at least in terms of pronunciation.
Lu-aunty
It made sense at the time…
Gonna miss the old one but I definitely had to go. I kinda like Luanti too
I hope this is a joke cause Luanti sucks, stick with the already well known Minetest.
Did they ever fix the game having a maximum map size of like 10.000 by 10.000? That limitation always seemed to put it at a disadvantage compared to Minecraft, for larger communities
Currently, the world dimensions are larger than that (according to the wiki):
“Minetest’s world is a huge cube with a side length of ca. 60000 blocks. Each dimension (X, Y and Z) ranges from −30912 to 30927.”
That’s better than I was thinking. But still, nothing beats “infinite”.
I find the increased world height much more important. Luanti can generate actual mountains, and caves where you’ll want to bring ladders for your descent.
It was the first time, I felt like it made sense to build minecarts and intermediate mining bases, because the ores reach far deeper.That’s a really interesting point. Neat!
I played some minetest and then looked at Minecraft. Is minecraft really limited to -64 +256??? I read it a couple of times but still can’t believe it. Ho can a game with °mine° in its name be so limited? More like Buildcraft Imo.
I believe, they increased it a little while ago, so it’s actually -64 to +320 now.
But yeah, I don’t think anyone’s actually happy about the limited world height. It’s so limited, because of the way Minecraft works on a technical level. It loads the map in chunks, which are just massive pillars, reaching from the bottom of the world all the way to the sky, across the whole 384 blocks.
As a result, if they increase the world height, they increase how many blocks have to be loaded at once, which increases the lag.
Luanti doesn’t have this problem, because it uses cubic chunks instead.
minecraft is not infinite there is a world border by default that makes the world about 60 million by 60 million blocks
Okay, but I mean, 60 million versus 30 thousand. The former is effectively “infinite”, I mean how many hours would it take you to walk that far?
KurtJMac started Far Lands or Bust in 2011, and reached 9.9 million blocks earlier this month.
It is basically infinite. I would be very surprised if you could reach the end. Having a pregenerated map also makes the game a lot lighter. (At the cost of longer world creation)
erm achumally it goes to like 3 bajiklion until there is a world border 🤓👆
Minecraft is not infinite
They fixed that quite a while back. It is 60000x60000x60000
hope they improve upon it, the old (when the banning was implemented) version of minetest was horrible. I’ll be trying it soon :)
It has come a long way. These days it doesn’t even come with a game preinstalled. You can play VoxeLibre, Asuna, and so much more. Plus the original Minetest game is still installable. Also there are quite a lot of mods and other content available.
The only gripes I really have is the security and UI design. Neither are that bad but they could be better.
What is the problem with security?
Online play is 100% unencrypted or authenticated. Client executes lua code sent by the server. I hope the code is kinda sandboxed but wouldnt put my hopes up there.
As far as I’m aware, most of the “dangerous” lua api (io/network etc) is blocked and only available to mods during the startup phase, and not otherwise during runtime.
But I’m sure there are workarounds. For one, I’ve written mods with rust for it, and you can require and then call any dynamic library through lua, with all of the io and networking you’d want, as long as it is brought in during the init phase. And the mods that do access the “dangerous” api, have to be explicitly given rights to do so (but again, by the server, not the clients) in the config before it works.
It’s not that bad for the most cases, as long as you trust the server. If playing single player, you personally control which mods get the secure environment access, so at that point it’s entirely your own fault, if you get exploited.
I hope they can build on some work from the lua devs. Isolating stuff like that is not always easy. But given lua is used extensively for embedded scripting, there is a good chance they can.
Also there isn’t necessarily a clean environment between mods. This means one mod could modify another mod.
Too bad that luanti.org is note available…
Also
luanti.net
(which would be the most logical step to use that address because of the same TLD).Why isn’t something like this done prior to announcing the new name …
Not sure why this was upvoted, the blog says it’s theirs.
Moving Forward
With the new name, a few changes will be made in the engine and community. Obviously, all the repositories and community hubs will adopt the Luanti name in some form. You’ll be able to find the website at luanti.org and [snip]
They have already bought .org and .net. I guess they just haven’t set them up yet.