The launch of the new version of Minetest 5.6.0, in this new version that is presented It has been realized a lot of changes Of which the most important are improvements to support for shadows, as well as the decision to fork the IrrlichT library, among other things.
For those who are unaware of Minetest, they should know that this is positioned as an open cross-platform version of the MineCraft game, which allows groups of players to jointly form various structures from standard blocks that form a semblance of a virtual world.
Twink It consists of two parts: the main engine and the mods. It's the mods that make the game more interesting.
The default world that comes with Minetest is basic. You have a good variety of materials and things you can make, but for example there are no animals or monsters.
Main novelties of Minetest 5.6.0
In this new version of Minetest 5.6.0 that is presented, it is highlighted that work has been done to improve compatibility with graphics and input devices.
Also due to the stalled development of the Irrlicht library used for 3D rendering, the project has created its own fork: Irrlicht-MT in which many errors have been corrected. It has also started the process of cleaning up deprecated code and replacing the Irrlicht bindings with other libraries. In the future, it is planned to completely abandon Irrlicht and switch to using SDL and OpenGL without additional layers.
Another change that stands out from the new version is that added support for dynamic rendering of shadows They change according to the position of the sun and the moon.
We can also find in this new version of Minetest 5.6.0 that a correct classification was provided for transparency, which made it possible to get rid of several problems that arise when displaying transparent materials, such as liquids and glass.
Moreover, it is highlighted that the management of mods was improved, This provides the ability to use a mod in multiple places (for example, as a dependency on other mods) and to selectively include specific instances of mods.
The player registration process has been simplified, furthermore separate buttons for registration and login have been added and a separate registration dialog has been added, which integrates the functions of the removed password confirmation dialog.
Added support for executing Lua code in another thread to the mod API to offload resource-intensive computations so they don't block the main thread.
Of the other changes that stand out of this new version:
- Different mod path values in world.mt to avoid issues with duplicate mod names
- Increase max. default block objects
- Built-in: Allows you to revoke unknown privileges (
- Fixed some textures not being sent correctly to older clients
- Fix various issues related to registration/authentication
- Fixes enabling dependencies of mods and modpacks
- Fix macOS build instructions (
- Various C++ code cleanups and improvements
- DevTest Game Enhancement List
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about it, you should know that the game is written in C++ using the irrlicht 3D engine, while the Lua language is used to create extensions. Minetest code is licensed under LGPL and game assets are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
You can check the complete change log of this new version in the following link.
How to install Minetest on Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those interested in installing Minetest on their system, you should know that it can be installed directly from the Ubuntu repositories.
Just open a terminal and type:
sudo apt install minetest
Although there is also a repository with which you can get updates faster.
This is added with:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:minetestdevs/stable sudo apt-get update
And they install with:
sudo apt install minetest
Finally, generally tIt can also be installed on any Linux distribution that supports Flatpak packages.
This installation can be done by executing the following in terminal:
flatpak install flathub net.minetest.Minetest