Minetest is a free voxel-based game for Windows, Linux, HaikuOS, FreeBSD, Mac OS and Android Minecraft clone
The new version of Minetest 5.7.0 the free cross-platform sandbox game engine that 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.
The main feature of the engine is that the game is completely dependent on a set of mods created in the Lua language and installed by the user via the built-in ContentDB installer.
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 5.7.0
This new toupdate is dedicated to developer Jude Melton-Hought, who passed away in February, who made a significant contribution to the development of the project.
For the part of the changes that are presented in this new version, it stands out that se added a processing framework post with various visual effects such as bloom and dynamic exposure. These effects, like the shadows, are also controlled by the server (can be turned on/off, configured by the mod). Post processing will help make it easier to create new effects in the future, such as lightning, lens effects, reflections, etc.
Another of the changes that stands out is the significant increase in rendering performance of maps, allowing map blocks to be rendered up to 1000 nodes away. It also highlights the improvement of the quality of shadows, tone mapping, in addition to an added setting to adjust saturation.
In this new version 5.7.0, Minetest has a setting that allows better use of the GPU when loading data. This results in vastly improved performance on modern hardware across 500+ display ranges.
In addition, it is mentioned that Minetest has been temporarily removed from Google Play due to the fact that Mineclone was added to the build of the Android version, after which the developers received a notification from Google about illegal content that violates the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The developers are working currently on this issue.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Added support for rotating hitboxes for entities.
- Removed default pitchmove binding to P key.
- Added an API to get information about the game screen size.
- Worlds with unresolved dependencies are no longer loaded.
- The Development Test game is no longer distributed by default, as it is intended for developers.
- This game can now only be installed via ContentDB.
Finally, If you are interested in learning more about it you can consult the complete log of changes of this new version in the following link.
How to install Minetest on Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those interested in the Minetest code, you should know that it is licensed under the LGPL and the game resources are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Ready builds are created for various distributions of Linux, Android, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS.
For those interested in installing Minetest on their system, dthey must know that it can be installed directly from the Ubuntu repositories.
Just open a terminal and type:
sudo apt install minetest
But also there is a repository with which they 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, in a general way can be installed on any Linux distribution that has support for the packages Flat pack.
This installation can be done by executing the following in terminal:
flatpak install flathub net.minetest.Minetest