Minetest 0.4.11 Released As Open-Source Alternative To Minecraft

[computerquip]

Not even legal, but moral? I'm all for FOSS, but if the Minecraft devs choose not to release their code as open source and freely available, that is their right.

The FOSS community should focus its efforts on making original, unique, and superior counterparts to desired software instead of blindly and unimaginatively copying whatever project it is they like. Most of the "best" and most polished FOSS software available (Inkscape, the GNOME project, Dolphin, Blender, Ardour) don't exist as direct clones, but instead compete on their own merits in their "market". If someone made a commercially successful but proprietary clone of Gnome there would be uproar and death threats. Don't commercial devs deserve the same respect as we demand for ourselves?

This is a silly argument given there are a million Minecraft clones... in particular, ones that were made before Minecraft like Infiniminer.

The reason Minecraft chose not to be open-source is to avoid the catastrophe that Infiniminer faced due to lack of proper modding support. It was made in C#. Thus, to make mods, people would decompile the executables, modify them, then distribute them. This caused severe fragmentation and a lack of upstream development.

So, lessons learned? Don't open your source because people will actively develop for their own fork since you didn't add proper modding support... even though the actual results of this aren't clear since the game was never super popular anyways. How does the author of Infiniminer determine that his game started to fail because of this when he probably never had 50 players online at a time? Not to mention, if people based modifications off of his code, how was his game actually failing if people were still playing his game, albeit modified?

I'm okay with not opening source, contrary to some of the inferred reasoning I provide in previous posts. What I'm not okay with is the reasoning that goes along with not posting source.

9/10 it's "so people don't steal it" - Yeah, okay, fine. Minecraft is a FPS game that uses TCP networking, has had a 3rd party tack on decent OpenGL control support for years now, and still can't get server software right as it has no daemonize mode and only an interactive mode. How the fuck would anyone want to steal this software?
0.5/10 it's "licensing issues" - Reasonable if dealing with other proprietary software, which Mojang is not. It's based on, ironically, open-source software like LWJGL.
0.5/10 it's "So we can avoid early criticism on early code" - The only viable reason. Most software do not use overly complicated proprietary algorithms that nobody can figure out. Seriously. A lot of it is copy-paste out of a fucking book done in repetition. Most of the uniqueness in a game comes from art and assets, of which Minecraft has virtually zero of aside from maybe the dragon and some other stuff that's been put in since I've been gone.

Minecraft's implementation is suprisingly unique in that it's so shitty, it failed to run on most PCs for the first year of its life due to memory and rendering constraints. I still don't understand how my friends coaxed me into buying this game but after almost 5 years of the modding community still going and Mojang still not adding official modding support... I don't know why the actual fuck any modder would want to participate on this crap. I mean seriously, you have a multi-million dollar company who has funded at least two remakes of the game for other platforms... and they can't make the PC version decent or even give it a modding API? It's been promised since 2010. What a fucking joke.

Bukkit for some reason doesn't know what the word "stable" means for an API, given they break 1/4 of their plugins every release. The situation isn't fun, you create work just for it to be out of date less than a month later.

[/rant]

[mmstick]

Is this game different enough from Minecraft to be legal?
Fedora AFAIK does not allow game clones for fear of legal problems.

By that logic, Linux is a clone of Minix is a clone of UNIX, therefore Fedora should stop developing for Linux immediately.

Minecraft's creators, Mojang and now Microsoft, does not own the rights to procedurally-generated sandbox voxel games, nor the algorithms to make them. Even Minecraft itself is a clone of Infinimer. Being a clone of something does not make it illegal. It would only be illegal if copyrighted art assets were copied over. Minetest does not have any copyrighted assets in the source code.

[drspinderwalf]

This is a silly argument given there are a million Minecraft clones... in particular, ones that were made before Minecraft like Infiniminer.

The reason Minecraft chose not to be open-source is to avoid the catastrophe that Infiniminer faced due to lack of proper modding support. It was made in C#. Thus, to make mods, people would decompile the executables, modify them, then distribute them. This caused severe fragmentation and a lack of upstream development.

So, lessons learned? Don't open your source because people will actively develop for their own fork since you didn't add proper modding support... even though the actual results of this aren't clear since the game was never super popular anyways. How does the author of Infiniminer determine that his game started to fail because of this when he probably never had 50 players online at a time? Not to mention, if people based modifications off of his code, how was his game actually failing if people were still playing his game, albeit modified?

I'm okay with not opening source, contrary to some of the inferred reasoning I provide in previous posts. What I'm not okay with is the reasoning that goes along with not posting source.

9/10 it's "so people don't steal it" - Yeah, okay, fine. Minecraft is a FPS game that uses TCP networking, has had a 3rd party tack on decent OpenGL control support for years now, and still can't get server software right as it has no daemonize mode and only an interactive mode. How the fuck would anyone want to steal this software?
0.5/10 it's "licensing issues" - Reasonable if dealing with other proprietary software, which Mojang is not. It's based on, ironically, open-source software like LWJGL.
0.5/10 it's "So we can avoid early criticism on early code" - The only viable reason. Most software do not use overly complicated proprietary algorithms that nobody can figure out. Seriously. A lot of it is copy-paste out of a fucking book done in repetition. Most of the uniqueness in a game comes from art and assets, of which Minecraft has virtually zero of aside from maybe the dragon and some other stuff that's been put in since I've been gone.

Minecraft's implementation is suprisingly unique in that it's so shitty, it failed to run on most PCs for the first year of its life due to memory and rendering constraints. I still don't understand how my friends coaxed me into buying this game but after almost 5 years of the modding community still going and Mojang still not adding official modding support... I don't know why the actual fuck any modder would want to participate on this crap. I mean seriously, you have a multi-million dollar company who has funded at least two remakes of the game for other platforms... and they can't make the PC version decent or even give it a modding API? It's been promised since 2010. What a fucking joke.

Bukkit for some reason doesn't know what the word "stable" means for an API, given they break 1/4 of their plugins every release. The situation isn't fun, you create work just for it to be out of date less than a month later.

[/rant]

I hear you. I've operated two minecraft servers for a few years now, one following the latest spigot and the other following a heavily-modded 1.6.4.

I have to say, the modding community has done astounding work to make some truly amazing stuff in the face of a completely inept studio constantly breaking Minecraft. Without too much of an increase in memory the modded server is able to wildly differentiate from the vanilla (read: boring) experience to a large degree.

Maintaining Minecraft, however, remains a vastly irritating task. I don't even bother trying to investigate less important issues anymore, it's more hassle that running all my other services combined.

On a different note, I am getting sick and tired at how the core gameplay of Minecraft keeps changing every release. It's like if Baldur's Gate came with ten updates, all implementing different versions of the AD&D rules.

[Michael_S]

Terasology

I've been tinkering with Terasology ( https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology ), which has pretty good graphics. It's in Java, so I can play it on my linux desktop and on my wife's computer with Windows whatever. ( I suspect it's much more resource intensive than Minetest, but I never compared them. Terasology definitely won't run on a Raspberry Pi, I know that.)

On Linux, I have an AMD Radeon 5770 card. With the open source graphics driver, playing Terasology more than a few seconds actually rebooted my machine. (First time that's happened to me in Linux in many years.) When I switched to the proprietary driver, everything ran fine.

The problem, though, as others have said, is that all of the existing Minecraft players are on Minecraft and Minecraft servers. Even a superior free replacement is going to have a hell of a time gaining traction outside of open source fans.

[drspinderwalf]

I've been tinkering with Terasology ( https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology ), which has pretty good graphics. It's in Java, so I can play it on my linux desktop and on my wife's computer with Windows whatever. ( I suspect it's much more resource intensive than Minetest, but I never compared them. Terasology definitely won't run on a Raspberry Pi, I know that.)

On Linux, I have an AMD Radeon 5770 card. With the open source graphics driver, playing Terasology more than a few seconds actually rebooted my machine. (First time that's happened to me in Linux in many years.) When I switched to the proprietary driver, everything ran fine.

The problem, though, as others have said, is that all of the existing Minecraft players are on Minecraft and Minecraft servers. Even a superior free replacement is going to have a hell of a time gaining traction outside of open source fans.

I'd be thrilled to have a better replacement - however, none of the alternatives are even close to capturing what Minecraft has.