Minetest

Ten years ago today, I uploaded the first version of Capture The Flag. Capture The Flag is a multiplayer game where two teams of players battle to claim the other team’s flag whilst defending their own. Capture The Flag is played in a destructible voxel environment, allowing players to build defences and place traps.

Capture The Flag started life as a persistent kingdoms game but quickly pivoted to a match-based team game. It was developed iteratively, taking into account player feedback. I hosted a server for the game for many years and a community formed around it. In 2021, I handed over the reins to CTF to very capable hands; it remains Minetest’s most popular server to this day.

This article covers the history of CTF, the lessons I learned, and the changes I made along the way.

In 2020, the Minetest Discord community ran a mod-making competition with “combat” as the theme. Participants had one week to create a mod with all the code written within the time, but pre-existing art was allowed. I made a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) minigame called Conquer; it received first place.

In this article, I will discuss some of the interesting challenges that Conquer needed to solve. I believe that Conquer is a great example to learn from as it demonstrates best practices for Minetest modding; it is well-structured and unit-tested.

Bing has now unbanned my blog. My site is still penalised/low in the results, but at least it's appearing now. See the bottom of this article for their response.

My domain was shadow banned by Bing and DuckDuckGo last year, and I don’t know why. Since then, my root domain (rubenwardy.com) has been unbanned but my blog remains banned. The event also negatively impacted the search placement of my root domain; another site that reuploaded some of my content is appearing as the first result when searching for it.

Last month, ContentDB received a large spike in traffic. ContentDB is the website I created that allows you to install mods/games/texture packs from within Minetest’s main menu. On Saturday 5th, Bobicraft, a Spanish-language Youtube channel with 5M subscribers, posted a video about Minetest. At the time of writing, it has reached 1.3 million views and is now the most-watched Minetest video.

In this article, I will show the data about this increase in traffic. As the tools that I use to monitor ContentDB are ephemeral, this will keep the data around for future reference.

A few months ago, my Steam Deck arrived. So, obviously, one of the first things I did was play Minetest. Whilst Minetest isn’t available on Steam yet, it is available on Flatpak and so can be installed from desktop mode.

Minetest plays very well on the Steam Deck, it performs great and Steam Input makes setting up controls easy. The Deck is an open console, so there’s full support for modding and you can cross-play with other platforms.

In this article, I will explain how to set up Minetest on the deck, and review the controls, performance, and experience. I’ve already written my thoughts about the Deck in another article, and recommend checking that out.

In 2016, I created an app to install mods for Minetest’s Android port. It was my first Android app; it taught me a great deal about Android development and also helped me get my first programming job.

Minetest is an open-source game engine with millions of downloads and thousands of weekly players. The project has a very active modding community, with many games available to play. Before I created the app, users had to manually install content by unzipping their files into a directory; this was a poor user experience, especially on Android, so I created the app to make this easier.

Minetest now has ContentDB, a platform I created to browse and install mods and games within Minetest. Because of this, the app is now obsolete and is no longer available for download. That doesn’t mean this app is fully gone - the lessons I learned live on in ContentDB.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 is a powerful new Artificial Intelligence model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It was trained on a large body of text, with sources including websites, Wikipedia, and books. It doesn’t just understand natural language, it can also work with programming languages.

This topic is especially relevant with the recent introduction of GitHub Copilot. Copilot is an “AI pair programmer” for your IDE that suggests code and entire new functions. It’s based on same technology as GPT-3, but with a model derived from GPT-3 and optimised for code called Codex. This article will use GPT-3 and Codex, as I wasn’t able to get GitHub Copilot, but the results will be identical.

In this article, I will ask GPT-3 to write Minetest code and explore how much it knows about modding, creating simple and advanced Minetest mods. I will finish by using it to convert Minecraft mods to Minetest.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to create a web app for University coursework, as a solo project. I chose to create a package repository for Minetest, an open-source project I help maintain.

Minetest is an open-source game engine with millions of downloads and thousands of weekly players. The project has a very active modding community, and many available games to run. There was one big issue - you had to manually install mods and games by unzipping their files into a directory. This was a very poor user experience.

Shara and I exhibited on behalf of Minetest at Freenode #Live. Our stall had a computer where visitors could play Minetest. We talked about it and handed out leaflets.

If you’d like to support Minetest, then please get involved and consider donating:

• celeron55
• rubenwardy (me)

Recently I have been looking at languages and compilation: VMs, parse trees, lexers, and interpreters. Nand to tetris is a pretty awesome guide to how the CPU executes programs - from logic gates to high level languages.