Introducing Minetest and our MT game server

I'm sure that most of you are familiar with Minecraft (MC), but just in case a quick intro... Minecraft is a game where everything in the level (or map) is destructible. You can mine resources to make tools and gadgets to build and mine further. Ie., trees for wood, iron for steel, etc ... It's a very addictive and time-intensive gameplay. I've known people to play MC for 8-10 hours in one session.

MC has been criticized, like any successful game, but two points concern me the most. First, the game is entirely written (the code) in Java, which is not a bad thing in itself, but Java is infamous for its slow performance in large games. Sure, performance is difficult to measure but you can really tell when any program feels sluggish. Its levels are big and this comes with significant cost of CPU and memory usage, specially with lots of players and lots of mining going on. And my other concern is that the game is not Open Source. This is an issue to me because of the irony. MT is infinitely playable and changeable, yet you get no choice to alter the game itself. Although the dev(s) is very proactive to add new features, the gameplay is limited to a narrow theme and the choices (tastes) of the developer - where are the alien miners?

Whether you agree or not with my points, it seems at least someone else had similar thoughts, and with this I'm glad to introduce Minetest (MT). MT is based on the same game concept as MC (which in turn is based on InfiniMiner), but it solves my two concerns above. It is written in C++ using the Irrlicht engine and it's released free under the GPL license.

This is all nice, but how good is it? MT is very new so it doesn't match many of MC's features. Also, many of the resources and tools are not complete. Monsters are almost non-existent - someone said it has ghosts but I haven't seen any yet. And being a project under heavy development, the performance is not optimal but the current stable version feels snappier than MC. Also, textures (images on map) and player models aren't anywhere done.

Although MT is incomplete and under heavy development, I consider this project as a "Good Thing[tm]" and definitely a project which GameBoom should support. I have setup a public server and everyone is invited to take the game for a spin. Just remember that this is a new project and it's under heavy development.

We are using the STABLE branch of the project, so make sure you use it to connect to our server.

GameBoom Minetest server address: mt1.gameboom.net, port 30000
Login with your GB.net username/password

Visit our Minetest game page for details and links to download.