Introducing Our New Name

[beeflet]

The new name isn't great (too many vowels in the same place, you couldn't spell it if you heard it) but at least it's original and doesn't sound like it's a knockoff test implementation of minecraft anymore.

Minetest is kind of a unique experiment in how modular a voxel game can be with mods. It's pretty cool. You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods. You have dependencies and stuff so not every mod has to reinvent the wheel. Much better experience than minecraft modding.

Minetest should lean into this and make the core gamemode more different than minecraft. Change up the artstyle, and make the physics feel better.

[xinayder]

> The new name isn't great (too many vowels in the same place, you couldn't spell it if you heard it)

That's only a problem for english. Finnish people (and I can say romance language speakers) would disagree.

[JoeyBananas]

The barrier to having better physics is that better physics requires more complicated netcode.

It is also a long-standing precedent in Minetest that the default game is just a minimal skeleton. "Change the artstyle" is a misguided suggestion because there are very few assets that are part of Minetest and not a 3rd party minetest mod.

[cortesoft]

> You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods.

That's how mods work in Minecraft bedrock

[mschuster91]

> You just visit another server and it downloads and sets up all of the server's mods. You have dependencies and stuff so not every mod has to reinvent the wheel. Much better experience than minecraft modding.

Reminds me of Unreal Tournament 2004, that was pretty much the same experience.

[bovermyer]

"Luanti" is pretty easy to pronounce/spell for me. I'm not sure what your native language is, though, maybe it's harder for you.

[freedomben]

I absolutely adore minetest and have an enormous amount of love and respect for the people who have built it into the phenomenal platform that it is.

But damn, they are not great at naming things.

I have long wished they would rename from minetest to something else, because as silly as it is, one of the biggest barriers of adoption I have run into is the name. When people hear the name, it is confusing and they think it is stupid and a joke. Hell, I even joke about it sometimes too.

Naming things is very difficult, so I do feel for them. I also will give this new name some time and see if it grows on me. I am a bit skeptical, but they have more than earned some trust.

Regardless, this is a fantastic game and a fantastic platform, and I really don't understand why so many people play Minecraft when there is an open open source alternative that is this good.

The code is genuinely very good, and is a pleasure to read. It is one of the things I love about a great open source project, where it was done for the love of the art, not just to grab a paycheck. The code is well thought out and well written, and dare I say even beautiful. Exactly my kind of project!

[thiht]

Lots of libre projects are terrible at naming things, I don't know why.

Doing the "use a word in some exotic language for some reason" is lazy and rarely great. Another example of that is "Forjego", they forked Gitea and went with some Esperanto word because... reasons.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Yeah, I've been on a minetest kick lately and it's a great game, and I can understand not wanting to call it "minetest", but minetest is 2 english words mashed together and one of them is extremely relevant/descriptive of the game in question. I personally even think that it's fine that it sounds like minecraft, because it... is basically minecraft but proper FOSS; that's approximately the reason I like it. This new name contains zero english words and frankly I'm having trouble getting my brain to hold it at all. Lua... something. And I only remember "lua" because I already knew about the programming language. I think I'm going to have to set up an alias or something on my machines so I can actually launch the thing now...

[VariousPrograms]

6 months ago you’d have to tell your friends to join you on Mineclone2, a Minetest game, which was like telling people to switch to Doodle Chrome on Microsaft Wandows Beta. Any new name is so much better.

[cAtte_]

> We decided to avoid using “free” or “libre” in the name ... Projects like Blender, Krita, or Godot are awesome, and they don’t need to convince you about their libre nature by putting it in their names.

so... we decided to add the name of the programming language we use instead?

[kragen]

It seems like a pretty reasonable choice when thinking about Luanti as a game engine instead of a game. If someone is choosing a game engine to write a game in, one of their most significant considerations is likely to be what programming languages are supported, so highlighting Lua in the name of the engine is not a bad idea.

[Dalewyn]

I think it's very wise to market your product on something people might actually care about.

Free/Libre is a fine philosophy, but as a selling point it has had a very disappointing history.

[barrettondricka]

Great, but I wish they invested their nomenclature resources into design and ease of access.

https://bloxd.io/ is currently reaping kids who can't afford official Minecraft. (Browser based, free, ad driven)

But then again, MineTest is a bunch of volunteers playing around with a tool, so you can't exactly force anybody to do anything.

[singpolyma3]

So what exactly did you wish they did? Make a browser version?

[owenpalmer]

Wow, Bloxd is really impressive. Works great on mobile.

[froggerexpert]

Great project, which has sorely been in need of a better name.

"Luanti" works. Unique, pronounceable, alludes to Lua ties.

[thaumasiotes]

The "n" obscures the notional reference to "lua". "Lua" is two syllables, but "luan" is just one. The name makes me think 乱, not an element you'd want to include in the name of most projects.

[skybrian]

The main website lists lots of games that are built on Minetest / Luanti. [1] Does anyone have opinions on which of them are the most fun to play?

[1] https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=game

[beeflet]

IDK a lot of the games feel really lame but there is this one CTF server that was fun. I might be too old for this stuff but I think it could be the next roblox if you could get it running inside of a webpage with WebGL.

Just scrolling through the list I found some interesting ones that really think outside the box (no pun intended), like this one that generates 3D-printable models.

https://content.minetest.net/packages/Warr1024/fdmcube/

[opan]

Most mods are for minetest_game, so if you pick a different base you can't use them all. I always just added a bunch of mods on top of minetest_game.

[barrettondricka]

I haven't played much myself, but VoxeLibre (and Mineclonia) are pretty good Minecraft replicas.

My only complaint is mobile controls. Desktop is decent but the mobile version (off F-droid) leaves much to be desired.

[jiffygist]

Can recommend Glitch. A fun singleplayer parkour game with a story.

[runjake]

Name is awful but game itself looks awesome. Can any speak to how “good” it is, especially server play?

[o11c]

The thing that bugs me is how ... intrusive the object dependencies are. Outside of the most trivial mods, you absolutely must buy into one of the major ecosystems, and quite a few things can't be changed in an external mod, only in the ecosystem's core mods, because they're all registered in a single function that's not hookable. Changing the core mods themselves of course causes problems whenever you want to update them.

That said, some of the ecosystems (frameworks?) themselves are decent as-is. The two mineclone forks (I don't pretend to know the difference) are probably the best place to start.

Mapgen sucks if you want any kind of realism though. Even the mods that pretend to care about it (half of which are in lua and thus really slow) don't operate on a "top-down" level, so always end up with things like "water flows uphill in a circle". And the grid is very obvious, especially if you're obsessed with the dimensions of your base like I am. I also suspect poor RNG control in places. And there's definitely an idempotency option - if you quit (or crash) the game while mapgen is still running, you can end up with half-generated terrain.

Even the builtin mapgens are slow to generate new terrain if you use the "fast" cheat.

(this ended up being a bit more negative than I'd like; I don't intend to stop people from trying it)

[jasonjayr]

There are a lot of creative mods + abilities. That the Lua programming language is core to the engine, means it is easy to do all sorts of supported creative things with the engine. But some of the mechanics and 'smoothness' of play that you can get in Minecraft just isn't there yet in Minetest, due to how the network protocol works. Give it a shot, you can play a local world with very little effort, and if you know lua, look at some of the 'world' definition code.

[JoeyBananas]

Pretty much everything in Minetest is a 3rd party mod coded in Lua. It is viable, but you are limited by the netcode and the quality / integration of 3rd party mods.

[card_zero]

Hardcore fans shall be called "luantics".

[xanderlewis]

I find it hard to take seriously much debate on naming things. Whatever name you choose is going to upset some people and please others; in the end, all you need is something fairly unique. You quickly forget any intrinsic meaning and it becomes transparent. ‘YouTube’ is a pretty amateurish sounding name and yet it stuck, and here we are now. When was the last time you even stopped and pondered its etymology?

The name of any successful entity quickly becomes synonymous with that entity. It’s a fallacy to think you can imbue the entity with meaning by picking its name very carefully.

If you think I’m underestimating the importance of a name, just imagine the reaction if you’d suggested naming a computer company ‘Apple’ in the 1970s.

“…as in, the fruit?!”

[Affric]

I agree but I always thought YouTube was a great name for what it was. It was me choosing what was on (no pesky programming) and us making videos.

It’s very different now but “you”, as in me, was very central to my idea of what YouTube was. And the TV was a CRT. It was the tube. And as per GWB it was a series of tubes it came through (facetious).

[pessimizer]

Apple is snappy and easy to remember, and they literally had to fight the Beatles for it.

[sixo]

"Luanti"—a nice name!

[egorfine]

fwiw in Russian language "minetest" is "bj is available".

[Averave]

Reminds me of the Minecraft server software "MiNET" and the issue that followed: https://github.com/NiclasOlofsson/MiNET/issues/446

[ksynwa]

Minetest is not a good name but I felt it had become iconic as the game grew more solid. But I trust the maintainers to make the right decision here.

[butz]

At least the didn't call it Unity or Proton.

[opminion]

Name change solves a problem I was having just yesterday. And it is easy to use and spell in the tongue I was using it.

[h2odragon]

When was this published? hard to keep up anymore

> We decided to avoid using “free” or “libre” in the name ... Projects like ... Godot are awesome, they don’t need to convince you about their libre nature by putting it in their names.

[luafox]

This article was published today, October 13th, 2024.

[beachy]

Why would you choose a new name that you don't have the .com for?

How about voxelmod.com or something else that is a) relevant and b) the .com domain is available.

[excalibur]

Yeah, this name sucks. It will endlessly be misread as "Luna-ti" and assigned astrological connotations, it sounds like a pharmaceutical, and it tells you nothing about the platform.

[andai]

Lua does mean Luna, just in a slightly different language.

[itronitron]

Luanti is easy to pronounce and distinct, but it's also vague enough that someone making a game using the Luanti platform will want to name their game something else.