Let's be frustrated together!
PoignardAzur wrote:
As far as I am aware, Minetest is an horrible failure at any decent goal I could imagine for it.
That's a bit rough isn't it?
I have personally seen Minetest raise from nothing to likely tens of thousands of users and to an online community with many things happening every day. For multiple years. What are you even comparing it against? Please be realistic. Everything falling down at this instant and never coming back would be more of a norm than literally anything else.
You can define some rather grand goals and say Minetest is a failure at them, but they are your goals. As a user of this free and libre product, you are as responsible of reaching the goals as anyone else.
PoignardAzur wrote:
I think the best thing that could happen to this game is serious competition. Right now people who want a good voxel game play minecraft. The people who play minetest want special things only it can offer (free access, easy modding, distance from Microsoft, high performance for slow PCs, etc), and as long at it will be the only game providing those, it will keep stagnating.
I really do not think Minetest would improve in the way you imagine if there was serious competition. You probably misunderstand the dynamic here - the reason why Minetest stagnates is not because the core team or I personally are somehow so proud of what we have that we don't feel any need to improve it. In my opinion Minetest sucks in so many technical aspects that I don't even know where to begin. Making it not suck even in one single aspect is a massive amount of work, and people naturally just want to build upon the old systems that should have been reworked years ago before anything was built on them.
We want to make Minetest better, but we have very limited resources and it's a very non-trivial task. The reason for why there is no competition is that making something like Minetest at any level of quality is hard enough in itself. You can say that we are incompetent or just pricks or whatever, but what's the point? That's not going to make development happen. It will probably cause nothing to happen, or sometimes me to write a piece of text like this because I feel like it.
That having been said, this niche would be better off if there was competition. The way that would work would probably be that Minetest would die off and people would be happily using whatever the competition was... but that won't happen. It wouldn't be a viable business and Minecraft isn't anymore the big thing among the college students who can make things happen given enough motivation.
It's basically a miracle Minetest even exists, let alone is still maintained and even developed, given the circumstances of its creation - but it does. And here we are on the forum that I host for people to discuss things about it. I don't get paid for doing this, and neither does anyone else. jp is right about the lack of funding resulting in a certain kind of dynamic which possibly isn't the best one, but that's how Minetest has always been.
You can talk about commercialization of Minetest all you want, but in addition to being very difficult it's not what I or any other members of the core team came here for. We are not here to provide you with a service, and you are not here to pay for us to provide a service. It's very far-fetched to change this.
It might not feel like it (which is a shame), but we are one community, and all of the core team's problems are your problems as well as all of your problems being the core team's problems.
Remember to show respect to those who develop and maintain all these things, because respect is one of the currencies we use to pay for each other's work here. If there's not enough to keep development happening, the game is already over and will not restart itself. I am a stubborn bastard and will stick around, but some others aren't so much.
Was that grim and dark enough?
Maybe I'll write something more positive next time...
On a more positive note, go read some closed pull requests from the past few weeks. It's not very grim and dark. It might even make you slightly hopeful:
https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pu ... s%3Aclosed
Also, there's some organizational development happening: A moderated IRC channel that unifies experienced modders, server hosts and core devs. It's doing well so far, but it does not directly affect the (perceived) pull request issue that this thread seems to be somewhat about.
Statistics: Posted by celeron55 — Mon Feb 29, 2016 23:50