Luanti (formerly Minetest) v5.15 brings UI improvements, mod upgrades and a big performance boost

The open-source voxel game creation platform Luanti (formerly Minetest) version 5.15 was recently released with an assortment of upgrades. For people who want a good alternative to Minecraft and Hytale, that's free and open source - Luanti can be a great choice with lots of different games available on it.

With the new release out now the developers noted a big performance improvement for it:

Luanti now uses a modern OpenGL feature to improve rendering performance. Our users have reported up to 10 times higher FPS in some situations. The feature is called Array Textures, and it allows Luanti to more efficiently render different parts of the map.

To take advantage of Array Textures, your device needs to support and use OpenGL 3.2+ or OpenGL ES 3.0. You can verify this by checking the About tab of the main menu. On desktop, it should say “opengl3” (not “opengl”) on the bottom left. On Android, it should say “ES 3 / ogles2”.

This release contains many other rendering clean-ups and improvements that should make Luanti run better and put it in a nicer state for future work.

Pictured - VoxeLibre (formerly MineClone2) on Luanti

The menu UI also saw some improvements like an outline for focused elements, to make using a keyboard easier. You can bind multiple keys to the same action which is good for accessibility and some settings will also be greyed out if your device doesn't support it rather than being completely hidden.

More modding and game making improvements with this release too like support for animated inventory images, nested modpacks inside modpacks, and improved alpha support in the HUD, the inventory, and the world

See the release announcement for details.