From our Discord announcements channel:

Hotfix release 0.86.1 is now live. It introduces a workaround allowing usage of bows, crossbows and spyglasses with touchscreen controls by using the zoom button, and introduces a patch to a graphical glitch which for some reason wasn't included in the last release (even though it was supposed to be there).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

By the way, a smaller update is now available: v0.86 - "Another Look [External Link]"

Highlights:

Mob improvements - Rebalanced shulkers, slimes, magma cubes, vexes and evokers.

Shepherd functionality: A shepherd staff was added, which allows you to lead your sheep; It can also serve as a weak weapon.

Visual updates: Sunflowers now have a custom mesh, which means it looks better, and the animations of the stonecutter and campfires were made more dynamic.

2 crash fixes were included, related to villager trading and pistons

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Merry Tuxmus, and Happy New Games! :grin: :heart:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: hardpenguinI appreciate the friendly invitation! I might take you up on your offer one day. For now I do not have time nor patience to work through any further steps of troubleshooting for this issue.

Ok, understandable. :) We do try to get feedback on such issues because fixing them makes the game better for everyone, especially people with older PCs. We're particularly happy with Minetest 5.8.0 because now our new soundtrack can shine without taking a huge toll on RAM usage, which was a problem with 5.7.0. If you haven't done so already, make sure you try out the latest releases of each.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: hardpenguinI played MineClone2 lately, had good fun despite dying a lot but got frustrated eventually by its poor peformance on Linux :( I experienced constant FPS drops on NVIDIA and have read this is not a Minetest issue but specifically a MineClone2 issue.

Hey, please come to our Discord [External Link] or Matrix [External Link] to give us some details about that. It looks like you have some specifics if you're sure that's not a Minetest issue. A little profiling might reveal the issue. This year MineClone2 scored some really nice performance improvements that enabled it to run reasonably well on my old Core 2 Duo laptop, so I wonder what else is there that causes performance drops on an RTX 3060 Ti.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

ASUS support has been terrible in recent years, as I've experienced personally, and seen among youtubers (JayzTwoCents, and others). Just this year I had to return one of their motherboards because it didn't do what it was supposed to do, plus other stuff. I contacted them twice, both tickets got closed without any assistance whatsoever. Intel should've chosen someone who does business better than ASUS. But who knows what that license requires. At least it's non-exclusive.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Happy birthday, GamingOnLinux! :heart: :grin:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Thanks for sharing the news! :) We hope the performance improvements will be visible for those who play the game regularly, especially on lower end hardware. Either way, MineClone2 always had lower requirements compared to Minecraft, so things are in pretty good shape even for older PCs.

The slowest "modern enough" PC I tested this release on is an older laptop:
- CPU: Core 2 Duo T9550 at 2.66 GHz (dual core)
- RAM: 4 GB DDR2 PC-667
- GPU: ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3470 (OpenGL 3.0) with 256MB dedicated RAM + 512MB from system RAM (on demand)
- SSD: Samsung 850 Pro 256GB
- OS: Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon

This laptop gave me around 10-20 FPS a few versions ago - a bit too sluggish for my taste. Now I get 60+, though not all the time. It fluctuates between 20-40 FPS while I fly around the world with the fast privilege, and while it does take some time to load the surrounding chunks, it feels smooth.

I don't know how much the new Minetest 5.7.0 contributed to this experience, but our lead maintainer is still focused on performance improvements and there are some more gains to be scored in the coming releases. :) For now, I got myself some new-old "gaming" hardware. :tongue: Make sure you give it a try on something old.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NezchanSo did they dumb down the Villager AI to make them as suicidal as they tend to be in Minecraft?

The mobs' AI is one of the medium-to-high priorities currently, along with spawning and performance improvements in various places.

The game is over 6 years old and it has plenty of technical debt that was never easy to address because new features were prioritized to make the game more fun and more useful. But having progressed a lot in the last years, it's in a decent enough place where some time can be spent on less visible parts of the game but important to the overall experience and gameplay.

I was talking to the lead maintainer yesterday about the Minecraft mobs in general, and how they pathfind and walk towards destinations they can't come back from (2-block high drops). We wouldn't be different if we did the same, but he's not a fan of that "feature/bug" and wants to look into smarter pathfinding once more important work gets done.

As I don't do development for MineClone2 at this point, I tend to view this like a player who sometimes enjoys challenges, and sometimes getting annoyed with it. I don't know how many Minecraft players are annoyed by the villagers' pathfinding - considering they can be very important if the players rely on them. Is this something that should definitely be improved, or is it fine if it remains a challenge? You know, very smooth gameplays can easily become boring or feel more like grinding than fun and problem solving. :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MayeulCAlso, it runs better on low-end machines in my experience, though the sort of low-powered machine that can barely run minecraft is getting harder to find, thankfully :P

Yup, Minecraft is a pain on my old Intel Core i5-661 (iGPU). And versions newer than 1.16 won't run on it, due to raised OpenGL requirements - that iGPU it stuck with OpenGL 2.1. Minetest + MineClone2 work reasonably well. And now that the 0.81.1 performance hotfix is out, I'm curious how the game would run on that oldie. I don't expect a huge boost, but thankfully that's just a "vacation PC". :D

The PC I normally play the game on is also fairly old (Intel Core i5-4690K + Intel HD Graphics 4600, OpenGL 4.5), but it's good enough for a long gameplay.

As previously said, it's nice that you don't need an online account to play MineClone2. You can also start a LAN game by just checking a box in the Minetest GUI (Host Server), although if you do the necessary port forwarding, people from the outside can join too, even from Android devices.

P.S. I'm part of the MineClone2 team, mainly doing testing and bug reporting. If any of you feel like contributing to Minetest (the engine, in C++), that would benefit all the games based on it, including MineClone2. :) As for MineClone2, Lua makes it tick. Minecraft is great but, unsurprisingly, Microsoft is a bit too intrusive for some people. It's well worth having a free software alternative, so any help is welcome.

View this comment - View article - View full comments