electronics, etc.

It has been three months since 0.4.4. I feel a need to summarize things that have happened since December.

First of all I’ll note that I really am not “the developer” anymore; there are people who are more involved in Minetest than me, and I’m mostly trying to keep out of the way doing other projects. Anyhow, I still have a chunk of things I’m responsible for.

Kept I have, an eye on things, enough to post something.

Website

Website-wise, the minetest.net VPS encountered bad problems (later diagnosed to be failing hardware), and we (me and xyz) moved the forum out to forum.minetest.net on xyz’s servers (2013-01-13). The forums are now automatically securely backed up over to me and xyz. The main minetest.net website is now temporarily hosted on c55.me.

xyz made the http://dev.minetest.net wiki, into which the existing Lua API documentation was moved, and later much Core documentation was written too. It now serves as the main source of documentation for developers and advanced users.

Releases

Many bugs have been fixed since 0.4.4 and I would have hoped for 0.4.5 to be released a month or two ago, but we have ended up on somewhat a rolling release model with mods already using features from unreleased versions and many people making unofficial Windows builds. We’ll try to make a proper release in a month or so, as/if a more suitable time is found. Until then, daily/unofficial builds (xyz’s, PilzAdam’s, sfan5′s) are recommended and I probably need to update the main site accordingly.

Development

So… after 0.4.4,

• uncountable number of bugs have been fixed,
• some MESE stuff was changed (umm…? well whatever),
• hmmmm/kwolekr has done a lot of mapgen/block loading work,
• RealBadAngel has worked on L-system trees with VanessaE using them in moretrees,
• a favourite/public server list has been added by Jeija (with proller doing some more related stuff),
• Taoki updated the player physics (which I don’t know if I like),
• doserj added UI for disabling/enabling mods, some smaller additions to the API were added;
• then there is sapier’s security modifications.
• And many things (sorry, I can’t in any way remember everything, and these are very much biased towards recent times),
• and the pull request list is pretty long.

I’ve granted thexyz, PilzAdam, darkrose and hmmmm upstream access a couple of months ago, so (yay!) I don’t have to wade through all this myself.

*Screams loudly in order to distract this boring officialness*

So, umm… many things are going well and not many things are going badly. Good it is!

On a completely unrelated note, and as a not really active movie watcher at all, I recently watched all the 6 worthy Star Wars movies, in the order of releases. I completely agree with the IMDB ratings.

Minetest core is a volunteer effort, but the barrier to entry is too high. In a series of changes meant to lower that, we’re going to hold an event meant to help people understand the engine: A documentation sprint!

What: Documentation sprint for Minetest
Where: #minetest-doc on Freenode and http://dev.minetest.net
When: 2013-01-19 16:00 UTC to 2013-01-20 01:00 UTC

-MarkTraceur

http://minetest.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4243

• I updated Minetest’s main website: http://minetest.net/
• Minetest 0.4.4 will be released this week.
• You should know about this shit: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html. Most notably, please be aware of the outdated and incompatible crap Debian and Ubuntu feeds you due to political reasons.

You may have stumbled upon this scenario: You have a server with large, reliable storage, and a bunch of computers that you use, with limited disk space. So you decide to store your music files on the server, because they fit nicely in there.

You may be familiar with MPD. It is a thing that lets you do this:

MPD Usage

…but how often do you actually want this? It’s useful only if your server is also your HTPC-kind of thing. My friend stumbled upon this issue, and came up with Musicd. It does this:

Musicd usage

That is, it streams music from your server to your computer, letting the server transparently do the storage thing, and your computer do the playback thing.

It’s a bit like hosting your own Spotify, Magnatune or so.

The current stable version (0.2.0) of Musicd allows you to connect to it using the qmdc client, which plays stuff, shows a playlist and handles the UI part of searching.

(There are no Windows clients, and musicd only works on *NIX systems.)

Experimental Awesomeness: HTTP Support

There has been some interesting development going on recently. More namely, a HTTP-based protocol. The github version does not have full HTTP support yet, but a fairly well working version is available at http://tsundere.fi/b/musicdhttpdev.tar.

You may need to start it up with the –enable-http option. Input goes as GET parameters, output comes as JSON and audio streams.

You can test it by using eg. curl and mplayer:

curl "http://localhost:6800/tracks?search=Rick%20Astley"
curl "http://localhost:6800/tracks?album=derp&artist=herp"
curl "http://localhost:6800/artists"
curl "http://localhost:6800/albums"
curl "http://localhost:6800/albumimg?album=4"
mplayer "http://localhost:6800/open?id=39"


There is a browser client in the works, but it hasn’t been released yet.

Clementine Support
I picked up the awesome Clementine-player source code and added Musicd-HTTP support to it.

You can find my work here: https://github.com/celeron55/clementine/commits/master

After building it, launch it up and select the “Internet” side tab, right click “Musicd”, and then “Configure Musicd”. After setting the server address, use “Refresh library” from the same context menu, and you’re good to go.

Also, in case somebody wants to discuss stuff, we created the IRC channel #musicd @ Freenode.net. (beware of the occasional Finnish speaking in there)

It turns out it has been 1 year since the release of Minetest 0.3.1, and the development of 0.4 was started exactly one year before tomorrow. Cool. 8)

The beginning of Minetest 0.4

Here is how the website looked back then!

Minetest website, 2011