for those of you without the patience to read a blogpost, the new name's actually a bit of wordplay.
“Luanti” is a wordplay on the Finnish word luonti (“creation”) and the programming language Minetest Luanti employs for games and mods, Lua. The goal was to avoid yet another plain English word (good luck finding something unique…) and highlight the core principles of the project. The fusion of celeron55’s Finnish nationality and the platform’s focus on content creation resulted in the birth of “Luanti”.
IMO, the worst thing about "Minetest" is that it sounded like it was just a test creation, a prototype or experiment. It's certainly well beyond that now. The announcement introduction mentions people associate it with being a Minecraft clone or alpha release, but even further, to me the name initially gave me the impression it was [still] someone's small hobby project. 'Luanti' is much better.
On this note, another thing I appreciate is what they said about "Free" and "Libre": those names are great for saying "This is a free/libre/open clone of [x]", and that's what I'll think when I see it. Software like LibreOffice aims to support Microsoft Office documents, OpenRTC2 and OpenTTD are for people who want to see those games pretty-faithfully cloned, even if extended. Luanti is not OpenMinecraft.
Agree 100%. I always though the name suggested it wasn’t quite a complete game. In fact at first I didn’t think it was a game at all.
Tbh Luanti is a pretty clever wordplay
Plus it sounds Italian
I don't think it was that bad. I think the new name is better though
Thanks for the TLDR, nice to know the reasons behind the name. And good reasons they are too.
Oh thank god. Minetest was the worst name, and the game is actually pretty cool. It definitely deserves a cool name, and Luanti sounds cool.
I was so scared it was going to be something silly.
I don't really like the new name yet, but it's a lot better than Minetest so I really can't complain.
I actually like the new name. It seems like when a community project renames it always is something even worse than the original name. This is a great name that doesn't sound silly to say out loud.
Literally just yesterday my wife learned of Minetest's existence and said it was a terrible name
Just tell her that you told them your wife didn't like the name so they changed it.
I've seen it a few times in passing and always assumed it was like, a tech demo or proof of concept.
It initially was that. Also the name wasn't meant to stick around forever.
But, out of a sudden, between updates, not even the new website URLs ready?
I don't follow Minetest development that closely anymore, but last time I checked there were no issues or pull requests on their GitHub, nor something official regarding a name change in the forums.
This feels like there are just a bunch of people haphazardly deciding there is a new name now.
I'm not going to search further to find the original discussion, but another user in this thread mentions seeing talk of this about a year ago. I agree that it's not very professional for the new website to be in a less than functional state, but it feels like excitement or decision fatigue may be the culprit, not a rushed process. Then again, it's an open source video game, not everything has to be "professional" all the time. Meanwhile, enjoy this meme from luanti.org:
I’m not going to search further to find the original discussion, but another user in this thread mentions seeing talk of this about a year ago.
There were plenty of those threads and discussions happening during the past few years. This is a constant topic that came up in the forums and sometimes GitHub over and over again.
Yes, and in the last twelve months those discussions clearly accelerated, and that post made it clear the lead/original dev had made their mind up. Which very much negates you saying this was rushed.
"good news honey, they heard your complaint and renamed it"
It IS a terrible name. But it also is an over one decade old brand.
It will be hard to propagate the new name and have it as recognizable as "Minetest".
Those in open source circles will see through places like GamingOnLinux, Lemmy, Reddit and the official IRC/Discord. Those that don't find out probably are no where near the open source gaming community so it won't really matter.
It made sense at the time...
the new name is equally terrible, at least in terms of pronunciation.
Lu-aunty
This is good news! Anyone here played it recently? How far has the game come in terms of content compared to Minecraft or Vintage Story?
it's just a framework, it depends on the mods you use. you can use mineclone2 if you want all the features of minecraft
Btw, mineclone2 also rebranded as Voxelibre, months ago, and for the same reasons.
Voxelibre now actively moves away from copying Minecraft exactly.
If you want the closest copy (and my personal recommendation) check out Mineclonia.
Mobs kinda suck, because the engine has no native mob API.
There are great mapgens who take advantage of the 1000's of blocks world height.
You can use the mod lib from contentdb. Also it is worth pointing out that they are moving towards a subgame focus not a mod focus. The original game has been discontinued and isn't preinstalled. You install a game like Asuna to get gameplay and content.
Of course you can still use Minetest game as a base for mods. I do that for simple worlds.
No, mobs, not mods. Monsters, animals, NPC's. The lua libs are nice and all but they are always glitchy in hitbox and position.
Edit: you meant the second sentence? My bad.
1000s*
Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?
No, it is something that has been discussed for quite some time. No one could decide on a good name until now
One could argue they still haven't
Since Minecraft blew up with 12 year olds using potatoe hardware I think the criteria required would be:
12 year old thinks name is great and can spell it
it can run on a potatoe
Who wants to volunteer to collect this data
You could argue but you would be wrong. The name gas changed. There is still some work needed to move domains but that's minor.
I'm sure it is
That woul've been:
Minetest Immortal
never thought i'd see minetest rebranding itself (if rebrand is the correct word at all anyway)
Man, I saw them initiating discussions around the name like a year ago. I did not expect anything to actually come from that after all this time. But yeah, glad that it did.
Now we just need a better default font. 🙃
And maybe a really solid UI design. It seems like a not of games don't have a good UI.
I like the meme.
I just wish they would merge the "truly infinite worlds" branch. The horizontal limits are to tight for this kind of game.
Gonna miss the old one but I definitely had to go. I kinda like Luanti too
How are you guys pronouncing this?
Personally, I’ve found it sounds kind of nice when said like “Loon tea”.
It just looks like "Loo wan tee" to me.
Edit: Actually, just read the article, and considering the name Luanti is a mix between the Finnish word "creation" and the LUA programming language; and I'm preeetty sure LUA is pronounced "loo-wah" or "lew-ah", I think the Luanti pronunciation is more likely to be "loo-wun-tee".
It's finnish, so like it's written. Foreign concept for english speakers, I know.
It is quite literally a foreign concept to anyone who only speaks English. That's how foreign languages work.
How is the word pronounced though?
I'm a finn, so the only advice I can give is that it's pronounced like luanti in finnish.
Not very useful, I know, sorry. Nau ai häv tu kou präktis mai rälli inglish.
The german way
Luh-Anti?
That's pretty much how it sounded in my lingual mind.
Anything is better than minetest which sounded like a hastily written debugging mod for Minecraft
Did they ever fix the game having a maximum map size of like 10.000 by 10.000? That limitation always seemed to put it at a disadvantage compared to Minecraft, for larger communities
Currently, the world dimensions are larger than that (according to the wiki):
“Minetest's world is a huge cube with a side length of ca. 60000 blocks. Each dimension (X, Y and Z) ranges from −30912 to 30927.”
That’s better than I was thinking. But still, nothing beats “infinite”.
I find the increased world height much more important. Luanti can generate actual mountains, and caves where you'll want to bring ladders for your descent.
It was the first time, I felt like it made sense to build minecarts and intermediate mining bases, because the ores reach far deeper.
I played some minetest and then looked at Minecraft. Is minecraft really limited to -64 +256??? I read it a couple of times but still can't believe it. Ho can a game with °mine° in its name be so limited? More like Buildcraft Imo.
I believe, they increased it a little while ago, so it's actually -64 to +320 now.
But yeah, I don't think anyone's actually happy about the limited world height. It's so limited, because of the way Minecraft works on a technical level. It loads the map in chunks, which are just massive pillars, reaching from the bottom of the world all the way to the sky, across the whole 384 blocks.
As a result, if they increase the world height, they increase how many blocks have to be loaded at once, which increases the lag.
Luanti doesn't have this problem, because it uses cubic chunks instead.
That’s a really interesting point. Neat!
minecraft is not infinite there is a world border by default that makes the world about 60 million by 60 million blocks
Okay, but I mean, 60 million versus 30 thousand. The former is effectively “infinite”, I mean how many hours would it take you to walk that far?
KurtJMac started Far Lands or Bust in 2011, and reached 9.9 million blocks earlier this month.
It is basically infinite. I would be very surprised if you could reach the end. Having a pregenerated map also makes the game a lot lighter. (At the cost of longer world creation)
Yeah I also never reached the end, though I imagine if playing multiplayer, with enough players and time, that then at some point there won't be any untouched land.
Yeah, I hear that. Although, I’ve travelled many thousands of blocks in Minecraft worlds, I’ve never travelled tens of thousands, so the limits in Luanti work for me. The increased world depth in Luanti seems more beneficial to me. YMMV
erm achumally it goes to like 3 bajiklion until there is a world border 🤓👆
They fixed that quite a while back. It is 60000x60000x60000
Oh man, I remember this from years ago when the only 1-up on Minecraft it had, was that I could run it at 60 FPS, infinite chunks in all directions, no extreme lag spikes while generating the map, and further view distance.
Zero mods back then, so I'm happy to see the mod support!
hope they improve upon it, the old (when the banning was implemented) version of minetest was horrible. I'll be trying it soon :)
It has come a long way. These days it doesn't even come with a game preinstalled. You can play VoxeLibre, Asuna, and so much more. Plus the original Minetest game is still installable. Also there are quite a lot of mods and other content available.
The only gripes I really have is the security and UI design. Neither of them are that bad but they could be better.
What is the problem with security?
Online play is 100% unencrypted or authenticated. Client executes lua code sent by the server. I hope the code is kinda sandboxed but wouldnt put my hopes up there.
As far as I’m aware, most of the “dangerous” lua api (io/network etc) is blocked and only available to mods during the startup phase, and not otherwise during runtime.
But I’m sure there are workarounds. For one, I’ve written mods with rust for it, and you can require and then call any dynamic library through lua, with all of the io and networking you’d want, as long as it is brought in during the init phase. And the mods that do access the “dangerous” api, have to be explicitly given rights to do so (but again, by the server, not the clients) in the config before it works.
It’s not that bad for the most cases, as long as you trust the server. If playing single player, you personally control which mods get the secure environment access, so at that point it’s entirely your own fault, if you get exploited.
I hope they can build on some work from the lua devs. Isolating stuff like that is not always easy. But given lua is used extensively for embedded scripting, there is a good chance they can.
Also there isn't necessarily a clean environment between mods. This means one mod could modify another mod.
Too bad that luanti.org is note available...
Not sure why this was upvoted, the blog says it's theirs.
Moving Forward
With the new name, a few changes will be made in the engine and community. Obviously, all the repositories and community hubs will adopt the Luanti name in some form. You’ll be able to find the website at luanti.org and [snip]
They have already bought .org and .net. I guess they just haven't set them up yet.
Also luanti.net (which would be the most logical step to use that address because of the same TLD).
Why isn't something like this done prior to announcing the new name ...
Minetest doesn't have to turn into Roblox, we already have OpenBlox for that purpose
Edit: person below is now accusing me of promoting crypto
Cool so, you linked to some git repositories that haven't been updated in 4-5 years, and looking at their current website there seems to be some sort of crypto involved now.
They're not to be confused, the lead dev's (openblox.org) one was made on 2014 before some crypto dipshittos (openblox.IO) took their name
Okay, but openblox.org doesn't resolve a website at all, directing users instead to a domain registrar.
Lead dev no longer renews that domain for the site. Thats why the repo needs to be revived
Okay... So it sounds like a dead project to me? When Luanti seems to have a huge community around it already...
Minetest has been more a platform for making games on than a single game for at least a decade, since they added lua scripting. Seems like you're outraged over nothing with no real understanding of what Luanti has been and aims to be.
Why is this news??
Why isn't this news? They are changing the name which is a big deal
I dunno. Doesn't seem like a big deal to me, but your mileage may certainly vary.
I hope this is a joke cause Luanti sucks, stick with the already well known Minetest.
Minetest is a terrible name. It was created back when it was experimental with no plans for continuous development or direction.
It will take time to switch to the new name we will get there
True though, I perfer for it to be called "MineTest"
ok boomer
It's nice to see open-source things copying what dot-coms do when they're bored.
Wait. No it's not. It's actually worrying.
I worked for a company named essentially "The Portland Office", and it had that name for 30 years; because, honestly, who cares about a name? The product should stand out.
Even if you can objectively see the name as just a name, many people sadly can't. It is really difficult to recommend others to join, just because they come with the idea that it's a minecraft clone and since it's not a clone it feels janky.
I'm glad they dropped the name for something new.
Good for you, others are justifying about calling it "LoOaNtI"
this is ok. minetest was an awful name.
for those of you without the patience to read a blogpost, the new name's actually a bit of wordplay.
IMO, the worst thing about "Minetest" is that it sounded like it was just a test creation, a prototype or experiment. It's certainly well beyond that now. The announcement introduction mentions people associate it with being a Minecraft clone or alpha release, but even further, to me the name initially gave me the impression it was [still] someone's small hobby project. 'Luanti' is much better.
On this note, another thing I appreciate is what they said about "Free" and "Libre": those names are great for saying "This is a free/libre/open clone of [x]", and that's what I'll think when I see it. Software like LibreOffice aims to support Microsoft Office documents, OpenRTC2 and OpenTTD are for people who want to see those games pretty-faithfully cloned, even if extended. Luanti is not OpenMinecraft.
Agree 100%. I always though the name suggested it wasn’t quite a complete game. In fact at first I didn’t think it was a game at all.
Tbh Luanti is a pretty clever wordplay
Plus it sounds Italian
I don't think it was that bad. I think the new name is better though
Thanks for the TLDR, nice to know the reasons behind the name. And good reasons they are too.
Oh thank god. Minetest was the worst name, and the game is actually pretty cool. It definitely deserves a cool name, and Luanti sounds cool.
I was so scared it was going to be something silly.
I don't really like the new name yet, but it's a lot better than Minetest so I really can't complain.
I actually like the new name. It seems like when a community project renames it always is something even worse than the original name. This is a great name that doesn't sound silly to say out loud.
Literally just yesterday my wife learned of Minetest's existence and said it was a terrible name
Just tell her that you told them your wife didn't like the name so they changed it.
I've seen it a few times in passing and always assumed it was like, a tech demo or proof of concept.
It initially was that. Also the name wasn't meant to stick around forever.
But, out of a sudden, between updates, not even the new website URLs ready?
I don't follow Minetest development that closely anymore, but last time I checked there were no issues or pull requests on their GitHub, nor something official regarding a name change in the forums.
This feels like there are just a bunch of people haphazardly deciding there is a new name now.
Here's a post from May in the
MinetestLuanti forums discussing the name change: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?p=425205#p425205I'm not going to search further to find the original discussion, but another user in this thread mentions seeing talk of this about a year ago. I agree that it's not very professional for the new website to be in a less than functional state, but it feels like excitement or decision fatigue may be the culprit, not a rushed process. Then again, it's an open source video game, not everything has to be "professional" all the time. Meanwhile, enjoy this meme from luanti.org:
There were plenty of those threads and discussions happening during the past few years. This is a constant topic that came up in the forums and sometimes GitHub over and over again.
Yes, and in the last twelve months those discussions clearly accelerated, and that post made it clear the lead/original dev had made their mind up. Which very much negates you saying this was rushed.
"good news honey, they heard your complaint and renamed it"
It IS a terrible name. But it also is an over one decade old brand.
It will be hard to propagate the new name and have it as recognizable as "Minetest".
Those in open source circles will see through places like GamingOnLinux, Lemmy, Reddit and the official IRC/Discord. Those that don't find out probably are no where near the open source gaming community so it won't really matter.
It made sense at the time...
the new name is equally terrible, at least in terms of pronunciation.
Lu-aunty
This is good news! Anyone here played it recently? How far has the game come in terms of content compared to Minecraft or Vintage Story?
it's just a framework, it depends on the mods you use. you can use mineclone2 if you want all the features of minecraft
Btw, mineclone2 also rebranded as Voxelibre, months ago, and for the same reasons. Voxelibre now actively moves away from copying Minecraft exactly.
If you want the closest copy (and my personal recommendation) check out Mineclonia.
Mobs kinda suck, because the engine has no native mob API.
There are great mapgens who take advantage of the 1000's of blocks world height.
You can use the mod lib from contentdb. Also it is worth pointing out that they are moving towards a subgame focus not a mod focus. The original game has been discontinued and isn't preinstalled. You install a game like Asuna to get gameplay and content.
Of course you can still use Minetest game as a base for mods. I do that for simple worlds.
No, mobs, not mods. Monsters, animals, NPC's. The lua libs are nice and all but they are always glitchy in hitbox and position.
Edit: you meant the second sentence? My bad.
1000s*
Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?
No, it is something that has been discussed for quite some time. No one could decide on a good name until now
One could argue they still haven't
Since Minecraft blew up with 12 year olds using potatoe hardware I think the criteria required would be:
12 year old thinks name is great and can spell it
it can run on a potatoe
Who wants to volunteer to collect this data
You could argue but you would be wrong. The name gas changed. There is still some work needed to move domains but that's minor.
I'm sure it is
That woul've been: Minetest Immortal
never thought i'd see minetest rebranding itself (if rebrand is the correct word at all anyway)
Man, I saw them initiating discussions around the name like a year ago. I did not expect anything to actually come from that after all this time. But yeah, glad that it did.
Now we just need a better default font. 🙃
And maybe a really solid UI design. It seems like a not of games don't have a good UI.
I like the meme.
I just wish they would merge the "truly infinite worlds" branch. The horizontal limits are to tight for this kind of game.
Gonna miss the old one but I definitely had to go. I kinda like Luanti too
How are you guys pronouncing this?
Personally, I’ve found it sounds kind of nice when said like “Loon tea”.
It just looks like "Loo wan tee" to me.
Edit: Actually, just read the article, and considering the name Luanti is a mix between the Finnish word "creation" and the LUA programming language; and I'm preeetty sure LUA is pronounced "loo-wah" or "lew-ah", I think the Luanti pronunciation is more likely to be "loo-wun-tee".
It's finnish, so like it's written. Foreign concept for english speakers, I know.
It is quite literally a foreign concept to anyone who only speaks English. That's how foreign languages work.
How is the word pronounced though?
I'm a finn, so the only advice I can give is that it's pronounced like luanti in finnish.
Not very useful, I know, sorry. Nau ai häv tu kou präktis mai rälli inglish.
The german way
Luh-Anti?
That's pretty much how it sounded in my lingual mind.
Except Loo (Lew) instead of Luh Lu-Auntie.
To go with your Lu-Vati & Lu-Mudder
A luna familia
Loo-wun-tee?
Lmao loo nah tee, like illuminati :D
What a terrible name.
Anything is better than minetest which sounded like a hastily written debugging mod for Minecraft
Did they ever fix the game having a maximum map size of like 10.000 by 10.000? That limitation always seemed to put it at a disadvantage compared to Minecraft, for larger communities
Currently, the world dimensions are larger than that (according to the wiki):
“Minetest's world is a huge cube with a side length of ca. 60000 blocks. Each dimension (X, Y and Z) ranges from −30912 to 30927.”
That’s better than I was thinking. But still, nothing beats “infinite”.
I find the increased world height much more important. Luanti can generate actual mountains, and caves where you'll want to bring ladders for your descent.
It was the first time, I felt like it made sense to build minecarts and intermediate mining bases, because the ores reach far deeper.
I played some minetest and then looked at Minecraft. Is minecraft really limited to -64 +256??? I read it a couple of times but still can't believe it. Ho can a game with °mine° in its name be so limited? More like Buildcraft Imo.
I believe, they increased it a little while ago, so it's actually -64 to +320 now.
But yeah, I don't think anyone's actually happy about the limited world height. It's so limited, because of the way Minecraft works on a technical level. It loads the map in chunks, which are just massive pillars, reaching from the bottom of the world all the way to the sky, across the whole 384 blocks.
As a result, if they increase the world height, they increase how many blocks have to be loaded at once, which increases the lag.
Luanti doesn't have this problem, because it uses cubic chunks instead.
That’s a really interesting point. Neat!
minecraft is not infinite there is a world border by default that makes the world about 60 million by 60 million blocks
Okay, but I mean, 60 million versus 30 thousand. The former is effectively “infinite”, I mean how many hours would it take you to walk that far?
KurtJMac started Far Lands or Bust in 2011, and reached 9.9 million blocks earlier this month.
It is basically infinite. I would be very surprised if you could reach the end. Having a pregenerated map also makes the game a lot lighter. (At the cost of longer world creation)
Yeah I also never reached the end, though I imagine if playing multiplayer, with enough players and time, that then at some point there won't be any untouched land.
Yeah, I hear that. Although, I’ve travelled many thousands of blocks in Minecraft worlds, I’ve never travelled tens of thousands, so the limits in Luanti work for me. The increased world depth in Luanti seems more beneficial to me. YMMV
erm achumally it goes to like 3 bajiklion until there is a world border 🤓👆
They fixed that quite a while back. It is 60000x60000x60000
Oh man, I remember this from years ago when the only 1-up on Minecraft it had, was that I could run it at 60 FPS, infinite chunks in all directions, no extreme lag spikes while generating the map, and further view distance.
Zero mods back then, so I'm happy to see the mod support!
hope they improve upon it, the old (when the banning was implemented) version of minetest was horrible. I'll be trying it soon :)
It has come a long way. These days it doesn't even come with a game preinstalled. You can play VoxeLibre, Asuna, and so much more. Plus the original Minetest game is still installable. Also there are quite a lot of mods and other content available.
The only gripes I really have is the security and UI design. Neither of them are that bad but they could be better.
What is the problem with security?
Online play is 100% unencrypted or authenticated. Client executes lua code sent by the server. I hope the code is kinda sandboxed but wouldnt put my hopes up there.
As far as I’m aware, most of the “dangerous” lua api (io/network etc) is blocked and only available to mods during the startup phase, and not otherwise during runtime.
But I’m sure there are workarounds. For one, I’ve written mods with rust for it, and you can require and then call any dynamic library through lua, with all of the io and networking you’d want, as long as it is brought in during the init phase. And the mods that do access the “dangerous” api, have to be explicitly given rights to do so (but again, by the server, not the clients) in the config before it works.
It’s not that bad for the most cases, as long as you trust the server. If playing single player, you personally control which mods get the secure environment access, so at that point it’s entirely your own fault, if you get exploited.
I hope they can build on some work from the lua devs. Isolating stuff like that is not always easy. But given lua is used extensively for embedded scripting, there is a good chance they can.
Also there isn't necessarily a clean environment between mods. This means one mod could modify another mod.
Too bad that luanti.org is note available...
Not sure why this was upvoted, the blog says it's theirs.
They have already bought .org and .net. I guess they just haven't set them up yet.
Also
luanti.net(which would be the most logical step to use that address because of the same TLD).Why isn't something like this done prior to announcing the new name ...
Minetest doesn't have to turn into Roblox, we already have OpenBlox for that purpose
Edit: person below is now accusing me of promoting crypto
Cool so, you linked to some git repositories that haven't been updated in 4-5 years, and looking at their current website there seems to be some sort of crypto involved now.
They're not to be confused, the lead dev's (openblox.org) one was made on 2014 before some crypto dipshittos (openblox.IO) took their name
Okay, but openblox.org doesn't resolve a website at all, directing users instead to a domain registrar.
Lead dev no longer renews that domain for the site. Thats why the repo needs to be revived
Okay... So it sounds like a dead project to me? When Luanti seems to have a huge community around it already...
Minetest has been more a platform for making games on than a single game for at least a decade, since they added lua scripting. Seems like you're outraged over nothing with no real understanding of what Luanti has been and aims to be.
Why is this news??
Why isn't this news? They are changing the name which is a big deal
I dunno. Doesn't seem like a big deal to me, but your mileage may certainly vary.
I hope this is a joke cause Luanti sucks, stick with the already well known Minetest.
Minetest is a terrible name. It was created back when it was experimental with no plans for continuous development or direction.
It will take time to switch to the new name we will get there
True though, I perfer for it to be called "MineTest"
ok boomer
It's nice to see open-source things copying what dot-coms do when they're bored.
Wait. No it's not. It's actually worrying.
I worked for a company named essentially "The Portland Office", and it had that name for 30 years; because, honestly, who cares about a name? The product should stand out.
Even if you can objectively see the name as just a name, many people sadly can't. It is really difficult to recommend others to join, just because they come with the idea that it's a minecraft clone and since it's not a clone it feels janky.
I'm glad they dropped the name for something new.
Good for you, others are justifying about calling it "LoOaNtI"