 | Minetest | 359 Members |
| Official Chatroom For The Libre Voxel Game Engine Join Our Community! +minetest:tchncs.de Latest version: 5.4.1 Rules: http://wiki.minetest.net/IRC#Rule | 59 Servers |
| Minetest | 359 Members |
| Official Chatroom For The Libre Voxel Game Engine Join Our Community! +minetest:tchncs.de Latest version: 5.4.1 Rules: http://wiki.minetest.net/IRC#Rule | 59 Servers |
| Sender | Message | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Jul 2021 | ||
 nephele | > MineClone 2 is a great game and I don't understand why it isn't sufficient to say "It's basically like that proprietary block game, but it doesn't make you trade your freedom to have fun. Also, if you can program, you can help make it better" Because 1) is a disadvantag "basically" is not the same as the same 2) is not easy to proove to users and 3) is true for both and irrelevant to users, that there is more 3 for them than for us is even a disadvantage | 17:27:10 |
 clementine_cruiser | think about it from a user perspective: a) getting above 99.9% similarity to the original requires ENORMOUS amounts of effort for increasingly small differences. You are trying to emulate a constantly moving target with a gigantic ecosystem around it, with a completely different technological framework b) the user is automatically conditioned to expect everything to be 100% identical. Every minor difference will put them at unease, either because you set their expectations that way (demo, or simply by the fact of the similarity), or by the Uncanny-Valley effect. c) this leads to the user unconsciously, but actively seeking any difference, as minor as it is, and evaluating it emotionally as 'papercut' (minor, insignificant experience degradation that sums up). And papercuts can be literally everything - from a single pixel in the text font to the fact their favourite mod is also 100% identical but called differently (craft-> test, or whatever) to differences completely outside the scope you emulate (mods, servers, ...) -> You are setting yourself up to have exponentially diminishing returns in trying to imitate a moving target, with your manhours of work getting more devalued the closer you get (because the last 0.10% are the most time-consuming to imitate well), and actively conditioning the user to view every difference as a flaw in your execution, rather than being maybe a conscious design decision | 18:06:55 |
| nephele | I would much rather have a mod people say "this was inspired by minecraft" than one that "is trying to be like minecraft" :) | 18:12:39 |
| clementine_cruiser | well, it's a tradeoff; you save 100% of work on design, by accepting it will always be judged as 'bad imitation trash' at worst and 'shameless copy that's going to be outdated soon anyway' at best. design is hard. that's why the tradeoff is still worth it in many cases...but creates a cap of 'value' in disregard to the effort you put into it | 18:17:36 |
| clementine_cruiser | as soon as you put real effort into things, it may make sense to put some of the effort into design as well, which then changes the entire goal you work towards. | 18:19:25 |
| clementine_cruiser | of course if your only intention is to treat it as a programming challenge of 'how can I get to this game-design I will follow as close as possible, with my existing coding tools', you switch the challenge from designing a good experience to designing code towards a fixed purpose, and that's just fine, as long as you're aware of what you're doing. (and the inevitably diminishing returns) | 18:34:29 |
| clementine_cruiser | * of course if your only intention is to treat it as a programming challenge of 'how can I get to this game-design I will follow as close as possible, with my existing coding tools', you switch the challenge from designing a good experience to designing code towards a fixed purpose, and that's just fine, as long as you're aware of what you're doing. (and the inevitably diminishing returns) | 18:35:23 |
| clementine_cruiser | because once you're doing imitations, the way it is perceived is even more prone to marketing... https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1418626164772331523/photo/1 | 18:52:15 |
 wsor | lol, thats great | 18:54:22 |
| nephele | Yes, windows 11 does look like plasma | 18:55:20 |
| clementine_cruiser | the comments on that tweet exactly highlight the 'perception problem' - on one hand you have 'good artists copy, great artists steal', on the other hand you have 'get this trash imitation out of my face'. Perception is powerful; so is marketing | 18:56:04 |
| nephele | I honestly don't mind if good design gets reused... time will tell if this is the case for WIN 11 | 18:57:12 |
| clementine_cruiser | yeah, if you have enough pull to capture a userbase, simply imitating competitor's features is the 100% ideal way to go. I just somehow doubt minetest has the market 'weight' for competing with microsoft... | 18:58:24 |
| clementine_cruiser | the contentDB is one of the most powerful features highlighting the strengths of minetest in a way minecraft can't directly do, utilizing and highlighting the possibilities of liberal content licensing, to make installing mods as straightforward as possible. decentralization features (hosting your own server with 1 click, and no dependency on some controlling instance), is another such strength, and lua modding the third | 19:10:43 |
| clementine_cruiser | if we can connect these strengths to also tie into gameplay by designing gameplay mechanisms only possible through them, minetest automatically gets killer features to stand on its own solely from a casual-user perspective | 19:13:03 |
| clementine_cruiser | * if we can connect these strengths to also tie into gameplay by designing gameplay mechanisms only possible through them, minetest automatically gets killer features to stand on its own solely from a casual-user perspective | 19:15:24 |
| clementine_cruiser | but that requires finding own, unique design ideas that work and are fun... and that may be a lot harder to succeed at than reverse-engineering how some cows move ^^ | 19:23:21 |
 @ericxdu:matrix.org left the room. | 20:24:48 | |
| clementine_cruiser | that last message came off a bit dismissive. I meant, harder from a game design viewpoint, not less work or less hard in general when implementing it | 23:59:54 |
| 25 Jul 2021 | ||
| nephele | > decentralization features (hosting your own server with 1 click, and no dependency on some controlling instance), Like the serverlist and contentdb? | 11:02:10 |
| nephele | >but that requires finding own, unique design ideas that work and are fun... and that may be a lot harder to succeed at than reverse-engineering how some cows move ^^ Well, I mean i have some stuff in my gamemode i like, just a bit too lacking in content for "general" enjoyment :P | 11:02:43 |
 emorrp1 joined the room. | 22:16:06 | |
| emorrp1 left the room. | 22:17:48 | |
| 26 Jul 2021 | ||
 woody2001 joined the room. | 09:32:27 | |
 freshreplicant | Has something changed about mapgen in recent dev versions? | 11:30:06 |
| freshreplicant | I'm noticing some odd stuff, the water level is wrong somehow and the biomes flag was turned off. | 11:30:36 |
| wsor | Check gour minetest.conf, some game or mod set global mapgen settings | 11:48:26 |
| freshreplicant | In reply to @wsor4035:matrix.orgOh man, ok. I think it might have been a game. Could be water_game. | 11:50:00 |
| wsor | Your the umpteenth person to complain | 11:53:10 |
 rubenwardy | 5.5 has some validation against this - MT will throw an error if a mod or game tries to set global mapgen settings | 12:22:12 |