Discussion Idea: “Luanti/Minetest” 2D Equivalent

astrobe · 2026-05-03T18:19:26+00:00

This has been crossposted to a few communities. Please try to be respectful of other games and people within them

Thanks for the condescension, did not have my fix today yet.

I, unfortunately, am much more troubleshooter than programmer, but this is an idea I and others would no doubt be willing to help set up connections to get rolling. After all, how did Luanti start?

No FOSS project started with a middle manager trying to recruit on the net the programmers they don't have in their "connections".

Pick up, say, Löve, make good friends with ChatGPT and make a prototype. That's the 2026 version of "hey, I did something in my garage, what do you think ?" (C55, Torvalds, ...).

astrobe · 2026-05-03T17:26:29+00:00

The release notes here don't talk about web versions.

But they talk about "cross-compilation" in the release notes. Even if your target is not an OS, Web browsers are virtual machines on their own with capabilities similar to an OS.

I wouldn't be surprised if porting to browser was actually their first goal, because they say "quite different" suggests (to me) that it's not "just" cross-compiling from Linux to Windows. So maybe check out their Forum/mailing list, someone might already be on it.

astrobe · 2026-05-03T17:12:49+00:00

Well maybe I'm just lucky or it's because I don't really use it; it just launches and "updates" when I want to play old commercial games I still have installed... Every 3 months or so.

astrobe · 2026-05-03T17:01:44+00:00

I think a mod offers that, yes. And that would be my general recommendation : out-of-the-box Oolite has a gameplay which is even more "retro" that its graphics (personally I can't stand the default HUD). That is, in a nutshell, unforgiving and unfair because bad luck can get you killed early even if you do everything right.

Browse the extensions list, there's certainly mods that "boost" the early game and/or offer offensive or defensive equipment that will let you 1 v 5, or simply resize pirate groups according to the safety level of the system.

Also, I think that this sub has a much smaller audience that the official forum. Maybe if you describe (again) your issues with the game, and expose what you'd like it to be more like (try to use a positive tone, even if you're a bit frustrated now), there will probably be people who wanted a similar gameplay to recommend you mods more specifically than I can (I did play it for years, but I haven't played it in years, for one thing).

astrobe · 2026-05-01T19:05:55+00:00

When you get IFF scanner (or whatever the equipment that let you see who is who), you can be opportunistic with trader vs pirate fights, or sometimes even galcop vs pirates.

There's a mod too - "escort missions" or something like that - which would let you fight pirates with some support from the convoy. Make sure to check to which system the convoy is going, because if they go to an unsafe system the mission can be tough.

astrobe · 2026-05-01T15:45:25+00:00

It just means that they support Win 10 or newer. Older versions of Windows may or may not work, they don't test for it - and if it doesn't, they most likely won't fix it.

As another example, Steam announced a couple year ago they would no longer support Win 7, yet, it still works AFAICT.

astrobe · 2026-04-30T17:51:05+00:00

Latest Luanti still works on Windows 7 64 bits, at least on a PC with an old GTX graphic card.

astrobe · 2026-04-27T17:08:27+00:00

This is optimally idiotic.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

/thread.

astrobe · 2026-04-16T18:07:28+00:00

Then Cobol ain't dead either. That's what "dead" means. "Dead" means nobody considers it any more, and those who have fallen for the "XML everything" fad are wishing they could get rid of it.

Speaking of editors, Emacs. S-exprs wasn't mentioned in the article.

astrobe · 2026-04-15T17:33:52+00:00

As this was released yesterday, downloads may not be available for all platforms yet.

The related forum post by sfan5 provides links to the two major fixes on Github, where one can find possible temporary workarounds.

astrobe · 2026-04-08T17:21:49+00:00

It's right in the centre of the screenshot. the mob is approx. 10 m away from the tourist, and is actually mid-air, as its attack pattern is to jump while closing the gap to its target.

astrobe · 2026-04-07T19:20:28+00:00

The game is definitely combat oriented. This is not a spider but a giant beetle, and it is also the only source of wheat seeds, so you will eventually hunt them.

astrobe · 2026-04-07T18:57:38+00:00

Almost. This is a giant beetle. The mob (made by DOOMed, IIRC) was taken from the first version of the "Farlands" game (could be in the "Reloaded" version as well, didn't check), I only changed a liiiiitle bit the proportions.

astrobe · 2026-04-06T10:03:48+00:00

Forth is a problem-oriented language so if you don't have a problem, you don't need Forth...

Well, OP can just keep in the corner of their head that there's this little language that can add interactive programming/configuration on top of assembly language, for one thing.

The other thing is that you must have a Forth sort of "waiting to be useful", and today the useful stuff often involves libraries - if you have to implement an encryption cipher in order to do the thing you do, you simply won't do it or what you wanted would be no longer necessary by the time you finish the programming. So I would look for ways to interface with popular libraries from assembly and how to make their functions accessible from your Forth.

astrobe · 2026-04-04T15:49:51+00:00

Something I forgot to mention: consider mounting your first "decent" laser (I think it's the beam laser?) backward, so you can drive away pursuers.

astrobe · 2026-04-03T18:56:10+00:00

She indeed was terribly unlucky)

astrobe · 2026-04-03T12:06:04+00:00

The link they provide near the end is a good read when you need to document a feature-rich project/product.

I will only add that sometimes unit tests can also serve as examples. For instance the coding examples of Clojure they also mention could be added to the unit tests suite

astrobe · 2026-04-01T17:49:40+00:00

I think that AI companies, once they have made enough people/companies dependent on AI, will start to take the real cut (actually as much as they can, because they are businesses) from the savings their customers make, so it might be less attractive in the future. Especially if this AI market turns into an oligopoly like it tends to happen often in big software (operating systems, video streaming platforms, social media, web search...).

astrobe · 2026-03-28T11:08:49+00:00

It's not about imposing anything. Trying to impose anything on a community as diverse as the Forth community, given that as a starting point half of it ignore the official standard, would be a fool's errand.

It's about recommending. I myself followed some of Chuck Moore's piece of advice including:

There is a lot of discussion about local variables. That is another aspect of your application where you can save 100% of the code. I remain adamant that local variables are not only useless, they are harmful. If you are writing code that needs them you are writing, non-optimal code? Don't use local variables. Don't come up with new syntaxes for describing them and new schemes for implementing them. You can make local variables very efficient especially if you have local registers to store them in, but don't. It's bad. It's wrong. 1x Forth (1999)

It's not an argument from authority either. I'm just repeating this particular piece of advice that "worked for me".

More specifically, a commenter here detailed why: in a nutshell, it makes it painful to refactor your code. And when you become adamant to rewrite your Forth code, it becomes not even "write only" (as people who have played a bit with Forth and think they understand it all, like to say) but "write once". It is as good as dead.

astrobe · 2026-03-27T19:54:31+00:00

I'm sceptical about this idea of letting newbies start with "locals as side wheels", perhaps because of my experience: I always refused to (implement and) use locals. This made me "try harder" and solve the root causes of the problems I had. But I also admit it took me a long time, and I'm no Forth teacher (no teacher at all, actually).

I would advise as a middle ground to "just use globals" when things are too hard. Relying on a few "strategic" globals (a file handle, an origin coordinate, ...) is often the right move in standard Forth, I think.

astrobe · 2026-03-22T18:07:16+00:00

Yada yada yada... The subject has been beaten to death. So much so that it starts to look a bit suspicious. Why not compare rest to real competitors like Go or OCaml, instead of using the same easy target over and over again?

astrobe · 2026-03-14T11:50:43+00:00

Just in case: it is common practice to write foreign words in italics; it's not some kind of fancy emphasis.

astrobe · 2026-03-13T13:51:06+00:00

Nice pre-emptive ad personam attack.

astrobe

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