6 ms·

Minetest for the Web

157 points by tech234a 4y ago

jhatemyjob 4y ago
Wait... this is amazing. Is there Lua addon support?
- ROllerozxa 4y ago
  All Minetest games consist purely of Lua, so of course there is. I don't know if there's a way to "sideload" games and mods into the browser storage but installing them from ContentDB works.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Seems like one might be able to use emscripten_wget or something. Emscripten can expose a unix-like filesystem
- jasonjayr 4y ago
  The official mod API is pure lua: (as an example:) https://github.com/tenplus1/minetest_game/blob/master/mods/farming/init.lua https://github.com/tenplus1/minetest_game/blob/master/mods/f... That code would run server side, but there is some recent work for client-side scripts as well.
mysterydip 4y ago
It would be great to be able to pair this with the server, letting people play on it together just by going to a website. I have a server set up for my daughter and her cousins, so reducing the friction to "go to this site, that's it" would be very useful.
- satoshinm 4y ago
  This is the precise reason I'm also very interested in this project (or more generally, any implementation of a web-based voxel game). Douglas Crockford correctly identified "load and go delivery" as a key feature of the web platform. I've lost friends as players because of problems they had installing the Java version of Minecraft on their new PC. If they could simply visit a website in their browser, especially on a mobile device, we could play again. Amusingly, very early versions of Minecraft circa 2009 _did_ run on the web browser: as a Java applet. This was short lived, and of course since 2017, Java applets are completely deprecated. Mojang also published a JavaScript implementation of Minecraft at https://classic.minecraft.net/ https://classic.minecraft.net/. You can share a link to play multiplayer. However, it is only a version of Minecraft "classic" (reports as 0.0.23a_01), and even then, a reimplementation, not 100% faithful to the original. It seems to be more of a "hey look what you can run your browser" cool tech demo of WebGL and WebRTC, than a serious multiplayer survival game. Hopefully Minetest for the Web can succeed in this niche. I, for one, am rooting for them.
- paradust 4y ago
  This is the idea behind the "Play with Friends" feature, still under development. Check back in a few weeks!
makarhum 4y ago
Here is the original Minetest project if someone has missed it: https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/.
dekhn 4y ago
Minetest is great. After the last Microsoft debacle I looked into Minetest and after a bit managed to amass a nice collection of mods to make a truly enjoyable game. UIt's everything Minecraft has come to not be.
- Macha 4y ago
  What mods do you use? I've tried base mineclone2 and mineclone 5 and they just feel like a clunkier version of minecraft. I played Minecraft Alpha and that was more polished.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    3d_armor, awards, basic_materials, beds, binoculars, biome_lib, boats, bones, bucket, butterflies, carts, chest_of_everything, compost, creative, default, dfcaverns, digilines, digistuff, display_biome, doors, dungeon_loot, dye, dynamic_liquid, env_sounds, farming, fire, fireflies, flowers, game_commands, give_initial_stuff, item_drop, keys, map, mesecons, mobs_animal, mobs_monster, mobs_npc, mobs_redo, moreblocks, mtg_craftguide, pipeworks, player_api, ropes, screwdriver, sethome, sfinv, signs_bot, spawn, stairs, tnt, travelnet, tubelib2, unifieddyes, unified_inventory, vessels, vines, walls, wielded_light, wool, xpanes So basically, it's the minetest game with a number of additions to make survival mode more interesting or convenient (dfcaverns, mobs, travelnet, unified_inventory, ropes), some automation I haven't used yet (mesecons, digilines, signs_bot), some things that sounded cool but haven't tried yet (tubelibe, signs ) and other things that round out the world (wool, dyes, vines). I make a small number of concessions in survival mode: occasional use of flying, XYZ location, extremely rare use of the chest of everything or /giveme. And a stratum of iron at -8 :) My current focus is on dfcaverns- massive caves with different ecosystems that involve digging deep. For exmaple, in minetest, ores often don't show up frequently until you get to -1024, which means digging straight down and building elevators for a while. I played Mineclone 5 for a while and it was mostly feature complete for what I wanted to do, but it doesn't play with other mods all that well, while all the mods I selected have good interoperability.
  - poser-boy 4y ago
    I suppose it depends on perspective. MC Alpha these days lacks performance optimisation, and cannot beat the extensibility of Minetest IMO.
dvh 4y ago
https://minetest.dustlabs.io/mt/minetest.js(1) https://minetest.dustlabs.io/mt/minetest.js(1): Uncaught RangeError: WebAssembly.Memory(): could not allocate memory
- isaacaggrey 4y ago
  I also see an error but instead: Uncaught TypeError: GLctx is undefined -- Firefox 105 on Linux 64-bit (ElementaryOS)
  - paradust 4y ago
    Can you check if the browser supports WebGL2? https://get.webgl.org/webgl2/ https://get.webgl.org/webgl2/
- paradust 4y ago
  It needs to allocate 2 GB on startup. Could you be low on memory?
satoshinm 4y ago
This looks amazing, great work! A web-based "Minecraft" has great potential, in my opinion, and has long been a dream of mine. My humble attempt at such a project: https://satoshinm.github.io/NetCraft/ https://satoshinm.github.io/NetCraft/ (2017) - a port of Michael Fogleman's Craft, a simple Minecraft clone written in C, ported to the web using WebAssembly and Emscripten. It works, reasonably well (after a few small enhancements/fixes to Emscripten) but did not get very far. But it could be so much more, a "metaverse", if you will. Minetest is a much more sophisticated application: paradust7's minetest-wasm port, even in its early stages, is already quite impressive. If it can be optimized, with streamlined add-on installation, seamless multiplayer/networking support, browser compatibility improved - I would not be surprised if this project catches on and gives Minecraft a run for its money. Having the ability to easily casually play within a web browser, no install needed, is a massive advantage over the Java or C++ implementations of Minecraft - which have not (officially) embraced modding to the extent Minetest has. If successful, this project could capture the large and diverse community of Minecraft modders - able to more seamlessly deliver their creative content through the web. Excited to see how it develops further.
- Sardtok 4y ago
  I guess you never played the early alpha versions of Minecraft. It used to run as a Java applet back when that was still kind of a thing. It ran just fine in the browser 13 years ago. Of course, you'd have to put in a bit of effort to be able to run an applet today, as that tech has been shut down due to security issues quite a while back.
  - slim 4y ago
    it was outdated even back then
robotnikman 4y ago
Speaking of Minetest and the Web, it would be great if there was a web based control panel for Minetest servers, similar to how there are many out there for minecraft servers like Multicraft
tomrod 4y ago
A lot of lag, but has a lot of promise. Neat!
paradust 4y ago
Hi all, I made this. Surprised by the sudden interest. It has been live but unchanged for 6 months. There's an updated launcher. It's not finished yet, but it is nicer for exploring single-player community-made games: https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ez/ https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ez/ I'm not actively working on this, as I have concluded it is not (yet) possible to create a good web experience. There are problems with storage, network, keyboard side effects (e.g. Ctrl, W), concurrency, and performance that need to be addressed by browser vendors. I highly recommend installing the native Minetest!
- freedomben 4y ago
  Neat project! And thanks for the explanation :-) Do you think the browser issues are being addressed already or will be addressed soon? or do you think it's a low priority for them? I would think enabling complex WASM apps would be a priority (especially for Google/Chrome) but you never know.
  - paradust 4y ago
    There is definitely a tremendous amount of work going into emscripten/wasm. Minetest is multi-threaded, and so relies on SharedArrayBuffer which only became available in 2020. The UX issues do seem to be stubbornly persistent though. I ran into the same issues long ago porting games with NaCl and asm.js. I'm not sure what is preventing progress there.
    - mysterydip 4y ago
      Two of the browsers are owned by the same companies that control two of the walled-garden app stores. The better the UX is for web apps, the less need people have to jump through app store hoops.
    - satoshinm 4y ago
      I sympathize with the persistent UX issues with web-based voxel engines. I think what is really needed is a UI/UX expert (unfortunately not me) willing to push forward and drive fixes across the entire stack: the game engine, Emscripten, and even investigating and submitting fixes/enhancements to web browsers - owning the complete experience. For what it's worth, when porting NetCraft I did make an effort to isolate, fix and upstream various UX fixes to Emscripten: https://github.com/satoshinm/emglfwbugs https://github.com/satoshinm/emglfwbugs with _some_ success; the developers of Emscripten are happy to accept pull requests. But I agree there's a lot of papercuts, and tracking down each of the usability nits could essentially be a full-time job... For the keybinding problem, I've found using backquote/tilde key for escape can sufficiently workaround the un-interceptable escape key. It also works well on mobile browsers without escape keys. But the problems with multi-gigabyte world storage, multi-threaded networking, SharedArrayBuffer, may require more invasive architectural changes. At this point, maybe a rewrite focused on web support from the beginning would easier than a port? But _a lot_ of work was put into Minetest over the years, it is great having the library of mods already developed for Minetest, available on the web. Although the same could be said for Minecraft itself. In any case, thank you for your work porting Minetest to the web. I appreciate it moving the needle in the "web-based Minecraft clone" niche. Even if it may not the be all to end all, hopefully the UX blockers can be resolved, fit and finish, if not in Minetest itself maybe it will inspire others to create something anew with lessons learned from your port. One step closer to the metaverse.
freedomben 4y ago
Minetest is an absolutely incredible project. My kids love to play it and it's one I can get behind because I can easily self-host so I own all the data, and I know my kids aren't talking to internet strangers through the game. It's packaged on most distros also so you can probably `apt get install minetest` or `dnf install minetest` and have it running. You can host games on the LAN from your machine, or you can easily start a server. On fedora you can trivially `dnf install minetest-server` and then run `minetestserver` and you've got a server!
- rollcat 4y ago
  Hosting a private Minecraft server is also quite easy, you just need a JVM and a freely redistributable .jar file. I think Minetest will perform much better on low-end hardware though; you can use PaperMC, Sodium, etc to improve Minecraft performance, but Minetest runs much smoother out of the box. Anyone here got experience running both Minecraft and Minetest servers? How do they compare?
  - udkl 4y ago
    You could also scale to zero a minecraft server with fly.dev https://fly.io/blog/scale-to-zero-minecraft/ https://fly.io/blog/scale-to-zero-minecraft/ The other voxel OS game is : https://veloren.net/ https://veloren.net/
qwinning 4y ago
Runs better than I expected on my browser, it gives me ideas on porting other software to webassembly :)
ZoomerCretin 4y ago
The web used to be full of applications like this. First Flash, then Java. Now we have open standards that are used so rarely that they are notable post-worthy events. Why is WASM not used as extensively as Flash and Java were?
- est31 4y ago
  People built apps in Flash because they could put great experiences onto whatever outdated crappy IE version they had to target. There was also a really great editor. Lastly, the APIs for a lot of stuff just didn't exist. There aren't really great wasm editors any more. JS frontend development has replaced most of that. Wasm is used but mainly to port existing applications to the web, like in this instance, or to implement client side computation heavy applications. It's also rarer because it's still quite recent compared to JS which has tons of inertia. Generally, incumbents are only replaced if the new solution is really better than the incumbent (or there is a powerful enough trend).

157 points by tech234a 4y ago

jhatemyjob 4y ago

Wait... this is amazing. Is there Lua addon support?

ROllerozxa 4y ago
All Minetest games consist purely of Lua, so of course there is. I don't know if there's a way to "sideload" games and mods into the browser storage but installing them from ContentDB works.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Seems like one might be able to use emscripten_wget or something. Emscripten can expose a unix-like filesystem
jasonjayr 4y ago
The official mod API is pure lua: (as an example:) https://github.com/tenplus1/minetest_game/blob/master/mods/farming/init.lua https://github.com/tenplus1/minetest_game/blob/master/mods/f... That code would run server side, but there is some recent work for client-side scripts as well.

mysterydip 4y ago

It would be great to be able to pair this with the server, letting people play on it together just by going to a website. I have a server set up for my daughter and her cousins, so reducing the friction to "go to this site, that's it" would be very useful.

satoshinm 4y ago
This is the precise reason I'm also very interested in this project (or more generally, any implementation of a web-based voxel game). Douglas Crockford correctly identified "load and go delivery" as a key feature of the web platform. I've lost friends as players because of problems they had installing the Java version of Minecraft on their new PC. If they could simply visit a website in their browser, especially on a mobile device, we could play again. Amusingly, very early versions of Minecraft circa 2009 _did_ run on the web browser: as a Java applet. This was short lived, and of course since 2017, Java applets are completely deprecated. Mojang also published a JavaScript implementation of Minecraft at https://classic.minecraft.net/ https://classic.minecraft.net/. You can share a link to play multiplayer. However, it is only a version of Minecraft "classic" (reports as 0.0.23a_01), and even then, a reimplementation, not 100% faithful to the original. It seems to be more of a "hey look what you can run your browser" cool tech demo of WebGL and WebRTC, than a serious multiplayer survival game. Hopefully Minetest for the Web can succeed in this niche. I, for one, am rooting for them.
paradust 4y ago
This is the idea behind the "Play with Friends" feature, still under development. Check back in a few weeks!

makarhum 4y ago

Here is the original Minetest project if someone has missed it: https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/.

dekhn 4y ago

Minetest is great. After the last Microsoft debacle I looked into Minetest and after a bit managed to amass a nice collection of mods to make a truly enjoyable game. UIt's everything Minecraft has come to not be.

Macha 4y ago
What mods do you use? I've tried base mineclone2 and mineclone 5 and they just feel like a clunkier version of minecraft. I played Minecraft Alpha and that was more polished.
- dekhn 4y ago
  3d_armor, awards, basic_materials, beds, binoculars, biome_lib, boats, bones, bucket, butterflies, carts, chest_of_everything, compost, creative, default, dfcaverns, digilines, digistuff, display_biome, doors, dungeon_loot, dye, dynamic_liquid, env_sounds, farming, fire, fireflies, flowers, game_commands, give_initial_stuff, item_drop, keys, map, mesecons, mobs_animal, mobs_monster, mobs_npc, mobs_redo, moreblocks, mtg_craftguide, pipeworks, player_api, ropes, screwdriver, sethome, sfinv, signs_bot, spawn, stairs, tnt, travelnet, tubelib2, unifieddyes, unified_inventory, vessels, vines, walls, wielded_light, wool, xpanes So basically, it's the minetest game with a number of additions to make survival mode more interesting or convenient (dfcaverns, mobs, travelnet, unified_inventory, ropes), some automation I haven't used yet (mesecons, digilines, signs_bot), some things that sounded cool but haven't tried yet (tubelibe, signs ) and other things that round out the world (wool, dyes, vines). I make a small number of concessions in survival mode: occasional use of flying, XYZ location, extremely rare use of the chest of everything or /giveme. And a stratum of iron at -8 :) My current focus is on dfcaverns- massive caves with different ecosystems that involve digging deep. For exmaple, in minetest, ores often don't show up frequently until you get to -1024, which means digging straight down and building elevators for a while. I played Mineclone 5 for a while and it was mostly feature complete for what I wanted to do, but it doesn't play with other mods all that well, while all the mods I selected have good interoperability.
- poser-boy 4y ago
  I suppose it depends on perspective. MC Alpha these days lacks performance optimisation, and cannot beat the extensibility of Minetest IMO.

dvh 4y ago

https://minetest.dustlabs.io/mt/minetest.js(1) https://minetest.dustlabs.io/mt/minetest.js(1): Uncaught RangeError: WebAssembly.Memory(): could not allocate memory

isaacaggrey 4y ago
I also see an error but instead: Uncaught TypeError: GLctx is undefined -- Firefox 105 on Linux 64-bit (ElementaryOS)
- paradust 4y ago
  Can you check if the browser supports WebGL2? https://get.webgl.org/webgl2/ https://get.webgl.org/webgl2/
paradust 4y ago
It needs to allocate 2 GB on startup. Could you be low on memory?

satoshinm 4y ago

This looks amazing, great work! A web-based "Minecraft" has great potential, in my opinion, and has long been a dream of mine. My humble attempt at such a project: https://satoshinm.github.io/NetCraft/ https://satoshinm.github.io/NetCraft/ (2017) - a port of Michael Fogleman's Craft, a simple Minecraft clone written in C, ported to the web using WebAssembly and Emscripten. It works, reasonably well (after a few small enhancements/fixes to Emscripten) but did not get very far. But it could be so much more, a "metaverse", if you will. Minetest is a much more sophisticated application: paradust7's minetest-wasm port, even in its early stages, is already quite impressive. If it can be optimized, with streamlined add-on installation, seamless multiplayer/networking support, browser compatibility improved - I would not be surprised if this project catches on and gives Minecraft a run for its money. Having the ability to easily casually play within a web browser, no install needed, is a massive advantage over the Java or C++ implementations of Minecraft - which have not (officially) embraced modding to the extent Minetest has. If successful, this project could capture the large and diverse community of Minecraft modders - able to more seamlessly deliver their creative content through the web. Excited to see how it develops further.

Sardtok 4y ago
I guess you never played the early alpha versions of Minecraft. It used to run as a Java applet back when that was still kind of a thing. It ran just fine in the browser 13 years ago. Of course, you'd have to put in a bit of effort to be able to run an applet today, as that tech has been shut down due to security issues quite a while back.
- slim 4y ago
  it was outdated even back then

robotnikman 4y ago

Speaking of Minetest and the Web, it would be great if there was a web based control panel for Minetest servers, similar to how there are many out there for minecraft servers like Multicraft

tomrod 4y ago

A lot of lag, but has a lot of promise. Neat!

paradust 4y ago

Hi all, I made this. Surprised by the sudden interest. It has been live but unchanged for 6 months. There's an updated launcher. It's not finished yet, but it is nicer for exploring single-player community-made games: https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ez/ https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ez/ I'm not actively working on this, as I have concluded it is not (yet) possible to create a good web experience. There are problems with storage, network, keyboard side effects (e.g. Ctrl, W), concurrency, and performance that need to be addressed by browser vendors. I highly recommend installing the native Minetest!

freedomben 4y ago
Neat project! And thanks for the explanation :-) Do you think the browser issues are being addressed already or will be addressed soon? or do you think it's a low priority for them? I would think enabling complex WASM apps would be a priority (especially for Google/Chrome) but you never know.
- paradust 4y ago
  There is definitely a tremendous amount of work going into emscripten/wasm. Minetest is multi-threaded, and so relies on SharedArrayBuffer which only became available in 2020. The UX issues do seem to be stubbornly persistent though. I ran into the same issues long ago porting games with NaCl and asm.js. I'm not sure what is preventing progress there.
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    Two of the browsers are owned by the same companies that control two of the walled-garden app stores. The better the UX is for web apps, the less need people have to jump through app store hoops.
  - satoshinm 4y ago
    I sympathize with the persistent UX issues with web-based voxel engines. I think what is really needed is a UI/UX expert (unfortunately not me) willing to push forward and drive fixes across the entire stack: the game engine, Emscripten, and even investigating and submitting fixes/enhancements to web browsers - owning the complete experience. For what it's worth, when porting NetCraft I did make an effort to isolate, fix and upstream various UX fixes to Emscripten: https://github.com/satoshinm/emglfwbugs https://github.com/satoshinm/emglfwbugs with _some_ success; the developers of Emscripten are happy to accept pull requests. But I agree there's a lot of papercuts, and tracking down each of the usability nits could essentially be a full-time job... For the keybinding problem, I've found using backquote/tilde key for escape can sufficiently workaround the un-interceptable escape key. It also works well on mobile browsers without escape keys. But the problems with multi-gigabyte world storage, multi-threaded networking, SharedArrayBuffer, may require more invasive architectural changes. At this point, maybe a rewrite focused on web support from the beginning would easier than a port? But _a lot_ of work was put into Minetest over the years, it is great having the library of mods already developed for Minetest, available on the web. Although the same could be said for Minecraft itself. In any case, thank you for your work porting Minetest to the web. I appreciate it moving the needle in the "web-based Minecraft clone" niche. Even if it may not the be all to end all, hopefully the UX blockers can be resolved, fit and finish, if not in Minetest itself maybe it will inspire others to create something anew with lessons learned from your port. One step closer to the metaverse.

freedomben 4y ago

Minetest is an absolutely incredible project. My kids love to play it and it's one I can get behind because I can easily self-host so I own all the data, and I know my kids aren't talking to internet strangers through the game. It's packaged on most distros also so you can probably `apt get install minetest` or `dnf install minetest` and have it running. You can host games on the LAN from your machine, or you can easily start a server. On fedora you can trivially `dnf install minetest-server` and then run `minetestserver` and you've got a server!

rollcat 4y ago
Hosting a private Minecraft server is also quite easy, you just need a JVM and a freely redistributable .jar file. I think Minetest will perform much better on low-end hardware though; you can use PaperMC, Sodium, etc to improve Minecraft performance, but Minetest runs much smoother out of the box. Anyone here got experience running both Minecraft and Minetest servers? How do they compare?
- udkl 4y ago
  You could also scale to zero a minecraft server with fly.dev https://fly.io/blog/scale-to-zero-minecraft/ https://fly.io/blog/scale-to-zero-minecraft/ The other voxel OS game is : https://veloren.net/ https://veloren.net/

qwinning 4y ago

Runs better than I expected on my browser, it gives me ideas on porting other software to webassembly :)

ZoomerCretin 4y ago

The web used to be full of applications like this. First Flash, then Java. Now we have open standards that are used so rarely that they are notable post-worthy events. Why is WASM not used as extensively as Flash and Java were?

est31 4y ago
People built apps in Flash because they could put great experiences onto whatever outdated crappy IE version they had to target. There was also a really great editor. Lastly, the APIs for a lot of stuff just didn't exist. There aren't really great wasm editors any more. JS frontend development has replaced most of that. Wasm is used but mainly to port existing applications to the web, like in this instance, or to implement client side computation heavy applications. It's also rarer because it's still quite recent compared to JS which has tons of inertia. Generally, incumbents are only replaced if the new solution is really better than the incumbent (or there is a powerful enough trend).