The release of Minetest 5.5.0 has been announced, an open-source, cross-platform variant of the game MineCraft, allowing groups of players to collaboratively build various structures from standard blocks that resemble a virtual world (sandbox genre). The game is written in C++ using the irrlicht 3D engine. Extensions are created using the Lua language. The Minetest code is licensed under LGPL, while the game resources are under CC BY-SA 3.0. Pre-built Minetest packages are available for various Linux distributions, Android, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS.
Among the added improvements:
- A transition has been made to use a custom fork of the Irrlicht game engine, which resolves many issues related to text input, fullscreen mode, macOS platform support, and graphics rendering.
- The Zstd algorithm has been implemented for map compression, resulting in a 20-30% increase in map generation speed.
- Support for the Dynamic Media API has been added to the Formspec and Lua API, along with a PNG format encoder.
- Work has been done on implementing dynamic shadows, which will be included in the next release.
- Performance optimizations have been added.
- Translations into Russian and Ukrainian have been implemented.
Source: opennet.ru
