Minetest 5.6.0 has been released, an open cross-platform version of the game MineCraft, allowing groups of players to collaboratively build various structures from standard blocks, creating a resemblance of a virtual world (sandbox genre). The game is written in C++ using the 3D engine Irrlicht. Extensions are created using the Lua language. The Minetest code is distributed under the LGPL license, while game resources are released under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Ready-made Minetest builds are available for various Linux distributions, Android, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS.
Among the added improvements:
- Work has been done to enhance graphics and input device support. Due to the stagnation in the development of the Irrlicht library used for 3D rendering, the project has created its own fork — Irrlicht-MT, which fixes many errors. The process of cleaning up outdated code and replacing bindings to Irrlicht with other libraries has also begun. In the future, there are plans to completely abandon Irrlicht and switch to using SDL and OpenGL without additional layers.
- Support for dynamic shadow rendering has been added, changing based on the position of the sun and moon.
- Correct transparency sorting has been implemented, resolving various issues that arise when displaying transparent materials like liquid and glass.
- Mod management has been improved. It is now possible to use one mod in multiple places (for example, as a dependency for other mods) and selectively enable specific instances of mods.
- The player registration process has been simplified. Separate buttons for registration and login have been added. A separate registration dialog has been introduced, integrating the functions of the removed password confirmation dialog.
- The mod API has added support for running Lua code in a separate thread for offloading resource-intensive computations so they do not block the main thread.
Source: opennet.ru
