The release of Minetest 5.6.0 is presented, an open cross-platform version of the MineCraft game, which allows groups of players to jointly form various structures from standard blocks that form a kind of virtual world (sandbox genre). The game is written in C++ using the irrlicht 3D engine. The Lua language is used to create extensions. The Minetest code is licensed under the LGPL, and the game resources are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Minetest ready builds are created for various distributions of Linux, Android, FreeBSD, Windows and macOS.
Improvements added include:
- Work has been done to improve support for graphics and input devices. Due to the stagnation of the development of the Irrlicht library used for 3D rendering, the project has created its own fork - Irrlicht-MT, in which many errors have been fixed. The process of cleaning up obsolete code and replacing Irrlicht bindings with other libraries has also begun. In the future, it is planned to completely abandon Irrlicht and switch to using SDL and OpenGL without additional layers.
- Added support for dynamic rendering of shadows that change depending on the position of the sun and moon.
- Transparency sorting has been corrected to eliminate various problems that occur when displaying transparent materials such as liquid and glass.
- Improved mod management. The ability to use one mod in several places (for example, as a dependency of other mods) and selectively enable specific instances of mods is provided.
- Simplified player registration process. Added separate buttons for registration and login. A separate registration dialog has been added, which integrates the functions of the removed password confirmation dialog.
- Added support for running Lua code in another thread to the mod API to offload resource-intensive calculations so that they do not block the main thread.
Source: opennet.ru