
Spoiler

Hello fellow survivalists and modders. I'm The Scarecröwman and my team and I have a idea.
You don't know me. I'm not originally from the Minetest forums. I was first brought to the idea of sandbox games when Minecraft was in it's Alpha stage. I went by the alias of Zurich_Antiock on the Minecraft forums, where I had started a suggestion topic called "The Nether Update Thread". In there was suggested, certain concepts such as "charred-bone archers", which eventually brought "Wither Skeletons' to the table, among other things. This suggestion thread led to the The Nether Expansion Mod, led by FISH2 and his group of developers. That mod led others to developing the current Betweenlands mod for Minecraft as well as Astral Sorcery at Curseforge, which I am currently involved in. My connection with them lends me connections to a lot of other people in that forum.
A few skilled friends and I have been discussing a serious objective to begin a new Sandblox, (block style sandbox) game-engine project, using Minetest's current mainframe. A 'fork' in other words, though we don't care for that term... because it implies a lot less quality than what we're intending. But we want to make this a major project, in hopes that it would include certain features that would bring the nostalgia of Beta Minecraft back, with an emphasis on creation with features tailor-cut specifically for creators who want to make something of their own with little knowledge.
As we all know, Minecraft has shaken the foundations of sandbox gaming as well as redefined gaming in a creative way, -and there are several open source alternatives. We've seen some fairly decent attempts to capture the essence of what Minecraft does while catering to the non-mainstream creative gamer. As of yet, however, there seems to be a lack of parallel quality when looking at these open-sourced versions. We understand, these versions are free and people are donating their time to make them possible.
But most of all, we want to keep the goal aimed at the same quality level of professional game studios.
We're doing this for two reasons:
1.) Everybody seems to want a more creative open-source mining sandblox game of Minecraft's feel and style. Both Minecraft and Minetest have proven that open-sourcing a game and building it with community support is successful.
2.) Minetest has brought everyone closer to the end goal. Its an amazing project, and we want to secure that it has a future in more than one place.
We stand for everything that put the tools of development in the user's hands, allowing for complete creative freedom to make things without hindrance by personal ideals, unnecessary stipulation or legalism. It is fortunate for us that open-source communities make this possible. Therefore, we have begun pulling resources together to build a 'fork' engine based off of Minetest's main code, but it should be noted that we are also looking at other avenues of opportunity as well. We also want start a more specific community, whose focus is open-door policy between developers and the developing users. Here are some points of progress that we've made since we started at the end of December.

We have not really touched Minetest's engine, yet. There are many many loose ends that must be tied up in order to have a decent starting platform for our project. This means we've been talking a lot about how our engine will be refined in order to focus on customization by creators and developers while seamlessly allowing for game-play and game-play functions. We have a lot of work cut out in this particular segment of our development path and need all the help we can get. We have been talking to several potential coders and programmers from various sources who are interested in what we're doing, but only three have come forward to assist in our efforts. We'd love to hear from anyone who is interested in becoming part of our development team, programmers of any language, but particularly C++, Lua and Java.
We don't have a lot of specifics, right now, because we're getting lots of counsel on this, and looking to build a team. But here are some of our ideas for what we're wanting to do:
We are considering the possibility of starting from scratch, or using other source-builds outside of Minetest, but if we choose to stick with Minetest, our first objective will be to clean up the source code of Minetest. Which means lots of re-scheming, renaming and removing of unnecessary elements. Included in this phase is simple optimization techniques aimed at greatly reducing CPU and Video workload. Our intention would also be to preserve compatibility but we are willing to break compatibility for the sake of optimization and improvements.
Target platforms from the start will include support for Linux, (of course,) and also Windows, *(both 32 and 64 bit,) but our objective is to reach all PC platforms and Android platforms in the future.
Our goal is to get the engine to a solid bare-bones state, equipped with all the functions creators could hope for when building and modding for their games. This includes, but is not limited to, the goals of: Improved, better organized GUI functions, Voxel-based crafting, support for multi-maps in a subgame, a flexible mob API focused on Optimization, emphasis on Immersion and Graphical Atmosphere, such as detailed shaders like colored lighting and shadowed leaves, -as well as intuitive techniques that expand and refine LOD, (Level of Detail).
In addition we have plans for a fully playable base survival game complete with a story line, three dimensions, quality sounds and music, mobs and NPCs, and much other content serving as examples for every usable function available in the engine. This will be in place so that when development enters its final stage, the focus will shift from developing the engine to developing mods for the engine.
Introducing the "Infernium" Block, to be used comparably like redstone but with many differences:

Inventory GUI Concepts, -we're wanting to add a light theme and dark theme respectively.


Also we are very heavily considering the possibility of manufacturing official creation software to work alongside Minecore. These would be used for customization and mods, such as dimension creation, mobs and story line workshop for beginning users unfamiliar with high-level programming, who still want to create decent mods.

Due to our policy concerning a Dev-Team to User-Base doorway, our objective is to heavily consider all suggestions, without bias, (except in the case that quality would be comprimised,) and to implement any code or content created by users that would make this engine a better piece of software.


They say a picture's worth a thousand words. To give you a sense of our quality, we have put together this showcase. It includes screenshots from presently chosen textures and graphics for the current build of the base game. These were 100% hand-crafted, scratch by us. They are not ripped from Minecraft. We started with a blank canvas. Although we are heavily inspired by the graphical influence of Minecraft, nothing here was pulled from any other person's work or copyrighted materials.









Take notice to some elements of lighting and shading we have already improved within the engine. These are unaltered images; non-photoshopped real-time enhancements.





Compare to original lighting in Minetest:


Because of the fact that we don't put off the things we can get right away, we have some tracks already composed for the Base Survival Game. They are a sneak preview of what's to come, and they speak for themselves. Have a listen:







Special thanks to Contributing Spectators:


Other ties and projects:




There is a lot of work to do and we are looking for people who would like to help us.
If you'd like to send us a comment or question or offer any contributions, you can email us at:
lanterngaming.devteam@gmail.com
Our website is still in development, there isn't much there, but it will be up soon!
https://minecoredevteam.github.io/

We want to hear your thoughts on this project. We are always looking at advice and criticisms. Do any of you have any ideas or suggestions? Please comment below and stay tuned!!
I would also like to thank sofar and others for having said their piece at the beginning of this. It is always valuable insight.
After much consideration, we have decided to take the idea for Minecore in a different direction. We've been told it would be a waste of our time to mess with the engine by some of you, (though we're not confident about that,) -so we are just taking word for it and ditching the idea of using MTE as the starting point.
The project will continue, though now at a much longer projected timeframe, as we are looking into developing our own engine with the help of friends from other arenas of the indie-gaming world.
This statement will be interpreted several ways; as a cop-out; as a cover in place of proof or legitimacy; an excuse to get out of dealing with harsh criticisms; emotional retaliation; but its none of those things. It's just a statement; take it however you perceive it to be.
It is true that we don't know everything about the Minetest engine and we're not 100% sure our ideas wouldn't work in a new subgame, but there are additional reasons effecting this decision.
Toby suggested the idea of doing this with me when we first met in October of last year and from first glance I thought it was the logical way to go. I figured it would be fun, too. We thought that by posting the idea here that we'd establish some support, but with the small amount it has generated from the development team, we feel it would be toxic to everyone. I can see why it was viewed as 'stealing' and we're sorry it came off that way, we just didn't think there would be any conflicts with the 'open-source' policy Minetest is rooted in. We do not want to steal anything and we no longer feel morally correct to be using Minetest as an engine-base.
As for the people who were interested and quite willing to help us, we are sorry to let go of Minetest, as well as for having unintentionally turned all of you into 'groupies'. We realize some of you are disappointed and others 'confirmed in your suspicions', but we thank you for your advice all the same as it helped us to make the right choice. We would also like to advise the user-base to pay close attention to the mistakes we've made here, so as not to repeat them. Such is for the best of the Minetest community.
On a lighter note, I want to emphasize that we always thought that the Minetest Development Team was making an amazing program, and have been succeeding for a long time. We hope they continue to succeed with unwaivering support from the community.
We truly did not mean to start an earthquake and have never meant to be a trouble to this community or its development or the relationships therein. We're just creative as well as passionate. We realize our original post may have come off egotistical and we're sorry for that too. Our intentions were pure. We must just be naive or need to fix our people-skills or something like that.
Well then, I guess this is 'the point of no return'.
Just to clarify though, we will not be using Minetest or its code. We will just continue our own projects, to include the Minecore project, and its concepts using other resources.
We really are not angsty about this outcome, so don't think that. We want Minetest to progress and that's partly our reasons for moving on.
If anything, we are just a little sad.
Thanks,
-Scarecrowman and friends