Introducing Our New Name

[Ravise]

“Is this a Minecraft clone? Is it like Minecraft Alpha?” If you’ve been a member of our community for some time, you are probably aware of how often these questions remind us of what people think of when they hear the name “Minetest”: a rip-off of a similar genre-defining game.

Honest question: do you think that "what is this? it is some poor man's minecraft?" questions will significantly drop with the rebranding?

Not so much honest question: do you think that the state of https://www.luanti.org/ as of 2024-10-14T1330 UTC will market The Game Engine Formerly Known As Minetest as a mature piece of software? root.cz, big news/articles server in czech linux world posted a short notice about this, and... oh my, I'm quite sorry about anyone trying to find out what the deal with Luanti is.

I'd also like to second hlqkj's general unhappiness about the... timing, let's say.

[hlqkj]

And I'll add one more line, as I am hearing more and more unhappiness from people in game, as well as here I see.

I cannot fail to note how all this was also carried out: within an hour or little more everything was changed, dropped over us like a cold shower, without any warning, and sealed. I would hate to think that there was an intent to silence any discomfort in advance, by presenting the largest number of people as possible with a fait accompli.

Just had to say my peace.

[rstcxk]

I cannot fail to note how all this was also carried out: within an hour or little more everything was changed, dropped over us like a cold shower, without any warning, and sealed. I would hate to think that there was an intent to silence any discomfort in advance, by presenting the largest number of people as possible with a fait accompli.

If you were lurking the IRC, you'd know that the rename was coming for like 2 weeks

Also not sure if it was "carried out within an hour" considering the decision to rename was made a year ago (though personally i thought it stalled out)

I also personally dont think the change is that big of a deal, people always hate change. Remember when basically everyone was complaining when minecraft changed all the textures? and now noone is complaining, and everyone agrees it was a good change. same thing thing for zombie pigman -> zombified piglin

[funkyfourier]

Hi. Newcomer to Minetest/Luanti here. Discovered it just a week or so ago, and I would like to offer my perspective as a newcomer.

The name definetely striked me as odd, and as has been pointed out several places I suspected that it was just a temporary file/project name which had stuck. I showed it to my daughter who is much into Minecraft, and I neglected to mention the name since I suspected she would find it cringeworthy.

All the teenagers will not now flock to Minetest/Luanti as a consequence of the name change, but personally as a newcomer I think it will give off more of a positive connotation and impression of completeness than something with the word "test" in it.

I must also stress how impressed I am with the engine and eco system as a whole, and wish the project everything well and congratulations with the new and, dare I say it, proper name.

[repetitivestrain]

I also personally dont think the change is that big of a deal, people always hate change. Remember when basically everyone was complaining when minecraft changed all the textures? and now noone is complaining, and everyone agrees it was a good change. same thing thing for zombie pigman -> zombified piglin

But it also doesn't follow that all change is good. E.g. this one has already produced lots of confusion for developers who must debate whether and when to replace the identifier minetest with `core', how to abbreviate the new name, or server administrators who must move configuration files and directories around, and so forth. There are probably numerous instances of the old name that simply cannot be replaced, such as the Android package name, and consequently the rebranding will forever remain in a kind of limbo, occasioning nothing but confusion.

Lastly Luanti is just meaningless for the lion's share of mankind, who are not Finnish speakers. "Minetest" was at least significant to people familar with Minecraft, and if the intention is to cut all ties with this all-important source of inspiration, it would be enormously destructive for Minetest, whose value proposition practically rests on its association with games in the same genre.

I know it's an unpleasant truth, but statistics don't lie, and nor does CDB. Besides, "Minecraft clone" is expressed in far more prominent locations than the project name. The icon, to start with, featuring lakes, beaches, catus on sand, caves, and voxel trees...

[SylvesterKruin]

In my opinion, the new name isn't too bad. I think "Minetest" felt a little too incomplete. And while "Luanti" is a little odd, I appreciate that they incorporated meaning into the name.

For me, I think the hardest part of this change will be the transition. I've only been a part of the Minetest/Luanti community for a couple years, but I've grown very used to the name. Now, everything that exists under or uses the Minetest name will have to change, and that will take a lot of time. And unlike the new glTF support, this name change doesn't make modding or contributing easier.

I agree with @funkyfourier; I've experienced many times where I avoided using the name "Minetest" because it sounded like "unfinished Minecraft clone." I also see @rstcxk's point. People do hate change. The players, modders, and contributors (Luantiers?) will use both the old and the new name for a couple months, and then we'll get used to it, and become occupied with other things. However I don't think the "Minetest" name will every completely go away.

[SylvesterKruin]

One of my biggest complaints is that https://www.luanti.org wasn't at least set up to some degree before announcing the name change; IMO it makes the change seem rather rushed. I understand that it takes time to change all the online stuff, but it might have been nice to have something a little more presentable up before announcing the name change.

[Blockhead]

- Was a name change needed? No.

Nothing's ever necessary though. But it was done with a positive intention for the image of the project.

- Is the new name anything more appealing than Minetest? No.

Yes. Well, probably. I think it needs fresher opinions. You and I aren't really in a place to judge it as objectively from being attached to the old name for so many years. Luanti does sound more.. exotic.

Then I’ve heard supporters calling the “we need more players/no one finds out about Minetest because of its name” argument.

This, as it has been quoted is a weak argument, yes. But names have a qualitative appeal, which you could measure if you could look over the shoulder of someone browsing an app list on, say, Google Play or KDE Software Center. I just don't think the "test" element inspires confidence; it would probably rate lower down the list if you asked people rank a list of "top 10 block games".

I say this here again: given it's not paid software, nor it shows ads, or monetize otherwise, why do we actually *need* more?

For more it is as simple as: If I have something good, I want to share it with others. If I want them to be interested, I should probably give it an appealing name.

People replying to that like “I developed a mod but almost no one is using it” or “No one would spend their time and efforts in developing something that doesn’t have users”. So, first of all, the whole community we are now is considered “doesn’t have users”?

Well, there are a lot of fresh faces that enter Minetest, make and publish their first mod, or map, or server, and get underwhelmed by the lack of response. The same could happen in Minecraft for sure, but there are definitely more people that play one game than the other. We shouldn't act just to appease people like that though. But here's the thing: if I can draw more people in who could potentially do the project some good, I should do so, for the benefits it will bring.

And further, does it all boil down to a lack of self-accomplishment of developers, then? If this stands, then the rebrand could be justified. It is in my opinion a nonargument though: Minetest has a fair user base among players, modders, coredevs and server owners to not be considered a dead, or even dying FOSS project.

I don't think many people were thinking Minetest was failing and going downhill due to the name. And I don't think the developers did this for ego, just to leave their personal mark on it or anything. The core team are some of the most down-to-earth people in the software space, really.

In addition to that - but this is a personal opinion - as an (ex, sigh!) server co-owner and, later on, owner it was never a problem to me to pay real money - not to speak about the time, which isn't something valuable just for core/mod devs - I/we dedicated to our servers for small communities of good players and people, rather than having to deal with the hordes of trolls and alike that is typical of Minec***t and other games having the “larger user base” you’re advocating for. I am sure some other admins would argue the same.

Sorry, but this just sounds like you personally not wanting to deal with the issues that come with growth, or rather a preference for non-growth. I don't think it's a healthy long-term outlook. My old business teacher taught us that a stagnant business is prone to failure.

When we talk about a rebrand to Luanti, we're not talking about anything too radical. It's not google ads, it's not a brand new main menu and GUI system, a corporate takeover, anything like that. The effect on growth was never going to be so big as to cause those kinds of problems.

Other issues that would matter more than a lavish rebrand

This is a familiar rhetorical technique. "But what about doing <x> which is more important?". Firstly, the time spent on the rename is not 100% time that would have gone to development instead. It's had input from more people than just the "proper" in-the-trenches C++ coders in the team. Secondly, if something can be agreed to be beneficial (which this must have been, otherwise it wouldn't have been done), then it's in your interest to just go and do it. Finding excuses to shelve things is a typical opposition tactic.

But granted that we needed more players, why a name change, anyway? To whiners complaining that users were not staying in Minetest due to its name: do you really think that an engine with the feature and performance limitations it had until just months ago played no role in not being able to attract users from other games that are actively maintained by big techs?

Of course tech improvements played a role, people aren't dumb, and this isn't a fraud vapourware project but a real software project, so it needs tech or it will just disappear.

Like, refusing to leave the 16-bit era because "Minetest always wanted and still wants to maintain compatibility with low-end hardware" (just a reminiscence of when we talked about the content ID, to say one).

IRC, forum or GitHub Link please?

Or not having a content DB for kids to do actual things rather than be forced to play MTG on their mobile devices, once they installed this thing called “Minetest”.

This sentence contains too many negatives. What is it really saying? Is this is a complaint that it took to long to remove MTG as the default game? A complaint that there's no kid-specific ContentDB? And it feels disingenuous to say kids were/are forced to play MTG, unless you are being so backwards-reaching in your complaints that you're talking about mobile versions from before ContentDB being added to the in-game menu.

Or having such poor quality mods, like a mapgen one I came across years ago that, once installed, would ruin a world by placing blocks that crash the server on load -- me and my co-owner spent hours dealing with such issues because such poor quality mods were advertised indiscriminately through the official channels, even before the content db was a thing. I honestly don't think an average player should be expected to deal, or even be able to, with what we had to, if we want them to like, stay, and popularize Minetest.

Wow this is a good laundry list of bugbears, but I can't help but be caught up on "years ago" in your first sentence. You really seem to be reaching for every thing that majorly annoyed you about Minetest in the last 8 years or so, and making the accumulation of that seem relevant to 2024.

Or, I'll say it again and again, not having an official iOS client (Apple's market share is about 50% on tablets! https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-marke ... /worldwide) also didn’t matter in having tons of players who, at best, ended up in the jaws of a well-known fork that (rightfully, after all) advertises its own servers/server list/client? To be honest, I’ve had to explain way more times to players I've met in servers, that they weren’t playing MultiC**ft but Minetest, than having to explain to them that Minetest isn't a clone of something else. The most popular answer was like: “There is no such Minetest thing in the app store - this is MultiC**ft and you’re wrong”.

The project can only do what it has expertise to do. Nobody showed up to port Minetest to iOS, so it never got ported. You must know this is how Minetest works because you've been around for as long as you have. And we've all heard the problems MultiCraft players cause to Minetest server admins, but you didn't propose any solutions, so again, it's just part of your list of gripes.

All of the above are issues that have had way more impact on users' choices than the name itself, but were all downplayed when argued about.

Someone always shows up to downplay issues. We all place different weight on the significance of issues too. The key is to figure out how to make what you want actually materialise. Also, no matter what changes get made, someone will always complain.

[*]You claim that Minetest was targeting only dev/skilled users. Sure this is not true with a name that have its scripting language, Lua, in it.

I'm going to need a direct quote or quotes, because that's not what I get from the blog post. Besides, isn't one of the main points of Minetest to get people into Lua? Yes, I'm countering your narrative that we're de-targetting developers. Because again, unless you can give me good quotations, I think you have misconstrued the blog post.

.... the new name didn't loose [sic] anything in terms of referencing what it actually is about ...

The only thing "absurd" with this line of reasoning (the two paragraphs which I have clipped down) is that this is not how people learn about and choose software. If it were, GIMP would only be used by latex enthusiasts, and Blender by chefs.

So, at best, and without intent to be disrespectful, your choice has been rushed and superficial at best. Luanti is meaningless, shallow, and just void. It could equally apply to Minetest, a ship tracker app, an enterprise software suite, a movie, ...

It carries nothing about what this software is all about, not (of course) the history behind it.

The whole process has been insanely drawn-out, not rushed. However, it may look rushed when you haven't been privy to all the details of how the renaming was decided, and just now read the result. Just because meaning is not obvious, does not make it meaningless. Meaningless would be a word drawn out of a random word generator. There was actual thought and intention into making a Finnish pun and a tech pun. Again, you've not made the name Luanti seem absurd to me at all, only made absurd objections.

Final thoughts

«[...] free from the ghost of its past [...]». Ah, identity and historical memory... Such undervalued principles nowadays, uh!? I guess, the widespread lack of common sense would make it pointless to cite here what great thinkers said about where this lack of historical memory leads to. Sigh.

We still have our memories of Minetest, even in the code of very many mods it will live on. It will take time for the new name to settle in, maybe a very long time. But Minetest-c55 then Minetest will always be written into the history, they aren't being memory-holed, just obsoleted.

I've also been presented with the argument that games like R*blox have got their fame because they didn't have "test" in their names. True that. But it is also true, as someone else pointed out, that the cited case (valid as an example) also has "blox" in it, which does recall what the game is about. We had "Mine" to do that job, and the argument that "test" had a negative meaning in that it made Minetest perceived as a personal test project or a place to test our own mods is flawed and biased by those who actually used Minetest that way, for a still plausible perception by an average user could as well as be that it's a Voxel-like game (Mine) where one can be more creative (test) with their game mechanics.

In this there may be some of the most accurate commentary, only in that I don't think the blog post is very realistic in saying

... users and developers would come to expect it to be an engine exclusive to cube games when it can be more than that. ...

I don't think Minetest is ever going to be useful for games that aren't voxel based, with all sorts of objects in floating-point positions, or smooth player controls custom-tailored to each game, or so on.

In any case, even if it was called "MyPersonalMinec**ftCloneTestProject", this name had on its shoulders a decade of history, a well-formed and fair community and user base, and plenty of room for huge improvements without needing a rebrand, which could also be argued to be just smoke and mirrors enacted to avoid dealing with the real issues that affect Mintetest, and harness it against going anywhere quickly enough.

Those issues have been left there and made untouchable (until very recently, but only for some of them) by the same group of folks leading this community, which way too many times I saw being forced by them into wrong directions, either because of lack of a clear vision, or lack of a neutral standpoint, while seeing more and more people in dissent, often having a point, being mistreated, ignored or even silenced, to the point that so many great and relevant contributors silently quit Minetest. I think I've had enough of this.

"more and more people in dissent ... being mistreated, ignored or even silenced" is an easy narrative to repeat but it really just reads like your personal feelings. You could convince me if you actually showed some GitHub comment threads where people were overruled or censored. I have a feeling you're more likely just jaded like anyone else who tries to make Minetest move in one particular direction too fast. There's a lot of people on this boat all trying to steer it and only so much propulsion.

On the contrary, you even imposed this objectively massive revolution without of any meaningful update, and I didn't fully grasp from the blog post if this is promising something in the future (which may also never come) or if it is entirely referring to the past evolution. This action took place almost in concomitance with the release of 5.9.1 which, unless I'm mistaken, was all about bugfixes, reverts of broken new features introduced by 5.9.0, and minor improvements invisible to the average user.

This is just as ridiculous as it sounds, sorry.

The name was always intended for the 5.10 release, but the blog doesn't make that clear. 5.9.1 was not that recent that it would be related, and of course it would be strange to do on a minor release.

[Blockhead]

E.g. this one has already produced lots of confusion for developers who must debate whether and when to replace the identifier minetest with `core',

minetest will always stay there as an alias. As for the builtin code of the engine itself, it either never used the name minetest, or at the very least, has not done so for a very, very long time since the early days.

how to abbreviate the new name,\

It's probably going to be LT, but in any case, something standard will emerge.

or server administrators who must move configuration files and directories around, and so forth.

The people running the project aren't silly. I don't think ~/.minetest as a directory is ever going to stop working, just like the minetest table.

There are probably numerous instances of the old name that simply cannot be replaced, such as the Android package name, and consequently the rebranding will forever remain in a kind of limbo, occasioning nothing but confusion.

If I have to run Element Matrix client from the commandline without any kind of app launcher, I do have to type flatpak run im.riot.Riot. But any graphical launcher or even anything that parses .desktop files, like a script that calls dmenu_run, will show me element. I've never even thought about it as an issue for more than a split second.

Lastly Luanti is just meaningless for the lion's share of mankind, who are not Finnish speakers. "Minetest" was at least significant to people familar with Minecraft, and if the intention is to cut all ties with this all-important source of inspiration, it would be enormously destructive for Minetest, whose value proposition practically rests on its association with games in the same genre.

I know it's an unpleasant truth, but statistics don't lie, and nor does CDB. Besides, "Minecraft clone" is expressed in far more prominent locations than the project name. The icon, to start with, featuring lakes, beaches, catus on sand, caves, and voxel trees...

You have no stats on something new, so, we shall have to wait and see what the effect is.

[ryvnf]

I personally disagree with renaming. I also disagree with the blogpost that there has been more than a year of public discussion. As far as I know there was only that one Github issue were people who supported a rename could post suggestions. That said, I do not think the new name is terrible and I recognize that the core dev team and c55 has authority to make these kinds of decisions on their own.

I also want to say that I appreciate all the work the core devs are doing for the project.

[hlqkj]

@Blockhead: first of all, thank you for taking some time to read what I wrote, and to answer it. After reading it I have something more to say to you: I'll put it in a spoiler because of the length.

For the reasons I am about to explain below, I won't answer you on every specific point you've made, nor would do another follow-up: I really don't want to have another long debate here (if you're interested into that, I'm open to do that somewhere else, where we wouldn't go off-topic and/or annoy the rest of the world). Thanks again for your time!

Spoiler

So, I was not actually referencing the blog post alone. Many of the thigs I cited came from other sources and some aren't even so recent (example, the "Robl*x" name comment happened last night in Discord, #general). I apologize, but for very old stuff I can't remember where I had such conversations: but all was and is public, and honestly I'm not here standing a trial, so with all my sincere respect, if you don't believe me or need to fact check me, you do the search. If you instead assume I'm just a whining liar, please save your time and stop reading this now.

Your detailed answer confirms what I think this community has become. Don't know how to be more direct on this: I just meant to state my opinion, or I guess you'll be happier if I refer to it as frustration instead, about what (I didn't hide it) was the last straw for me.

You don't need to counter me on every single period I wrote: it is just my stated opinion, and although I may stand corrected on some points, overall I still stand for it, period. Again, I did not come here to be fact checked. Go ahead and say your point, rather than trying to dismantle mine: I'll very gladly read it and re-elaborate my own thinking also based on what you and others say (as I always did in the past, most of the times being silent).

Don't you see yourself, how almost no one of those who came here to express their own (legit, for sake!!!) support/positive feedback on this topic have been quoted, or called to stand/support/prove their own statements or opinions?

On the contrary, (now referring mostly to the past years, not to stick specifically on your answer - but it applies to it as well) almost every single time I stepped into some conversation anywhere in this community (and yes, I admit this, I have mostly showed up only when I had to dissent or protest against something, because of my willing to keep quiet unless I was seeing something I really could not stay silent about - otherwise I'd just support quietly, here and there with a thumbs up reaction) I got debates started and conversations got exactly like your post, that is, a crossfire of comments entirely structured in a "quote a line-counter that line" fashion, which made threads deviate from their underlying matter and focus on trying to dismantle, or otherwise remove standing to everything I said. So, very often threads literally "screwed" up onto themselves, until I gave up on them and went back into listening mode, that is, silent.

That's a form of silencing, and is exactly among what I was referring to when I said «more and more people in dissent ... being mistreated, ignored or even silenced». That's also a reason why I always avoided using direct quotes unless necessary, and for sure never used them as a machine gun, like others do.

If you plan to reply to demolish this as well by depicting me as just someone playing the victim, let me first add a link (one example is enough, I hope? You're not expecting me to post every single case that happened ever since I'm sure) in support of the fact that I wasn't the only one noting unethical beaviour. This was also easier to remember, and locate: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/is ... 1550721637.

There are many other points I'd like to reply to you, but as said, I don't want this thread to explode: I reiterate my offer to talk anywhere else it would be more appropriate, if you want to.

PS: Took me a little longer, but here you go, I found what I was recalling about the quote below: I am not a liar. I hope you'll forgive me the quotes, I may have mis-used them, but the concept still stands. And I didn't quote anyone directly, anyways.
https://github.com/minetest/minetest/is ... -315558922.

Like, refusing to leave the 16-bit era because "Minetest always wanted and still wants to maintain compatibility with low-end hardware" (just a reminiscence of when we talked about the content ID, to say one).

IRC, forum or GitHub Link please?

Another example, about this second quote below, is here: https://irc.minetest.net/minetest/2021-03-15#i_5797944.
Back then I was co-admin of some servers, and we felt there was an issue not much for our servers specifically, but for the goodness of the Minetest community: we moved from an extreme of having dozens of guest and/or new players joins per minute, to not having anymore at all when 5.x was released and protocol deprecation was enacted. We saw the matter was about iOS users and MultiCraft clients, and their use of the serverlist.
We cared, tried to open up a talk, and come up with some profane suggestions - it's not fair for you to say this:

And we've all heard the problems MultiCraft players cause to Minetest server admins, but you didn't propose any solutions, so again, it's just part of your list of gripes.

[c56]

ok maybe we should introduce a setting to allow people to change the name (it should change command used to run it, window name , and any other name specific references)

[Linuxdirk]

I love that one meme from the soon-to-be official website.

[ErrorNull]

i don't mind the name change. at initial glance, 'Luanti' does sound a bit strange and exotic, but i'm also glad we no longer have the 'test' connotation. i also love lua, so having the that as part of the name is cool. the fresh 'Luanti' name also gives us modders the choice to distance ourselves from the 'mine[craft]' association, for those of us trying to make a game that's less minecrafty. also, whether or not the name change will attract or detract users, i don't really care, as my enjoyment in modding luanti is not dependent on the size of our user base. if only 1 user ever plays and enjoys my mods/games, i'm happy with that.

[vulonkaaz]

I love that one meme from the soon-to-be official website.

made a more accurate version of it

[Melkor]

interesting news, what changes are coming to the community? That is more important

[Herkules]

Will take some time to get used to, but i really like the change. While speaking, "Luanti" feels similar to the mentioned "Godot", satisfying!

[rstcxk]

I made the most accurate version

words-cannot-describe-this.png (125.62 KiB) Viewed 3405 times

[LMD]

I'm a fan of the new name :)

[repetitivestrain]

E.g. this one has already produced lots of confusion for developers who must debate whether and when to replace the identifier minetest with `core',

minetest will always stay there as an alias. As for the builtin code of the engine itself, it either never used the name minetest, or at the very least, has not done so for a very, very long time since the early days.

That doesn't address the resulting confusion at all, especially considering that, according to hearsay, threats are being issued on IRC to remove the original name at an unspecified future time. See: https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia/issues/2189

The people running the project aren't silly. I don't think ~/.minetest as a directory is ever going to stop working, just like the minetest table.

No doubt prompting many users to pose the question why their "Luanti" save files are being stored in a directory named "minetest."

There are probably numerous instances of the old name that simply cannot be replaced, such as the Android package name, and consequently the rebranding will forever remain in a kind of limbo, occasioning nothing but confusion.

If I have to run Element Matrix client from the commandline without any kind of app launcher, I do have to type flatpak run im.riot.Riot. But any graphical launcher or even anything that parses .desktop files, like a script that calls dmenu_run, will show me element. I've never even thought about it as an issue for more than a split second.

I can only disagree, when K9 Mail evidently felt this problem to be sufficient to justify divesting Thunderbird for Android into a separate application.

Lastly Luanti is just meaningless for the lion's share of mankind, who are not Finnish speakers. "Minetest" was at least significant to people familar with Minecraft, and if the intention is to cut all ties with this all-important source of inspiration, it would be enormously destructive for Minetest, whose value proposition practically rests on its association with games in the same genre.

I know it's an unpleasant truth, but statistics don't lie, and nor does CDB. Besides, "Minecraft clone" is expressed in far more prominent locations than the project name. The icon, to start with, featuring lakes, beaches, catus on sand, caves, and voxel trees...

You have no stats on something new, so, we shall have to wait and see what the effect is.

This name may be new, but ContentDB is not, and it would be foolish to expect a new name for the engine to attract popularity away from that genre of games which currently dominates it in that respect.

[c56]

No doubt prompting many users to pose the question why their "Luanti" save files are being stored in a directory named "minetest."

you know what maybe just make what folder ($name)'s files are stored in a setting.
then we can make the default data dir of ($name) --> see my name as setting suggesting
.minetest if that is found else we do .luanti (or whatever ($name) is set to
maybe we can even hijack the DNS resolver to make it so that any url with (luanti/minetest) gets that replaced with ($name) probably would need a bit of browser hacking too to fix broken links

in short
make everything a setting then noone can argue and anyone can have preffered name

(note this is a joke)

[Pro Superstar]

Iluanati confirmed. It's a nice name! And a good one for an engine.
And with that, I'm glad the distinction could be done with and we have a universal voxel game to call our own. I thought Minetest was a fine name, but Minetestgame wasn't so much. I hope the internal transition goes smoothly. After some time when more games are made, I feel like I could see myself saying, "I'm playing Luanti".

What is the suggested short name (Minetest -> MT, Luanti -> ??)

How about LNT?

[not2stressed]

I don't like the new name, it is meaningless to me and I suspect meaningless to most potential new players. Whether or not a new name was actually needed is questionable.

But I suspect the horse has bolted on this matter so I won't bother spending too much energy venting about the fact that I don't like it. I do appreciate all the effort that is being made to develop Minetest so thanks to all who contribute. But to me, in my mind it will always be Minetest.

Rather, I'd like to make a suggestion to perhaps get improved feedback and ideas in the future. I suspect most players of Minetest don't follow forum/blog posts, IRC etc. They just want to play. So for any important news or significant announcements, including asking for feedback/polls that truly reflect players thoughts & ideas, why not have something like a "News Banner" in the logon window, maybe above the "Favorites"?

I feel that currently feedback comes from relatively few actual players and this may be a way to get feedback from a greater sample size of players, hopefully resulting in better decisions being made about where changes are needed. I have been playing almost daily for a number of years and was basically unaware that this was happening. How are players to know?

Long live Minetest!

[Blockhead]

That doesn't address the resulting confusion at all, especially considering that, according to hearsay, threats are being issued on IRC to remove the original name at an unspecified future time. See: https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia/issues/2189

There is always someone who wants to "clean up" the old stuff by "deprecating" (I hate that that term gets thrown around so much, it's actually quite a strong word in origin, meaning "I pray this thing would just go away") and then removing it. Those people I will continue to strongly argue against, because they are just obstructive.

The Mineclonia discussion is just a suggestion, which most Luanti mods&games will have to face, about how and when to drop the old name. Cora mentioned GreenXenith's comment, but GreenXenith isn't a core dev. The comment that it wouldn't be made until 6 is just how the policy of deprecation in Minetest works, but then GreenXenith also says "it's cheap to keep around" - exactly! So why remove it? I'll argue against ever doing it myself.

No doubt prompting many users to pose the question why their "Luanti" save files are being stored in a directory named "minetest."

To which they can get a quick history lesson. Yes, it does create a bit of a disconnect, for now at least.

Of course, we can't say that the main directory won't move in future. BUT that for the foreseeable future, compatibility would be maintained for old installations. Putting a .myappname directory straight into a Linux home directory is a big no-no these days; with the amount of software that the average desktop user installs, it quickly adds up to dozens or more than a hundred subdirectories causing clutter. That's why stuff now lives in ~/.local and ~/.config. Seriously, I have almost 70 .directories in my home directory right now. Maybe you disagree with the practice of moving stuff to those directories; that's fine, I can understand that there are objection to that as well.

As for the sysadmins of the world, it is and has always been their job to migrate stuff to new versions, or suffer the consequences of obsolescence. But since a lot of them just install through their distro and get security patches through backports their distro does, there's no reason they can't also keep their server in place for 10 years or something if they so desire, never moving from ~/.minetest. Heck, people are still on 0.4.x after all this time. Sysadmins make their choices, hopefully more consciously than other users.

I can only disagree, when K9 Mail evidently felt this problem to be sufficient to justify divesting Thunderbird for Android into a separate application.

Email and instant messaging occupy the space more of client-server architecture, where the messages sit on the sever and are just synced to clients. I'm not that much of an Android developer; surely there is a way to share data from one app to another to move over certain options. Minetest-Luanti would pose a bigger problem in that we need to make sure people can keep their worlds, that much is definitely true.

This name may be new, but ContentDB is not, and it would be foolish to expect a new name for the engine to attract popularity away from that genre of games which currently dominates it in that respect.

True, it would be foolish purely to hope for that, but I hope that would help anyone who is actively looking for alternatives of their own accord to choose Luanti rather than snubbing their nose at "Minetest". Ah well, it's all speculation.

[Blockhead]

@Blockhead: first of all, thank you for taking some time to read what I wrote, and to answer it. After reading it I have something more to say to you: I'll put it in a spoiler because of the length.

For the reasons I am about to explain below, I won't answer you on every specific point you've made, nor would do another follow-up: I really don't want to have another long debate here (if you're interested into that, I'm open to do that somewhere else, where we wouldn't go off-topic and/or annoy the rest of the world). Thanks again for your time!

Sorry if the effect I arrived at just made you feel like it was another episode in grinding down the opposition. I thank you for taking the effort to following up with links, at your own effort. It's not that I didn't believe you were experiencing legitimate complaints, or lying, but I like to be able to deal with specifics and go to the roots of things, and it's a little frustrating to not know where these things come from. A lot of your complaints go back a long way, and I just wanted to mentioned specifically paramat, who always was abrasive, isn't around any more - now, of course, you could bring complaints against others like Zughy being over-eager in some respects. I also have no idea what goes on on the Discord, I refuse to use a Discord server for a free software project, and I've never heard of anything particularly good coming off of it. Anyway, maybe we can discuss things more interactively and friendly with DMs, on IRC or somewhere, instead of more standoffishness.