Luanti Forums

I didn’t expect such a heavy reaction to this, and I don’t understand why. Obviously, games can "abuse" this feature but you’re overlooking that Luanti technically “allows” games to do various other things to heavily annoy players. Luanti already gives games plenty of opportunity to be nasty to players, and doesn’t stop them. Luanti allows you to create impossible games, insulting games, games that spawn unclosable formspecs, trolling games, games that kill you every tick, etc. Yet nobody complains. It is the same for this new feature. So the argument doesn’t really work IMO.

The use case for this feature is for simple screen effects that are not considered to be part of the HUD, like blood effects, damage distortions, vignette, gameplay-relevant view obstructions, etc. Emphasis on the word “gameplay”. It can be useful for anything that should not disappear when you hide the HUD, because it functionally is not the HUD.

Of course games could "abuse" that feature and just force the entire HUD to be always on but that would very likely be punished by bad ratings. Also, you seem to forget this is a free software community, which should prevent the proliferation of anti-features anyway. It’s hard to get away with anti-features when they can just be patched out.

I don’t think it is fair to blame Luanti for merely allowing games to theoretically do bad things. Luanti already does that in various other ways.

I think this feature is fine as-is. And we have yet to encounter a game that abuses this feature to begin with.

I may change my mind if someone can come up with a CONCRETE abuse so bad that the usual remedies no longer work. But so far, I think this feature can stay. But maybe, in the long run, CSMs will be the "true" solution anyway. No idea …

EDIT:
As for cheat codes: I think cheating in singleplayer games are OK. But I also think games should NOT present their cheat codes on a silver platter by default. Games should have a clear mode that presents itself as the "intended" way to play. Cheaters have to do at least a little effort to enable cheats. If a major cheat is only one button press away, that’s just poor game design IMO. This is not a question of freedom, but of very basic game design principles.

Thinking of cheat codes, I just had an idea for compromise: What if Luanti added a little "secret" setting that, if turned on, allowed to hide ALL HUDs? Could not only be for "cheating" but also for devs in case the game HUDs malfunction badly. I mean, trying to prevent clientside cheats from the server is a foolish excercise anyway, so we might just give up and make it (semi-)official anyway.

That's fine if I want it to be pitch black or something, but not if I want a graphical overlay of, say, translucent gray to only make it difficult to see, not impossible. And anyway, that was an off-the-cuff example, I'm sure we could come up with others.

Wuzzy wrote: ↑

Sat May 30, 2026 20:24

Thinking of cheat codes, I just had an idea for compromise: What if Luanti added a little "secret" setting that, if turned on, allowed to hide ALL HUDs? Could not only be for "cheating" but also for devs in case the game HUDs malfunction badly. I mean, trying to prevent clientside cheats from the server is a foolish excercise anyway, so we might just give up and make it (semi-)official anyway.

The Luanti way of allowing clients to display normally inaccessible information to users (e.g. for debugging) is through server-controlled values, such as for example debug priv, basic_debug, noclip priv, cpcsm restriction flags, or manually crafted ssm mods (in this case a mod that makes all hud elems hideable).
(Latter can be a bit annoying (see e.g. complaints about dynamic shadows being off by default). But I don't think we desperately need an easier way for this specific case.)

I think instead of what Wuzzy stated should be in 5.17, I think privileges should be adjusted a bit, the only thing that should be added is a special bypass for Singleplayer worlds. If activated, it would grant every required privilege that your mods explicitly demand, like "server" for Cleaner, chest_with_everything & give for Chest With Everything and so on, that way if you add a mod that requires a certain privilege but wanted to use it immediately in a Singleplayer world that didn't have that privilege granted, it would automatically update the privilege sheet for you and automatically grant it. It won't affect Online play.

Tooltips now support hypertext.

viewtopic.php?t=32521

Text shown in `label[]`, `textarea[]`, and `field[]` elements can now be aligned.

Before this, using `hypertext[]` was the only way to align text.

https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/pull/16982

Inventory slots can now be styled with textures

https://api.luanti.org/formspec/#listim ... gimg_hover

https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/pull/17305