Minetest 0.5 has begun development!

PRESS RELEASE 2017-09-13

The open source modding and community focused multiplayer block sandbox engine Minetest has merged the first big changes in its 0.5-dev branch on GitHub.

Breaking changes include a move from the C++03 language standard to full C++11, continued testing and expansion of client-side modding APIs and clean up of accumulated compatibility code for faster future development.

Minetest 0.0.1 was originally released in October 2010, making this the 7th year of development. Minetest takes cross-platform compatibility seriously and hadn’t yet moved to C++11 due to missing official support from Debian GNU/Linux. Following release of Debian 8, Minetest moves to C++11, with all features of the language standard taken into use.

The tagline of Minetest at this point is “Wait, is it an engine or a game?”, and we have no answer. Reaching the founder Perttu “celeron55″ Ahola for an answer results in weird horn and fart noises.

Minetest consists of a native core written in C++, on top of which content is written in Lua and published as independent releases. Minetest can be played and developed for fun, and welcomes contributors to all of its components.

The Minetest community can be found on the official Minetest discussion board at forum.minetest.net, and a changelog of the continuing 0.5 changes can be found on the Minetest developer wiki.