In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka “we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side” doesn’t work well. You can’t change main menu, you can’t fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can’t write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn’t imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don’t have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.
The problem for me is that it repeats many of the issues I had with Minecraft, so I don’t really have a good base to start with. Not really interested in LUA either, so there is even less motivation for me to make something from the ground up (I should probably be doing something with Godot instead).
I imagine the benefit for Luanti would be if you want to make a simple grid-based game it should be easy to do so (similar-to-but-easier-than a MC mod for example). Trying different games though, it was hit-or-miss for me especially when it just spits you falling into an empty world (I assume that’s a known config-error or incompatibility).
If you tie yourself to a commercial platform, it’s gonna take advantage of you. That’s how they make money. So, I would also recommend using an open-source game engine like Godot and then distributing on multiple platforms.
The closest open-source thing to the Roblox model, that I can think of, is Luanti, which is basically a game engine and distribution platform for Minecraft-like games. Don’t expect to make money off of it, though.
Bedrock Edition is fine. It’s basically at feature parity with Java now. The mod scene is almost non-existent, but for vanilla it’s fine. If that’s where your friends are playing, you’ll have a great time.
Fortnite. Yes, Fortnite. They’ve added a bunch of crazy stuff similar to Roblox where you can be paid for your content. Hell, Gaijin just bought the rights to a stupid custom map in the game for this very reason.
It’s free, and so are the tools. But the tools are also just… UE5. Which is also free and literally made to develop games.
It's called UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite), not Fortnite the game specifically. From what I understand it's a watered down version of Unreal Engine and is really good to use, lets you publish your games straight to the platform.
Idk if you can get these to work on the deck; they are not all sold on Steam and I don’t know how well they play with Linux, but here’s some to at least look into:
Planescape: Torment
Icewind Dale 1 & 2
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 (and 3 for that matter, which does for sure work on the deck)
Fallout 1 & 2
Neverwinter Nights (particularly its two big expansions)
feels too much like D&D
Well… Fuck. If you didn’t even like Disco Elysium there is no hope… 😩 All of these are literally D&D games except Fallout, which was based on GURPS.
As others have said. Minecraft is the more known and established. Luanti is awesome though. It can do "Minecraft" and so much more. I'd say it really comes down to external factors.
Do your friends already play Minecraft. And if the don't, are they going to have money to put towards it? In the end there's nothing saying you can't do both. I will say this though. Installing and running a dedicated server for Minecraft, bedrock at least. Was way harder than luanti. But if you aren't planning on self hosting then you don't have to worry about that.
Free: Battle for Wesnoth is really great, I haven’t played it in a long time but it was already great like 10-15 years ago so it’s probably even better today, Nethack (if you don’t mind the starting difficulty and the “graphics”) is also great, VERY complex gameplay but very rewarding if you know it fairly well. Also saw a video of Xonotic today, looks also really good if you’re into fast multiplayer arena shooters (Quake-like). Heard positive things about 0 AD as well (Age of Empires-like). All of these are open source and in the extra repository on Arch.
Non-free but really cheap: Stardew Valley is probably great, I’ve never played it and it doesn’t look like my cup of tea but I’ve only heard positive things plus it’s like #1 or #2 rated on Steam, so it must be really good.
Non-free: Stellaris (got into it recently, great game and well-maintained Linux client (not at all common), much better than I expected, VERY complex and content-rich, quite expensive when you want all DLCs. It’s like a live service game, you’ll pay quite a bit if you want everything, but you also get tons of content). Also, Alien Isolation is one of my favorite single player horror games of all time and it also has a Linux client (which was a surprise for me) but that one is probably outdated and not maintained anymore by now I’d guess (but didn’t look it up) so it might be better to play the Windows client via Proton. I’m not up to date on that though - look it up. Oh, and POOLS also has a Linux client, that’s a great small walking simulator, “Backrooms”-like, very atmospheric and great visual design.
Markdown treats a single newline as a space, so that already wrapped text doesn’t need to be rewrapped. If you want to have each item on one line, some options:
Two spaces before newline
<span style="color:#323232;">Foo << two spaces here
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Bar
</span>
I've noticed the slight increase in vertical space when I've used paragraph breaks in Markdown editors in the past and I thought it was some sort of rendering error. I feel like I've unlocked secret knowledge. Thanks for your post!
bin.pol.social
Gorące