Using Minetest?

[Alexander Pruss]

I am guessing that no one has made a Minetest mod that implements the MCPI API (with some translation between block types)? It seems like it would be a good thing, as one could then do school things without paying for Minecraft licenses. 

I also have a question for anybody who knows about lua. Minetest has a lua interpreter for mods, and a very well documented API, but I think the lua interpreter has no tcp/ip socket library. Can I can just drop in binaries for a socket library compiled for the right version of the lua interpreter?

[Alexander Pruss]

I figured it out, at least for Win-32, and I have a proof of concept mod here (requires luasocket library). So far, it only supports getPos/setPos/setBlock, but that's enough to get some pretty images.

[Alexander Pruss]

I've got an alpha-quality implementation of Raspberry Jam Mod for Minetest. Install the win32 0.4.13 version of Minetest, and then put the contents of the mod zipfile in the mods folder (so that your directory structure is minetest-0.4.13/mods/raspberryjammod). Then enable the mod for a world and off you go.

This makes it possible to do school coding events with no licensing costs.

The mod implements just about everything needed to run a lot of scripts, including most of the Raspberry Juice extensions

Current exceptions: 

- no camera.* implementation

- entity.* only works with the main player

- the mod translates between Minecraft block ids and Minetest node names, but not all Minecraft block ids will translate well

- world.settings for immutable mode and checkpoints

- only left sword clicks are detected -- I couldn't find a way to detect right clicks in the API

- the side of the block clicked on with the sword click is not detected (7 is always returned)

- world.getBlock is supported but not world.getBlocks

[Alexander Pruss]

I'm now, I think, at beta quality. Still only for Windows (but if you drop socket/core.so into it, it should work on Linux), but at least it works with both 32- and 64-bit.

I think this is a solid option for school use when the school doesn't have Minecraft licenses. I also suspect that Minetest will be less distracting to students than Minecraft. It will be a bit unfamiliar, and so they won't just launch into doing their favorite Minecraft things as soon as they're in front of a keyboard (a problem I definitely had when teaching this stuff).

And installation is pretty easy. You could put Minetest together with RaspberryJamMod and your favorite settings on a USB key, and just copy it to lots of computers. (You'll still need python.)

[Alexander Pruss]

I just released a new Minetest Raspberry Jam Mod. 

It seems to work pretty well with the exception that if you draw large structures that stretch into unrendered territory, occasionally your code and the terrain generator can get in each other's way resulting in holes.

All in all, this means we have a free Windows-based solution for teaching programming using mcpiapi/python. Should also work on Linux if one pops in a luasocket shared library, which I don't have.