Minetest's future 2022-01-08

mtf20220108

I was inspired by yesterday's #minetest-dev discussions to write down what Minetest's future looks like to me currently.

- Directly serves gamedevs and server admins
    - Doesn't need to cater to players by itself regarding to gameplay, gamedevs and server admins already have players in mind
    - But players essentially become gamedevs when they open the content database and server admins when they open the hosting tab
    - think more along the lines of Roblox than Godot (I'm flexible about this though. Have to see how it goes), but don't make separate game distribution unnecessarily difficult

- Multiple worlds with separate lua environments
    - this is necessary because a single world per game server is a special case. There's no way we can get away with supporting only the special case
    - the client needs to view only one world at a time (for now)
    - communication between environments via messages or RPC of some kind. Also a shared key/value database?
    - the current lua api becomes the world api, and a new game/manager/overworld/lobby api (with its own non-world lua environment) is added to manage the worlds
    - Worlds essentially are like scenes or models in some systems. The game environment's job is to create and delete them, and pick which world is shown to each client. A client is always viewing one world.
    - Need to think about the naming though. The main menu should still talk about worlds, so these multiworlds need to be called something else. Spaces? foo = overworld.create_space(), overworld.get_client("celeron55"):set_space(foo) or something

- non-first/third-person controls and cameras have to be supported, again because we're wasting the engine by locking it into a special case.
    - This practically means that something along the lines of my scriptable player physics concept has to be included.
    - "what the player controls" and "what the player sees" have to be separated, not because of RTSes or something, but even because of stuff like cutscenes or viewing other players.

- Once these are working, stuff like seamless VAEs aren't such a ridiculously big stretch anymore. But this needs to be developed in smaller steps