In-Game, and Out of Game Documentation

[exevirus]

Hello,

I’m relatively new to the MeseCraft community, and am the creator of Little Lady and Labyrinth (ContentDB games), and on the discord moderation team for Minetest. I have interviewed MisterE before, and currently working on a retail Minetest project, where Minetest is packaged into a USB, given a guide, poster, and stickers, and then sold for like $12-15 in local game shops and similar.

Currently, I’ve been hunting for a solid mod-soup MTG based game/ researching whether to make one myself, and have found MeseCraft to be close enough to what I was hunting for (the first recommended game in the box, followed by about 7-10 others). Because my project is focused on very new players to minetest in general, most of the project revolves around guides and documentation at the moment. Has there been a serious effort yet to document the game in detail? What about in-game documentation?

Finally, AGPL is an hard to comply with licensing due to actual legal implications requiring that a connecting player be sent the actual mods and server code at that instant, not redirected to a git repo with the codebase… I’m wondering why not target just plain old GPLv3, which is essentially how this game distribution is being treated on official servers?

[mesecraft]

Welcome to MeseCraft. Your initial post has been approved and subsequent posts will automatically go through without approval. 🙂

[komodo]

Hi @exevirus,

First off, thanks for the words of encouragement about the game. It took some time and learning to get it to this point and I started off from scratch from MTG. I appreciate that you can also see the importance and vision of a high-quality MT game that meets the demands of players.

Commercializing the game is fine with me. Engaging in commerce with MeseCraft is something I’m interested in as well, as I think the funds can help growth for both MeseCraft and MTG and that would be great for everyone. What you are considering sounds interesting to me, and a challenging project. But sounds like it could be a good kit to get people involved and engaged. I’d like to learn more about that.

I’ve listened to all your produced podcasts before and really enjoyed getting to hear voices in the MT community. I hope you keep it up. I understand you’re recently a Dad, as am I, and I think it takes a high degree of dedication to stay engaged in a project like this while also having the responsibilities of parenting and other demands from daily life. I’ve also played Little Lady with a friend and we both really enjoyed it. I haven’t tried Labyrinth yet. MisterE has been a very friendly person to work with on projects and I’ve enjoyed working with him as well.

There are plans to implement better documentation, however, I just have a manpower shortage lately to accomplish this and it’s not the highest priority for me right now. With the game currently in an alpha state, I don’t think it makes sense to focus on the documentation part right now, as there will be many changes to come and the documentation would be quickly outdated. Instead, players have been helping each other in game and coming to the forums for questions and support which has been helping. However, due to lack of tutorials or information at start, I’m sure there is some % of players that bounce from confusion, so having some basic documentation would probably be a good idea.

As for the license, I picked AGPL because there is nothing preventing someone from hosting the server, making changes and adding proprietary features to the game and hosting it as a service. Technically, they are not distributing the software when operating SaaS, so can choose not to share changes to the code while hosting their own version of the game. I choose AGPL because accounts for SaaS in FOSS and figured it would better encourage distribution of modified version of the game hosted on servers, which is one of the ways the game is intended to be played. This was also intended to stop servers adding changes to extort players for privs, items, other perks in the future, which was a big problem Mojang ran into with it’s hosting community, ultimately this is one of the things that led notch to leave MC too. I’m not sure if that is 100% accurate, but that was my understanding and reasoning for picking AGPL. I guess a lot of open source software is used, changed, and then not shared when it is involved in SaaS, which is why the license was created. To stop SaaS taking advantage of FOSS. I figured a URL to the source would be considered adequate but reading through it again and what you are saying, I’m now not sure that is the case.

I’d be down to chat more about this or get in contact to discuss MeseCraft, Minetest, etc etc or just shoot the chit sometime.

[komodo]

I found this snippet in the FAQ on the GNU website

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3ServerAsUser

If some network client software is released under AGPLv3, does it have to be able to provide source to the servers it interacts with? (#AGPLv3ServerAsUser)
AGPLv3 requires a program to offer source code to “all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network.” It doesn’t matter if you call the program a “client” or a “server,” the question you need to ask is whether or not there is a reasonable expectation that a person will be interacting with the program remotely over a network.

For software that runs a proxy server licensed under the AGPL, how can I provide an offer of source to users interacting with that code? (#AGPLProxy)
For software on a proxy server, you can provide an offer of source through a normal method of delivering messages to users of that kind of proxy. For example, a Web proxy could use a landing page. When users initially start using the proxy, you can direct them to a page with the offer of source along with any other information you choose to provide.

The AGPL says you must make the offer to “all users.” If you know that a certain user has already been shown the offer, for the current version of the software, you don’t have to repeat it to that user again.

[mistere]

so, it seems that to comply, you would need to have some easily accessible message on the server that shows where to get the source. you only have to make an (honest) offer of the source, not actually send it. so a web link would be fine.

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