Releases: minetest-LOTR/Lord-of-the-Test
The End of the Road.. for now - Bugfix 6
The End of the Road.. for now - Bugfix 5
Fix various crashes and deprecated code
Refinements to some existing systems
The End of the Road.. for now - Bugfix 4
The last release was based on the wrong branch, whoops.
The End of the Road.. for now - Bugfix 2
Fix some crashes that occur in Minetest 5.2.0+
Due to changes in behaviour in entities and minetest.get_content_id
The End of the Road.. for now - Bugfix 1
Fixes a licensing issue with default_explode.ogg, see cefe234
The End of the Road.. for now
Version: 1.2.0: The End of the Road ... for now
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
Message from the Developers - The road ahead
It's been almost 3 years since the last stable release, so here's a new one...
Now, over 6 years after the first days of Lord of the Test, and more than 5 years after it first appeared on github, work on this version has come to an end.
While it's not perfect, it has certainly come a long way since its first days, when it began life as a modpack, rather than a game. It originally used just the default mapgen, now it has it's own special one - albeit imperfect. There are a greater variety of mobs, more features, fewer bugs. The features of the Minetest engine have advanced incredibly. Both of us have learnt a lot in terms of coding, design, planning and building a game. We've had help with coding from people from all over the globe. We've had support from countless people, some who have been in Minetest since the very start of Lord of the Test, some who joined later and are still with us, and others who have left, for one reason or another. At one time, there was support for both Minetest and Freeminer! There have been various servers running Lord of the Test, some managed and developed by us, some independently.
There's still a lot of work which could be done on it, a lot of features that could be added, but the base which it is all built upon still has large parts of code from 2013, when neither of us had an idea of how to code, or of what direction we wanted the game to go in. So a lot of the code one finds in the game is messy, unreadable, a combination of mods forced to work together. The game is based on Minetest Game, but since the time we made that our base, it has only been synced a few times, the last many years ago, and now, there is a lot of content in it that we feel would be unsuited for Middle Earth. In addition, we have changed a lot of the mods from Minetest Game to a greater or lesser extent, making the task of updating them rather daunting. But, at the same time, this means that we lose out on many of the bugfixes/performance improvements/security fixes which have been added. In addition to all of this, since we have our base in Minetest Game, it looks as if mods supporting Minetest Game should be compatible with Lord of the Test, when in actual fact, they are often not, due to part of the game overriding them, or causing crashes when they use functions from Minetest Game which were only added later.
So, when we considered the way forward, we had two possibilities ahead of us. Either, we could have decided to go through all of the code, back-porting fixes, rewriting messy portions, redesigning what we didn't like, updating Minetest Game, or, we could rewrite the game from scratch. This decision wasn't easy to make, and it took a long time to reach, with many discussions (some rather heated!) along the way. But in the end, we both decided that the best course of action was to redo everything from scratch, coding our own systems as much as possible, and focusing on a coherent, unique design.
If you've been following the development of Lord of the Test rewrite on Github, you may have seen that work has been going into this for the past couple of years. There's not been an awful lot of progress, as both of us have been very busy, but work is slowly progressing forward. Below, you'll see a few of the things that we want to do with the rewrite.
We will rename Lord of the Test to "Lord of the Test: Third Age (LTTA)". The main focus for LTTA is optimized code and polished features, and through that, the rewrite will feature a range of new efficient and polished features. Among some things to expect are;
- A new mapgen, with lots of biomes, which is accurate to Middle-Earth geography rather than scattered randomly-placed biomes.
- Massively reworked races/classes system, featuring great variety of races and subraces.
- Various gameplay systems will be re-hauled to fit better within the context of LTTA, some examples are farming, weapons, crafting, armour, inventory, all providing new and different polished gameplay.
- Work is being put into the various visuals too, with nice new textures, new mobs models and even a new, unique player model!
Simply put, expect LTTA to be vastly different from LOTT!
All of these things are just what we've got planned for the beginning, later on, there'll be an even greater variety of content, including a whole new quests system, a dialogue system, a complete array of mobs, and so much more!
But all of this will take time. We remain busy, and are likely to be so for the foreseeable future. So, if you want to help in shaping Middle Earth in Minetest, get in touch!
You can find us at IRC #lordofthetest in freenode and at discord here
Thank you all for your support and help along the journey - we wouldn't have been able to this far without your help! While this part of the road is over, there is an even bigger one ahead of us! The journey is exciting, and who knows where it will lead? Stay tuned for more information, and if you want, keep an eye out for a possible new development blog here!
- fishyWET (neinwhal) & Amaz
Future of LOTT
For the time-being, until LTTA is stable and complete enough for a release, LOTT is still the main stable version.
LOTT however, have reached an "End of Development" stage.
Since the game has reached its end of development, no more new features should be added.
LOTT will now be strictly restricted to only bugfixes or minor improvements (guide edits/additions and rebalances only if really needed). Only bugfix releases will be released.
If you wish to contribute to LOTT, please see CONTRIBUTING.md for further information.
If you wish to contribute to LTTA however, see the developer message above.
What's new?
With that however, the final version of LOTT does come with a couple new features, and much overdue rebalances & fixes.
See the changelog for a full list!
But most important of which is, guides/handbooks are now added, basically serving as ingame wiki, which should hopefully explain some of the new and existing features that are a bit unclear without reading the code.
They spawn in generated structures' chests.
For a list of guides, where they spawn and what info they entail, see here.
But that's about it for the final release of LOTT. We will see you in LTTA!
Yuletide Update
After over a year without a release, here is a new release for Christmas!
It contains many new features, here is a partial changelog:
- A total rework of ring crafting
- Two new buildings, which spawn underground in the Lorien and Iron Hills biomes
- 3d signs, ladders and torches
- Palantiri, which allow teleporting
- A new, ridable warg
- Many bug fixes!
For a full changelog, head over to the wiki!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone from all three of us in the Lord of the Test team!
Many thanks to all who contributed to this release, with models, textures, code, bug reports and suggestions!
N.B. This release requires Minetest 0.4.15, released on 2016/12/22
The long expected update!
After almost a year, here is another release of Lord of the Test.
This is also the first "stable" release - by that, I mean it isn't likely to crash, although it still remains a distinct possibility!! Also, quite a lot of features have been added, making the game somewhat more complete.
(I've switched (back to?!) to semantic versioning as well.)
Just because I've released 1.0.0 doesn't mean the game is finished though, or that it's balanced - expect more stuff soon(ish)!
Changelog can be seen here
Late Halloween Update
This update was quite rushed but we got the halloween update up! It is late though but it is never too late to enjoy halloween! Couple of tiny fixes and new features were add in also.
