It has come a long way. These days it doesn’t even come with a game preinstalled. You can play VoxeLibre, Asuna, and so much more. Plus the original Minetest game is still installable. Also there are quite a lot of mods and other content available.
The only gripes I really have is the security and UI design. Neither of them are that bad but they could be better.
Online play is 100% unencrypted or authenticated. Client executes lua code sent by the server. I hope the code is kinda sandboxed but wouldnt put my hopes up there.
As far as I’m aware, most of the “dangerous” lua api (io/network etc) is blocked and only available to mods during the startup phase, and not otherwise during runtime.
But I’m sure there are workarounds. For one, I’ve written mods with rust for it, and you can require and then call any dynamic library through lua, with all of the io and networking you’d want, as long as it is brought in during the init phase. And the mods that do access the “dangerous” api, have to be explicitly given rights to do so (but again, by the server, not the clients) in the config before it works.
It’s not that bad for the most cases, as long as you trust the server. If playing single player, you personally control which mods get the secure environment access, so at that point it’s entirely your own fault, if you get exploited.
I hope they can build on some work from the lua devs. Isolating stuff like that is not always easy. But given lua is used extensively for embedded scripting, there is a good chance they can.
hope they improve upon it, the old (when the banning was implemented) version of minetest was horrible. I’ll be trying it soon :)
It has come a long way. These days it doesn’t even come with a game preinstalled. You can play VoxeLibre, Asuna, and so much more. Plus the original Minetest game is still installable. Also there are quite a lot of mods and other content available.
The only gripes I really have is the security and UI design. Neither of them are that bad but they could be better.
What is the problem with security?
Online play is 100% unencrypted or authenticated. Client executes lua code sent by the server. I hope the code is kinda sandboxed but wouldnt put my hopes up there.
As far as I’m aware, most of the “dangerous” lua api (io/network etc) is blocked and only available to mods during the startup phase, and not otherwise during runtime.
But I’m sure there are workarounds. For one, I’ve written mods with rust for it, and you can require and then call any dynamic library through lua, with all of the io and networking you’d want, as long as it is brought in during the init phase. And the mods that do access the “dangerous” api, have to be explicitly given rights to do so (but again, by the server, not the clients) in the config before it works.
It’s not that bad for the most cases, as long as you trust the server. If playing single player, you personally control which mods get the secure environment access, so at that point it’s entirely your own fault, if you get exploited.
I hope they can build on some work from the lua devs. Isolating stuff like that is not always easy. But given lua is used extensively for embedded scripting, there is a good chance they can.
Also there isn’t necessarily a clean environment between mods. This means one mod could modify another mod.