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Goanna v0.12.0-alpha

Goanna can read the game aloud and be played from the keyboard, sounds come from where they are, new materials arrive on your first visit to a world, dug blocks remember their progress, and the AI game master's characters can now walk, follow, patrol, trade and fight on its orders. Mineclonia's pack in the box is 1.3.1, with every mob and outfit skin.

Accessibility

  • Read aloud. Ctrl+B, in the menu or in a world, turns on speech for chat, text the game puts on the screen, what you point at, what you hold, your health, and menus and forms as they open, then each control you move to. It speaks through your system's voice, so a screen reader user keeps their own voice and rate. Settings, Audio chooses the voice, its rate and volume, and which of those things are read. On Linux it needs speech-dispatcher and a voice such as espeak-ng. It has not yet been tried by a blind player; see docs/play/accessibility.md.
  • Menus and forms from the keyboard. Tab and the arrow keys move through the main menu, Goanna's menus and every game form, Enter presses. On inventory slots Enter picks up and puts down, Shift+Enter moves the stack, Ctrl+Enter takes half; Left and Right switch tabs; Up, Down and Enter choose the links in a conversation. When the game sends a form again, the focus stays where it was.

Sound

  • You hear your own building. Placing a block makes its sound for you now, not only for everyone else. Using an item, taking damage, falling hard, jumping and landing make their sounds too, footsteps quicken as you run and sound in water and on ladders, and other players and creatures make footsteps as they walk.
  • Sounds come from where they are. They fade with distance as in the vanilla client and pan fully left and right, and a creature's sounds move with it instead of staying where it started. Sounds cannot yet seem to come from above or behind you on headphones.

Materials

  • New materials on the first visit. Joining a world whose materials you do not have, the connecting screen shows them downloading and the world opens with them, instead of with the server's art until next time. Skip and play now joins straight away, as before.
  • Smaller downloads. Joining a Minetest Game server no longer also downloads Mineclonia's 84 MB pack, and a pack's older versions are no longer downloaded before its newest.

Starting worlds

  • No more starting with a Luanti too old for the game. A Luanti whose version cannot be told from where it is installed, such as a distribution's package, is now asked its version. One older than 5.10 is listed as too old and never used, and Start Game installs Goanna's own server instead. Starting a world says which Luanti the game needs rather than starting a server that cannot run it. Not yet tried on Pop!_OS, where it was reported.
  • Digging picks up where you left off. On a Minetest Game or Mineclonia world started from Goanna, a block you stopped digging keeps its progress until it changes or the server stops, for everyone playing there, vanilla clients included. Kythen keeps its own.

Fixes

  • Kythen's map opens. Images a game sends after you join, such as Kythen's map, never arrived, so the map did nothing.
  • What you point at is described. The text a game gives a block or creature, such as a chest's owner, shows in the corner as in the vanilla client.
  • Inventory tabs switch at once. Clicking Recipes in Minetest Game's inventory did nothing until it was closed and opened again.
  • Inferred relief turns off on creatures too. Turning it off left it on for mobs and players already drawn.
  • One notice for new materials. Installing several bundles at once printed the same chat line once for each.

Experimental

  • A program playing as you sees and hears more. Besides menus and forms (which 0.11.0 already let it press, fill and choose in, without saying so), it now reads the HUD with its colours, the names over creatures, what the crosshair is on, and the sounds you hear with their direction, and can ask for a picture of the screen. See docs/agents/agent-interfaces.md.
  • The game master's characters can act. Besides speaking, a cast character can now be told to watch someone, walk somewhere and stay, patrol a few points, follow someone or keep its distance, hold an item, open its trades to a player, or, if it can fight and was cast armed, attack, with the same fairness limits as an encounter. It carries each order out by itself. See docs/agents/director.md.
  • The game master from a shell. tools/goanna-director-cli runs the AI game master from a terminal or a script, one command per call, with the same checks as the MCP service. See docs/host/director-setup.md.