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Goanna v0.9.0-alpha

Goanna 0.9.0 is mostly about the interface. Server forms are sent and drawn the way the vanilla client sends and draws them, node items are drawn from their own meshes rather than from a folded cube, and both sit under a new dark glass style. The Luanti pin moves to 5.17.0, which brought animation along several tracks with it. Away from the interface, lava draws as lava, the sun stays out of caves, and a dig is measured from the shape a node actually has.

Changes

  • Luanti 5.17.0, and every animation track. The luanti/ submodule moves from 5.16.1 to 5.17.0: protocol version 53, formspec version 11. Entities play every animation track a 5.17 server sends, with priority, blend and start frame. Seen on fresh Mineclonia, Minetest Game and devtest worlds on the Luanti 5.17.0 Flatpak with Godot 4.5.1, and the older messages against a Luanti 5.10.0 server. Nothing between 5.10 and 5.17 has been joined, and an entity the server hides still does not animate, where vanilla animates it.
  • Animated node tiles. Tiles play their frames on the vanilla client's clock, the cube-like ones from animation arrays, so nothing changes per frame on the CPU. On a fresh Mineclonia world, 41 animated tiles and 13.45 ms median frame time against 13.59 ms with the animation off. An animated node still shows its first frame as an inventory icon.
  • Formspecs sent and drawn as upstream does. Buttons, labels, fields, slots, tooltips, hypertext, tables and scrollbars follow the upstream classes they come from, forms older than version 3 use upstream's element order, and a submission carries the fields GUIFormSpecMenu::acceptInput sends, not every control in the form. That last one is why Mineclonia's player settings back arrow saved the player's settings and showed itself again instead of returning to the inventory, in both styles and before the glass existed. Checked by 460 suite checks and side by side with the vanilla 5.17.0 client at 1600 by 900 on Mineclonia's forms, Minetest Game's and two of VoxeLibre's.
  • Node item icons drawn from the item mesh. A node item without an inventory image takes upstream's item mesh, rasterised in software the way drawItemStack draws it, in place of a folded cube that read a mesh node's atlas as cube faces and made every stair and slab a cube. Against the vanilla client, Mineclonia's list slots are within 0.9 of 255 mean absolute difference per cell, where they were 4.4 to 70.7, and its creative inventory first opens in 80 to 89 ms against 170 to 178 ms. Flat inventory images still ignore a stack's colour metadata.
  • The dark glass interface style. Settings, Appearance, Interface style chooses between Dark glass, now the default, and Game theme. In glass, Goanna's screens and every server form sit on panes that blur and darken the world behind them, a form's window chrome replaced and its content kept, with text a game wrote for a light theme lifted until it reads. Over snow, open sky, sand and water, a forest, a cave and a night at 1600 by 900, interface text measures 9.1:1 or better and a slot's count 4.6:1, and the glass costs 0.07 to 0.11 ms a frame with a form open, on an RTX 3090 another process was using at about 40 per cent. Dark and mid tone items stand out less on a glass slot tile than on Mineclonia's light grey slot, and the Minetest Game sweep and the main menu recapture were not redone after the GPU fault of 19 September.
  • Enhanced materials for Mineclonia, and a catalogue that resolves. Mineclonia's material maps are published as org.goanna.mineclonia.pack, 1021 normal and material map pairs, 95 MB, 177 of them authored by hand and the rest baked. Goanna asks for a bundle by itself once a server announces art the bundle covers. Every map was composed again for this release, and the first attempt at that was wrong: the bake had been pre-multiplying its height field by the material depth that nodes_array.gdshader applies again at draw time, so composing to that convention halved the relief of every baked stem, and the quality gate agreed because it enforced the same convention. Both now write the field across the byte and apply the depth once. The asset epoch the 0.8.0 catalogue pointed at was never published, so until now every bundle URL answered 404 and no client could install one; the catalogue now names assets-2026.09.2, which is published, and Kythen terrain moves to 1.1.0 with it. Watched working on 20 September: a client with a fresh profile joined a Mineclonia world on a Luanti 5.17.0 server, fetched the archive from the published catalogue, checked it against its recorded hash, installed 1021 pairs and composed its profile, with nothing in the log. That is the first time any client has installed a bundle. Three limits worth knowing. A bundle carries material maps only, so the art stays the server's own rather than the 256 px upscale the authored texture pack carries. A world hosted in Goanna serves those maps with no setting to find, where joining a remote server still means choosing Installed Mineclonia PBR on the Join Game screen, because the default choice hands the session no pack and a pack cannot be changed after connecting. And 11 of the 1021 ship with a recorded quality failure, dirt, clay, podzol, the rails, a torch and a grass top, each a few per cent smoother than a band the classification review itself calls a default rather than a judgement; asset_bundles/recipes/ names them and says why they ship.
  • The sun no longer shines into caves. The sun's only occluder was the shadow map, and the server never sends the ground above a cave, so a cave had sunlit floor patches and shadows cast the wrong way. The node, foliage and entity shaders now scale every directional light by Luanti's own sunlight. On a copy of the reporting world, Luanti 5.16.1 and Godot 4.5.1, the cave frame with the sun on matches the sun switched off to within the noise floor. Water, glass, ice and lava are not gated.
  • Lava draws as lava. A real liquid at light level 6 or more takes its own shader and its source tile's artwork, flowing and falling blocks included. Near lava is subdivided to eight segments a node and carries a velocity field from the neighbouring liquid levels, so the art moves with the flow, dark texels rise as crust and the glow is the inverse of the same mask. Verified with Godot 4.5.1 on an RTX 3090 by fixtures and by captures from disposable Minetest Game and Mineclonia caves. The cost of a large lava lake near the player is not measured, a pack's separate flowing artwork is replaced by the source artwork, and the full animation strip is not played.
  • Digging carves the node's own shape. Damage is measured from the surface a node actually has, derived from its own resolved boxes, so a blow on a slab, a stair or a ramp lands on that shape rather than on an inset from a cube's six faces. A stored carve shows a persistent crack stage to every player, and a game can claim the goanna_carve key so a client's guess never overwrites the game's own answer. The port of Kythen's rule matches the reference generated from its Lua over 7083 checks, and in play it has been watched carving a cube on a Minetest Game world. No slab or stair has been watched carving against a server.
  • Luanti is found where it is packaged. A report from a Pop!_OS machine said no game was installed: the lookup searched one user directory and one hard coded Flatpak path. Goanna now keeps every install it finds, packages, user and system Flatpak, Snap, AppImages, the Windows zip and source checkouts, reading each one's directories by Luanti's own rules, and a Luanti screen in the menu lists them, remembers the choice and can install one. Verified in an Ubuntu 24.04 container, where the scan found the package and its two games and brought a server up, and on this machine, where the 5.17.0 Flatpak and its eight games are found in 16 ms. Not verified: anything on Windows itself, the Flathub install end to end, and the machine the report came from.
  • Test clients stay off the owner's desktop. In test mode Goanna never captures the OS pointer or asks for focus, tools/goanna-headless runs a client inside gamescope's headless backend, tools/goanna-mcp runs any number of them as named instances, and the control channel's ui_* and key commands drive a form from inside. Through the MCP server, on a fresh Mineclonia world: two instances at once, a form opened, read, typed into and clicked, and nothing of Goanna's on the desktop. That ran on software rendering because the GPU had faulted, so two headless clients sharing the GPU is an open risk to verify, not a result.

Still alpha

Linux, Godot 4.5, Vulkan. Mineclonia is the most tested game, VoxeLibre reaches only two forms of the parity pass, and every number here was measured at 1600 by 900 on one RTX 3090. Other GPUs and other resolutions are not covered. A Windows package is exported beside the Linux one, but no Windows export has ever been launched by anyone; a report either way would be useful. macOS is not built.