Introduction to Structures for Minetest

During the course of next month (March 2019) I'm going to present another project I've been working on. This is one of the fewer things I've been putting effort into which aren't furry or vore related. Fear not: Those projects are continuing as well, and there should be updates to show on them starting next April!

A brief summary of what I'll be presenting: Structures is a mod for the Minetest engine, currently running on top of its default game (Minetest Game) though intended to be part of an original game I plan on making someday. It's part of an ambitious goal to create something that hasn't been attempted before to my knowledge: A city generator for voxel worlds, capable of dynamically creating complex life-sized cities. Players will come across cities as they navigate the map, and will be able to explore every room inside of every building, in which they can interact with various items found in homes or offices. In combination with the Creatures mod, cities will later contain people (human and anthro alike) which you'll be able to interact with, however that is a more distant plan.

The mod was originally created more than 5 years ago, with the base code developed since that time. Due to unfortunate events surrounding Minetest, namely the unexpected death of one of its developers with whom I was working on the shaders, I shelved both Structures and Creatures during the last few years. This year I decided to pick it back up again: I modified the city generation algorithm to fix multiple bugs and greatly improve its performance. Since the old town that was used to demo it became incompatible, I'm now designing the new default town which is what I'll be showcasing here.

The end goal is something among the lines of a Grand Theft Auto fashioned open world, but for a Minecraft type of environment. The focus is on scale and detail: Cities will be as big as real life ones, every building will contain an interior you can enter, and in every room you can interact with functional appliances and electronics. When the project reaches maturity, it will be a full scale world simulator, however a lot of work is needed until that point.

If you wish to try this for yourself, I recommend first downloading Minetest and becoming familiar with it. Mods can be installed by simply cloning their Git repository into the mods directory, then enabling them in the configuration of the world. Note however that at this time, large buildings are spawned incompletely, due to engine bugs which I plan on working with the Minetest team on fixing.

Structures mod: https://github.com/MirceaKitsune/minetest_mods_structures

Minetest engine: https://minetest.net