Feature Discussion • Re: New Feature Hype Thread

I didn’t expect such a heavy reaction to this, and I don’t understand why. Obviously, games can "abuse" this feature but you’re overlooking that Luanti technically “allows” games to do various other things to heavily annoy players. Luanti already gives games plenty of opportunity to be nasty to players, and doesn’t stop them. Luanti allows you to create impossible games, insulting games, games that spawn unclosable formspecs, trolling games, games that kill you every tick, etc. Yet nobody complains. It is the same for this new feature. So the argument doesn’t really work IMO.

The use case for this feature is for simple screen effects that are not considered to be part of the HUD, like blood effects, damage distortions, vignette, gameplay-relevant view obstructions, etc. Emphasis on the word “gameplay”. It can be useful for anything that should not disappear when you hide the HUD, because it functionally is not the HUD.

Of course games could "abuse" that feature and just force the entire HUD to be always on but that would very likely be punished by bad ratings. Also, you seem to forget this is a free software community, which should prevent the proliferation of anti-features anyway. It’s hard to get away with anti-features when they can just be patched out.

I don’t think it is fair to blame Luanti for merely allowing games to theoretically do bad things. Luanti already does that in various other ways.

I think this feature is fine as-is. And we have yet to encounter a game that abuses this feature to begin with.

I may change my mind if someone can come up with a CONCRETE abuse so bad that the usual remedies no longer work. But so far, I think this feature can stay. But maybe, in the long run, CSMs will be the "true" solution anyway. No idea …

EDIT: As for cheat codes: I think cheating in singleplayer games are OK. But I also think games should NOT present their cheat codes on a silver platter by default. Games should have a clear mode that presents itself as the "intended" way to play. Cheaters have to do at least a little effort to enable cheats. If a major cheat is only one button press away, that’s just poor game design IMO. This is not a question of freedom, but of very basic game design principles.

Thinking of cheat codes, I just had an idea for compromise: What if Luanti added a little "secret" setting that, if turned on, allowed to hide ALL HUDs? Could not only be for "cheating" but also for devs in case the game HUDs malfunction badly. I mean, trying to prevent clientside cheats from the server is a foolish excercise anyway, so we might just give up and make it (semi-)official anyway.

Statistics: Posted by Wuzzy — Sat May 30, 2026 20:24