Luanti 5.16.1 released!

Introduction

Luanti 5.16 is here! This release contains many smaller enhancements and bug fixes, including rendering and input improvements.

You can download Luanti from our website, check out the code on GitHub, or read the full changelog.

Table of Contents

• Mod Directories Are Now Read-only
• Rendering and Input
• Modding and Game Dev Features
• What’s Next?

Mod Directories Are Now Read-only

Writing to mod directories was deprecated in Luanti 5.9.0. This is now enforced by a runtime error. Mods should use core.get_mod_data_path() to store global data or core.get_worldpath() to store world-specific data.

This was done primarily to improve security, but also prevents data loss when updating packages using ContentDB and allows users to install mods and games in system-wide read-only directories.

Rendering and Input

We continue to work on modernization, performance improvements, and bug fixes for our rendering and input code.

We now have hardware skinning support for animated meshes. This moves work from the CPU to the GPU, improving performance, especially when there are many animated entities in the world.

Input improvements continue with support for additional mouse buttons, improved focus in GUIs, and keyboard-binding support for controlling the camera.

Several graphical glitches were fixed, including alpha blending of particles and nested node boxes.

Modding and Game Dev Features

Game developers can now rename their games without breaking player worlds or installs. This is done automatically using game aliases.

Developers can now disable the wield item swap animation. This animation is played by default whenever the wield item changes; skipping the animation allows developers to take advantage of dynamic wield items without this disruptive animation.

What’s Next?

Take a look at the pull request list and milestones to see what the community and developers are working on.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to Luanti! Questions? Ideas? Feel free to get involved!