Introduction
This year marked Luanti’s second consecutive appearance at FOSDEM! Held in Brussels, Belgium, FOSDEM is the largest free and open source software conference in Europe. Fresh off our recent rebranding and new release cycle, FOSDEM was a fantastic opportunity to collect feedback and update people on what’s happening in the Luanti world. The rename did make some logistics a bit tricky (flyers and leaflets needed to be redone), but thanks to some cutting-edge technology, we managed to recycle some material!
Speaking of feedback, FOSDEM showed us in a real-life context that renaming was the right choice. Instead of entertaining frequent questions about being a Minecraft clone, we were able to introduce Luanti as a game platform and all the features that came with it. The conference was also a convenient way to update familiars on the new name, with a few “Oh, this was Minetest!” comments throughout.
Besides the new name, our demos were also a huge hit with attendees. We were very happy to see the surprise on people’s faces while playing Extra Ordinance by SumianVoice (the winner of the 2024 Luanti Game Jam). For those who hadn’t played any Luanti games for a while, a third-person mech shoot-‘em-up game was simply mind-blowing (give it a try if you haven’t played it yet!). Visitors were also interested in the devices we featured at the booth: rubenwardy’s Steam Deck and a postmarketOS phone (kindly lent by Okias). Kids and adults alike greatly enjoyed their time with the Steam Deck, while more tech-savvy people were fascinated by a mobile Linux device running Luanti games.
Many adults who stopped by the booth were interested in Luanti as a libre game environment for their kids or students. Parents and teachers were both happy to see what Luanti could do, especially with the smooth and safe integration ContentDB offers for downloading content. Thomas even ran a workshop on Saturday teaching kids and parents how to mod and add content to their games; the kids were amazed when they were able to add dragons from Draconis to their worlds! They also had fun playing minigames together on the A.E.S. server. Many thanks to Haui, a passionate community member who helped cover our booth alongside their partner while we were pulled away to assist with the workshop.
The Saturday workshop was just a small part of the education theme present this year. rubenwardy and Zughy had a great conversation with Teckids about the workshops they host in Germany, and Zughy was invited to run a few in Italy. Tama McGlinn created AdaBots with Luanti to teach children programming and gave a talk about it as well. And of course, Zughy gave a talk on Sunday about Luanti and showcased some education projects and strategies.
The best part of real-life events is, hands down, the people. Many people paid a visit to the Luanti booth, sharing their ideas, projects, inspirations, or simply meeting us in-person after years of knowing them by a nickname on the internet. For instance, Adrian would like to make a to-scale world map in Luanti using OpenStreetMap data; Tama (from earlier) connected bots to the voxel world to teach programming with AdaBots; Markus from CoderDojo helps kids make and 3D print buildings in Luanti; Sylvia plays on Zughy’s Luanti server and had a wonderful conversation with him about possible improvements.
Being a free software convention, we got to interact with quite a few people representing various platforms. We were situated next to Homebrew, they renamed the Minetest cask to Luanti live on the stand. Folks from FUTO and NOSTR stopped by to discuss publishing Luanti on their platforms, while the night before FOSDEM two of us grabbed a bite with some Codeberg staff and got to hear about different experiences in the free software ecosystem. Several Luanti core team members also took the opportunity to meet in real life and talk face-to-face. We went for pizza on Saturday evening, joined by the director of the French Institute for Research and Innovation. With full stomachs we had plenty of fuel for a casual meeting that turned out to be very productive, and we even ended up with a new core dev (y5nw) by the night’s end!
FOSDEM was a great conference this year and we’re definitely ready to do it again. We hope you had as much fun as we did, and we’re looking forward to meeting you again. We’d also like to thank our sponsors who helped make the whole experience possible. In alphabetical order: Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, Italian Linux Society, rubenwardy’s sponsors, and Wikimedia Italy.
Cover image by rubenwardy.