In August, Luanti had a stand at FrOSCon, a free and open-source conference held in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
The stand
Our stand featured a desktop computer allowing visitors to try out various games and servers. Alongside keyboard and mouse, visitors were able to try out our new gamepad support. The stand was later supplemented with a second laptop to increase capacity. We put up two posters behind our stand, one of which was designed from scratch by ZenonSeth.
Our stand also had plenty of Luanti stickers, which were popular as ever; by the end, most of them had gone.
People we talked to
Our stand was visited by various people, ranging from casual visitors to regular players, parents, and Luanti community members.
People who initially expected a Minecraft clone were subsequently surprised to discover a variety of games and mods that demonstrate Luanti’s customizability and flexibility. At the same time, certain limitations of the engine became apparent, such as the lack of client-side customization and responsiveness to input. This is something that would be solved by allowing mods to run code on the client using Server-sent Client-side Mods (SSCSM).
We were also approached by parents who are interested in using Luanti at home. Many of them would like to see more resources for Luanti, particularly video tutorials for modding.
Beyond x86
Nura (formerly postmarketOS), a Linux distribution targeting mobile devices, also had a stand at FrOSCon. We were glad to see that Luanti was used for demonstration. Similar to FOSDEM, we noticed interest in making Luanti available on Linux mobile, including distributions that deviate further from “traditional” ones targeting PCs.
T2/Linux, which had a stand in the same corridor as ours, showed us a RISC-V laptop running Luanti. They proceeded to surprise us as they were able to successfully build and run Luanti on a PowerPC Mac.
Children’s Workshop by Teckids
Teckids is a non-profit that we collaborated with at FOSDEM. During FrOSCon, they independently held a Luanti-related workshop for children, teaching them how to create their own mods.
Conclusion
This was the first time we attended FrOSCon. We appreciate the positive experience there, and we would love to attend FrOSCon again next year.
We would like to thank our community for supporting us, particularly with the content that we were able to present to our visitors.
Cover image by luatic.