MT5 Changes

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Revision as of 12:29, 29 January 2026 by Poikilos (talk | contribs) (Add new page describing all but version released a few days ago.)
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This is a review of release notes of several MT5 versions (<= 5.8 are skipped since they were already integrated into Final Minetest's "Trolltest" rolling release, but if anything is missing from it that follows the criteria below, you may inform Final Minetest). It is not a thorough review of commits that are not described in release notes.

The purpose of this page is to help improve backward-compatible versions (Final Minetest's "Classic" and "Finetest" rolling releases) so this page covers changes which:

  • Help play on MT5/Luanti servers.
  • Fix bugs
  • Improve the server but don't break compatibility with worlds (MT5's guideline is to upconvert worlds silently, but Final Minetest's guideline is to not do that or at least have the option to run old engine versions when necessary to run old worlds).
  • Improve the client but don't break compatibility with servers (with Classic servers, but especially with Finetest--the purpose of those servers being the point above).

This page does not usually cover other changes (unless where compatibility is uncertain).

Editor (Poikilos)'s Note: I reviewed patches in release notes for Luanti 5.9-5.13. I didn't review other commits or pull requests merged. I am recommending to implement these patches (only ones where I provide a diff URL) in cases where the patch doesn't remove params nor endpoints (They seem backward compatible but I haven't reviewed all the diffs). I mentioned some without providing diffs since I don't recommend them but they are notable and may affect us (changing mod compatibility, etc).

These patches likely have to be applied in order, especially in cases of new SDL key handling which was new then was improved.

5.9.0

  • Performance improvement for finding nearby entities (adds spatial index, so should/could be backward-compatible):

5.10.0

meh, not interesting

5.11.0

  • OpenGL 1.x fixed pipeline mode deleted (sigh...)
  • Dropped BMP image support. We shouldn't drop BMP support, but we should not use BMP files if we intend to make game(s) compatible to some degree with other clients.

5.12.0

  • Porting to SDL (2) has begun (Window and Input handling only)
  • Panel added to settings to control inputs (formerly, editing keymap.txt was necessary)
    • sneak & aux1 are optionally toggle-able now (instead of always turned off on release)--meh
  • set_camera player API function (desirable to help with Poikilos' 3rd-person camera control code)
  • Breaking changes to map format: "Alongside better world loading and generation performance, world storage has been changed to save block positions as separate integers instead of a hash. This simpler implementation is much easier to work with internally and for external tools. Please note: Worlds created with or migrated to 5.12.0 are not backward-compatible."

5.13.0

5.14.0