After a long-term discussion announced on the renaming of the Minetest game engine, it will now be developed under the name Luanti. The new name is a combination of the Finnish word Luonti, meaning “creation” (reflecting the project creator’s Finnish origins), and the name of the Lua programming language used in the engine. The decision to rename was driven by the confusion caused by the similarity between the names Minetest and Minecraft, leading users to believe it was a Minecraft clone. Additionally, the presence of the word “test” in the title suggested it was a test product.
The Luanti project focuses on creating a free cross-platform game engine in the sandbox genre, allowing users to create Minecraft-style games using a variety of blocks to build structures and buildings in a virtual world. The gameplay options offered by the engine rely entirely on the mods created in Lua. The engine is developed in C++ and utilizes the 3D library Irrlichtmt (a fork of Irrlicht). The code is distributed under the LGPL license, while game resources are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
