Show HN: Teachcraft – Learn Python through Minecraft
Looks like a great guide to get started with coding with Minecraft. There have been some efforts over the years, but this looks really complete. One obstacle for schools to get started with this however, is buying all the Minecraft licenses.To this end, I've been toying around a bit with an open source Minecraft clone called Minetest lately [1][2]. It's surprisingly complete, and could also have great uses in (programming) education.It has a C++ core based on the Irrlicht 3D engine, but many of the game mechanics are implemented in Lua. Modifications like the examples in Teachcraft can also be built in Lua. For example, this [3] is a mod to spread flowers and mushrooms around the map.The Lua language isn't used much currently in the education environment, which is mostly focused around Scratch, Python and sometimes Javascript. Then again, seeing different languages and noticing their similarities can be educational in itself.Finally, I've been wondering how hard it would be to port something like Minetest to Emscripten. Irrlicht seems to be compatible already [4]. The non-JIT version of Lua is compatible as well [5]. Obstacles in Minetest that I can identify would be the heavy use of the filesystem, the use of UDP sockets and memory sharing between threads.Would anyone know more about how hard porting something like this would be?[1] https://github.com/minetest[2] http://www.minetest.net[3] https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game/blob/master/mods/f...[4] http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=51...[5] https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua