Proposals/Client scripting plans

Minetest is planned to get client side scripting. This page summarizes the plans for development, and tries to document the consensus inside the core development team. If your changes don't want to serve this **documenting** purpose, please **don't edit** this page (except trivial edits like grammar corrections), but rather edit the talk page, or suggest changes in irc. This is no Feature request page.

General design

The language will be plaintext lua (no bytecode, as it's insecure and against the open source nature of minetest). There won't be any restrictions on mod licenses though.

The general design should be much like the web browser / javascript relationship. During the connection, the server sends all code that should be executed to the client, which runs it inside a locked down sandbox. Unlike with server mods, there will be no way (without changing c++ source code) to execute code outside of that sandbox.

Unlike with web browsers, lua code should run in a separate thread. Also, to be completely separate, it shouldn't share the lua environment with the mainmenu lua (to forestall intra-environment exploits).

Base execution setup

Every server mod can have a directory "client" whose content will be sent to the client upon connection. After all files have been recieved, the client executes an "init.lua" file for every of those mods.

To emphase the short-lived-ness of the code, the client shouldn't give any access to the filesystem. This implies that all lua files should be held in memory. There can be caches (even permanent ones, like with the texture cache), but lua code shouldn't be abled to "just access the filesystem", not even subdirectories.

Communication between server and client

Client lua and server lua should be abled to communicate with each other. There should be no minetest.client_exec_code(playername, codestring) like call, because it favours a bad setup where code is parsed and re-parsed again, generating lag.

API compartments

SAO/CAO control

There should be ways to modify CAOs from client lua.

Formspec replacement

There is still a debate with what to replace formspecs.