Supporting Julia for minetest

[ashwani-rathee]

Problem

It would be great to have something like MineRL for Julia. I have worked on Miner.jl which is like a toy minecraft: https://github.com/ashwani-rathee/Miner.jl which is integratable with ReinforcementLearning.jl which provides reinforcement learning tools with Julia. But I want a richer experience which minetest can provide and I want it to be part of the environment available there. I can make c++ libraries available in Julia through https://github.com/JuliaInterop/CxxWrap.jl.

Solutions

What I want to ask is if there is c++ api to the whole game? and are you guys interested in something like this? I would help with development but I need support on c++ side of things

[JJJHolscher]

If you take a look at minetester/minetest_env.py en minetester/util.py you can see that python communicates with c++ using zeromq and protobuf.
For you to make this julia-compatible you might only need to be able to make the same zeromq calls and deserialize the message you receive with protobuf without ever touching the c++ code.

Right now c++ retrieves information from minetest by looking at global variables from the server mods in mods and client mods in clientmods. These are written in lua since that's how the original minetest project set it up.

So, you probably won't need to touch any c++ unless you want features the modding api doesn't provide, but you will need to write your own lua mods for retrieving information.