Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

bobajeff 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Kind of looks like like Minecraft if it was built out of Voxatron. (millions of Little destructible cubes) seems like a very very difficult thing to do at that scale. On top of that making a engine and a language. This guy must have interesting things to say.

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barcoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm a long time Unity developer that in the past year picked up Godot. The speed at which Godot loads compared to Unity is staggering, it's just so much faster. When I returned to Unity I raised that my flow state was constantly being broken in a way that it wasn't when using Godot.

Entering flow is one of the beautiful things I love about programming. And being knocked out of it often feels like a physical jolt.

Lobster seems to take the idea of optimisation and speed to new levels. Entering and remaining in flow must be even easier. First though, I'll need to put the time into learning enough to be able to do it!

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gslepak 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for mentioning Lobster. This guy seems to have learned many lessons of language simplification and design. Looks like a promising language and I wish it success.

Ref: https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/language_reference.html

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yesitcan 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I get taken out of flow every time I submit my prompt to Claude. How’d you work around that?

	▲	kranner 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Are we just assuming nobody is programming commando anymore?
	▲	mef51 3 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can try not using Claude

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spacemarine1 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The founder, Wouter, has created or helped design 10 programming languages. Voxile is built in his newest language: Lobster. Wouter has been a major contributor to WASM and LLVM while also inventing flatbuffers. He’s worked at Crytek, Gearbox and Google among many other places. I’ve never seen anything like Voxile.

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vessenes 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very cool - the post made me want to play the game, and check out lobster, but didn't link to it - lobster is open source: https://github.com/aardappel/lobster. It doesn't look like the voxel engine is, though, which is a bummer. On reflection, I'm guessing that game is built for mods, so that would be a path to getting to play with the engine side.

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Aardappel 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, only the lower layers are open source right now. We will eventually expose more, when modding will more stable, etc.

Right now the editor has a UI driven minimalistic language for specifying quests and other gameplay actions.

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OtomotO 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Any ideas how to increase the render distance way further?

Because that's where I always get stuck. There are so many cool algorithms and ideas that I have like combining ray tracing with meshing and even like imposters for the distant chunks.

But this is getting very complicated with contrees and raytracing/marching etc.

	▲	Aardappel 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		With raytracing having a far render distance is actually fairly cheap and simple compared to polygonal worlds (good looking LOD is hard). Some reasons why we don't have a super far render distance, in order of importance: The biggest is GPU memory. The octree that holds the world gets gigantic at large sizes. We'd have to swap parts out as the camera moves. We can do that but haven't gotten there. Noise: raytracing looks incredibly noisy if you simply cast rays far into small geometry. Hence we even have LOD for blocks, even though they're not needed for efficiency, they're needed for visual stability. If you're unlucky and a ray has a lot of near misses with geometry, it does more work than other rays and it causes GPU performance degradation. It's rare but to raytrace far you have to optimize for a certain amount of ray steps, we actually put a bound on this. We find having fog gives some visual unity and sense of scale. With far away fog, the world looks VERY busy visually.

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ashton314 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gorgeous. These are the graphics I wish Veloren[1] had. Maybe my machine is lacking the specs to dial up the graphics all the way…

[1]: https://veloren.net/

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sarchertech 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Now this is the kind of thing I expect people to bring to show and tell when they post about how they are 100x as productive thanks to AI.

	▲	Aardappel 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Haha.. yeah entirely coded without AI so far, lets see how long we keep that up :P

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VinLucero 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Really looking forward to playing Voxile with my friends! I feel like merging real quests with a Minecraft-like will be compelling.

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huevosabio 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This looks so cool! Love the build to fight angle.

Gonna try it as soon as... I have time

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thousand_nights 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

naming something tech related without referencing crabs or lobsters challenge [impossible difficulty]

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imiric 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The game currently has a Mixed (65%) rating on Steam. Granted, some negative reviews are shallow, but some mention important issues. Regardless, a Minecraft clone is not exactly groundbreaking in terms of gameplay.

This is to say that technical merits are rarely good indicators of a good game. As a gamer, I don't really care about the game engine, and even less about the language it's written in. Good programmers often obsess about these details, but it's easy to miss the forest for the trees, which is what I think happened here. Game design is a separate skill from game development, and not many people excel at both.

Still, it's great seeing this here, as the technical achievements are quite remarkable.

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sarchertech an hour ago | parent [-]

65% positive reviews doesn’t tell you much about whether the game is good or not. At most it tells you that the game wasn’t great at communicating what people should expect.

	▲	bingaweek 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is just being intentionally obtuse. Everyone knows that 65% generally means the game doesn't even run on most devices, crashes constantly, or has some other serious flaw. Ridiculous.

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Cloudef 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very cool

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injidup 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

lobster: Like rust, python and ruby all mixed together