One issue with Voxel-based physics destruction games is that the physics happens in continuous space (as opposed to voxel space). This means that the moment you break off a chunk of geometry, it has to be converted into a mesh and simulated like any other mesh-based model will, This makes voxels seem like more complicated Voronoi-noise based fractures. If you want the modelling workflow or the looks of voxels, it's fine. But assuming that voxels will somehow help with the destruction physics seems not to be a valid assumption.
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.
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!
[delayed]
So true.
Recent changes to Xcode have meant that on device debugging now launches WAY slower for me every time.
Once it’s going it’s fine. But an extra 20 seconds every time you start the app just kills things for me. It was never instant but now it’s trash.
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.
I get taken out of flow every time I submit my prompt to Claude. How’d you work around that?
Are we just assuming nobody is programming commando anymore?
You can try not using Claude
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there any way to have something like a distance blur? e.g. as rays travel further you reduce the number, subsample then apply a gaussian(or algo of choice) blur across those that return, increasing in intensity as the rays angle gets coarser?
It'd be really neat to have some way of enabling really long-distance raytraced voxels so you can make planet-scale worlds look good, but as far as I'm aware noone's really nailed the technical implementation yet. A few companies and engines seem to have come up with pieces of what might end up being a final puzzle, but not seen anything close to a complete solution yet.
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…
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.
Haha.. yeah entirely coded without AI so far, lets see how long we keep that up :P
If you use Google in any capacity, you already have.
Really looking forward to playing Voxile with my friends! I feel like merging real quests with a Minecraft-like will be compelling.
This looks so cool! Love the build to fight angle.
Gonna try it as soon as... I have time
naming something tech related without referencing crabs or lobsters challenge [impossible difficulty]
[deleted]
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.
It's not intended to be a Minecraft clone.. if you look a bit closer than the initial visual impression, you'll see there are many differences in gameplay.
As for the rating, yes we had a rough initial launch, but we're fixing all these things. Note that it is 65% out of only 63 user reviews, so statistically not set in stone yet.
Steam review marked as most helpful states:
> I played this game for 3 hours and i can confirm it is not in a playable state, there were several bugs within the first few maps that deleted needed items causing us to reset the entire world. several times. Don't waste your time...
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.
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.
Very cool
lobster: Like rust, python and ruby all mixed together
One issue with Voxel-based physics destruction games is that the physics happens in continuous space (as opposed to voxel space). This means that the moment you break off a chunk of geometry, it has to be converted into a mesh and simulated like any other mesh-based model will, This makes voxels seem like more complicated Voronoi-noise based fractures. If you want the modelling workflow or the looks of voxels, it's fine. But assuming that voxels will somehow help with the destruction physics seems not to be a valid assumption.
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.
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!
[delayed]
So true.
Recent changes to Xcode have meant that on device debugging now launches WAY slower for me every time.
Once it’s going it’s fine. But an extra 20 seconds every time you start the app just kills things for me. It was never instant but now it’s trash.
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
I get taken out of flow every time I submit my prompt to Claude. How’d you work around that?
Are we just assuming nobody is programming commando anymore?
You can try not using Claude
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there any way to have something like a distance blur? e.g. as rays travel further you reduce the number, subsample then apply a gaussian(or algo of choice) blur across those that return, increasing in intensity as the rays angle gets coarser?
It'd be really neat to have some way of enabling really long-distance raytraced voxels so you can make planet-scale worlds look good, but as far as I'm aware noone's really nailed the technical implementation yet. A few companies and engines seem to have come up with pieces of what might end up being a final puzzle, but not seen anything close to a complete solution yet.
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/
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.
Haha.. yeah entirely coded without AI so far, lets see how long we keep that up :P
If you use Google in any capacity, you already have.
Really looking forward to playing Voxile with my friends! I feel like merging real quests with a Minecraft-like will be compelling.
This looks so cool! Love the build to fight angle.
Gonna try it as soon as... I have time
naming something tech related without referencing crabs or lobsters challenge [impossible difficulty]
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.
It's not intended to be a Minecraft clone.. if you look a bit closer than the initial visual impression, you'll see there are many differences in gameplay.
As for the rating, yes we had a rough initial launch, but we're fixing all these things. Note that it is 65% out of only 63 user reviews, so statistically not set in stone yet.
Steam review marked as most helpful states:
> I played this game for 3 hours and i can confirm it is not in a playable state, there were several bugs within the first few maps that deleted needed items causing us to reset the entire world. several times. Don't waste your time...
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.
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.
Very cool
lobster: Like rust, python and ruby all mixed together
[dead]