Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

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

#31

Post by LelouBil »

barcoder wrote: post #15

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. Lob…

Yeah,

I'm working on an indie game project and just got frustrated with Unity, I'm porting everything over to Godot.

I even learned about using Kotlin with Godot today [0] and I am really hopeful this is stable (it seems so), because I favor a more functional style of programming and C# ends up making everything 5 times more verbose than Kotlin.

[0] https://godot-kotl.in/en/stable/

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

#32

Post by jfindley »

Aardappel wrote: post #11
OtomotO wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

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

#33

Post by katdork »

fallat wrote: post #29
Aardappel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and this is why i, personally, use searxng these days instead of google or duckduckgo

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

#35

Post by istillcantcode »

I appreciate when games load fast (this one does). Its one of the signs I use to see if a game is worth my time. Most of the games I play, I am playing the game within 20-30 seconds of opening the game from my desktop. I'm naively assuming that in order for a game to load fast you have to have a good plan of what order to load things in. It feels like an attention to detail thing to me.

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

#36

Post by Aeolun »

barcoder wrote: post #15

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. Lob…

Lobster doesn’t seem that different from Lua in that regard? I won’t say it isn’t impressive, but I’m having a hard time believing the hard part of this thing was calling from an interpreted to a static language.

Edit: I was mistaken about what Lobster is (potentially compiled instead of jit), but the main point stands.

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

#37

Post by Aeolun »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #30

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 f…

This isn’t actually true if you use GPU raytracing, as everyone involved with voxel destruction seems to realize at one point or another. Meshing in a performant way after every destruction event is simply not possible.

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

#38

Post by sarchertech »

bingaweek wrote: post #20
sarchertech wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Explain how a game that doesn’t run on most devices or crashes constantly is recommended by 65% of reviewers.

But also if that is true, that just solidifies my point which is that a 65% doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with game design.

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

#39

Post by MikeShah »

spacemarine1 wrote: post #2

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.

Indeed! Thanks for also linking my discussion with Wouter His early work on Cube engine and Amiga-E are still awesome to look at.

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

#40

Post by Aeolun »

Aardappel wrote: post #6
vessenes wrote: post #3

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.

What is the voxel resolution Voxile works at?

Also, does it have a single world grid? (I saw you say octree somewhere) or many separate elements?

Post reply on HN