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

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

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

#61

Post by voidUpdate »

e1ghtSpace wrote: post #60
voidUpdate wrote: post #53

It always mildly annoys me when a game says that it is all voxels, but clearly isn't, since the little cubes easily move off the voxel grid. Its just geometry moving around, like normal games, but modelled in little cubes, instead of being fully restricted to voxels. I would really like to see a fully voxel game, where all geometry is "rendered" to voxel space before being rendered to the screen, so that everything i…

Are you suggesting the voxel grid is attached to the camera, or that the camera moves through the grid?

Either could work, but world space voxels would probably be easier to understand than camera space

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

#62

Post by thot_experiment »

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.

Cube 2: Sauerbraten too! Definitely spent some evenings playing that with my roomies back in the day before we invariably went back to Q3. What an insane resume.

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

#63

Post by thot_experiment »

mrsmrtss wrote: post #51
LelouBil wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

> I favor a more functional style of programming and C# ends up making everything 5 times more verbose than Kotlin. As if you can't program C# functional style.

> As if you can't program C# functional style.

This, I was really impressed recently when I met a C# dev who was also a programmer (as opposed to your standard C# SaaS dev who just copy pasted from the framework docs and stack overflow and was fully automated by Claude in 2025) and he showed me how nice the language has gotten since I last used it over a decade ago when it was just Microslop Java. They've really put in work and it has a lot of great functional constructs now.

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

#64

Post by nmeofthestate »

LelouBil wrote: post #31
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/

I do wonder whether Kotlin is sufficiently different from C# to make it worth developing in Godot in a non-standard way.

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

#67

Post by dinkblam »

thot_experiment wrote: post #62
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.

Cube 2: Sauerbraten too! Definitely spent some evenings playing that with my roomies back in the day before we invariably went back to Q3. What an insane resume.

I have fond memories of porting Cube, Sauerbraten and AssaultCube to the Mac back in the day. Given what i've seen from Wouter back in the day i am not surprised he is still on it full steam…

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

#68

Post by simgt »

suncore wrote: post #58

About the Lobster language used: The first thing I do when encountering a new language is look at the memory management, since what I want to do with a piece of code is usually build and manipulate data in a safe and efficient manner, so this is central. I am happy to see Lobster seems to be trying to take a new(ish) and pragmatical approach to memory management and that there is a whole document describing it in det…

Thanks for sharing, it's indeed a great way to quickly see what a language has to offer.

From what I understand, the main innovation of Lobster here is that `class Foo` is a boxed type, while `struct Bar` will be inlined. I'm not sure I see how that's an improvement over using either `Foo` or `Box` on instantiation. It also does reference counting by default, and tries to optimise it out at compile time by assigning a single owner and borrow.

We often see complains that Rust's ownership puts a lot of burden on the programmer, but there is really a point at which it clicks and we stop having to fight the borrow checker almost entirely.

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

#70

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

voidUpdate wrote: post #53

It always mildly annoys me when a game says that it is all voxels, but clearly isn't, since the little cubes easily move off the voxel grid. Its just geometry moving around, like normal games, but modelled in little cubes, instead of being fully restricted to voxels. I would really like to see a fully voxel game, where all geometry is "rendered" to voxel space before being rendered to the screen, so that everything i…

Lexaloffle's Voxatron is what you're describing: https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php

IMO the effect is less compelling than you might think.

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