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

https://elbowgreasegames.substack.com/p/voxray-games-pushes-major-update

by spacemarine1 • 5 months ago

279 77 5 months ago

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

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.

MikeShah• 5 months ago

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

repelsteeltje• 5 months ago

I remember learning about Bla, a functional programming language for Amiga wrote for his master's thesis.

thot_experiment2• 5 months ago

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.

dinkblam• 5 months ago

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…

vessenes• 5 months ago

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.

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

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.

OtomotO• 5 months ago

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.

Aeolun4• 5 months ago

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?

injidup• 5 months ago

lobster: Like rust, python and ruby all mixed together

huevosabio• 5 months ago

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

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

sarchertech3• 5 months ago

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.

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

Haha.. yeah entirely coded without AI so far, lets see how long we keep that up :P

fallat• 5 months ago

If you use Google in any capacity, you already have.

ashton314• 5 months ago

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/

VinLucero• 5 months ago

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

Cloudef• 5 months ago

Very cool

barcoder• 5 months ago

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!

yesitcan• 5 months ago

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

kranner• 5 months ago

Are we just assuming nobody is programming commando anymore?

mef51• 5 months ago

You can try not using Claude

sixo• 5 months ago

Not every conversation is about AI. This one isn't.

animuchan• 5 months ago

If the flow is just typing prompt after prompt into AI, I guess just ignore that it's running and keep typing? Or open a new tab and keep typing. Why does Claude even break the typewriter flow thing that's going for you?

gslepak• 5 months ago

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

MBCook• 5 months ago

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.

LelouBil3• 5 months ago

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/

mrsmrtss• 5 months ago

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.

nmeofthestate• 5 months ago

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

Aeolun4• 5 months ago

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.

imiric• 5 months ago

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.

sarchertech3• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

AmbroseBierce• 5 months ago

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...

sobiolite• 5 months ago

That review is a year old. Just maybe it’s improved since then?

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

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.

thousand_nights• 5 months ago

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

bobajeff• 5 months ago

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.

HexDecOctBin3• 5 months ago

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.

Ideally, we would be able to do physics in voxel space itself (sort of like a cellular automata based classical mechanics), but that doesn't seem to be possible.

Aeolun4• 5 months ago

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.

HexDecOctBin3• 5 months ago

So how would you do destruction physics on voxels without meshing? This is how even Teardown does it, and it uses raymarching.

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

Have you tried Teardown? Has incredibly good voxel physics. Definitely possible.

HexDecOctBin3• 5 months ago

Teardown calculates collision meshes and does physics on those. Not on voxels directly, and definitely on in voxel space.

peterashford• 5 months ago

Heh. I thought I remembered the name. I used to use Wouter's E programming language on the Amiga. It was pretty good, as I recall.

istillcantcode• 5 months ago

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.

cpill• 5 months ago

I guess if I'd done all that work on lobster and then bipolar built a ray traced voxel engine on top of that, end game would be to licence the engine. You have something here that the other game engines don't have, and something Minecraft is not likely to have (they are pretty stagnant development wise). This is easily 100 times better than Roblox. If you focus on making the world building tools easy to use and modding/game design you could easily be the next big thing. Don't get too bogged down in game design other than to use it as a proof of concept to help you understand what game designers will need.

Scramblejams• 5 months ago

Congrats on your release, Aardappel! Bought a copy to support the dream!

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

Much appreciated :)

BatFastard• 5 months ago

Does anyone know if this uses Microvoxels or an Octree? As someone who has built an Octree engine I am curious. I will say it is gorgeous!

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

Both! It uses an octree, and at the leaves are bricks of small voxels.

voidUpdate3• 5 months ago

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 is just cubes that don't move, just change colour

Lichtso• 5 months ago

John Lin used to work on such an engine where all voxels stay axis and grid aligned, even in animations:

https://x.com/ProgrammerLin/status/1342786223811698688 https://voxely.net/blog/

But I think the project was abandoned in 2021.

e1ghtSpace• 5 months ago

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

voidUpdate3• 5 months ago

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

xyzzy_plugh• 5 months ago

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

IMO the effect is less compelling than you might think.

voidUpdate3• 5 months ago

looks great to me, if that little gif is anything to go by

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

While Voxile has off-grid blocks of voxels for monsters etc, it is much more serious about being on-grid for everything else. The entire world is entirely on-grid, single size voxels, you can only place aligned objects, and rotate in 4 directions. These voxels only every exist as voxels, never as polygons.

In contrast with most voxel-looking games, which are actually meshes converted from voxel inputs, placed at arbitrary locations with arbitrary scale.

When I started this project, I actually prototyped what it would take to have moving objects in-world as aligned voxels, but the animation was too jerky and it was too limited. Would have been an interesting "style" suitable for some games (strategy games?) but none with fast paced realtime combat.

andy12_• 5 months ago

I wasn't prepared to see how good the game looks visually. It's super cool.

suncore• 5 months ago

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 detail (https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html) which means the language creator agrees that this is important. Also happy to see the language seems to support fast memory management in a multi threaded environment, which is absolutely not self evident in many languages.

simgt• 5 months ago

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<Foo>` 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.

Aardappel12• 5 months ago

Lobster is meant to be a more high level language than Rust, so encoding what you want 99% of the time in the type made sense. It also makes it easier for people to read, knowing that common types like int2 are always by value.

That said, it be easy to have annotations to force the other use case, just so far that has not been needed :)

anentropic• 5 months ago

Ah, the Lobster guy!

I have been running across that repo for years and wondered if anything was happening with it - great to see an impressive game project built on it now.

anonzzzies• 5 months ago

Cool, finally something from Aardappel again (maybe I missed many other things). I like the programming languages since E and I am happy something we can buy comes from it. Well done.

junon• 5 months ago

Love Voxile! It's a beautiful little game. Actually didn't known it was still receiving updates.

laalshaitaan• 5 months ago

Building your own language to build your own engine to build your own game is what most orgs would flag as scope creep. But that's exactly what lets Wouter push things nobody else can lol he controls every constraint all the way down. Genuinely wild stuff.

deterministic• 5 months ago

This is the kind of cool article that makes me visit HN regularly.

Instead of the usual BS "AI will kill us all" or "AI wrote Linux in 5 secs!" style articles.

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

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