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!

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

lobster: Like rust, python and ruby all mixed together

Very cool