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I want to like Veloren, I've been following the project for a long time as I like their design goal and the art direction they have, but even after all this time it's the perfect illustration of what you get when you try making a game with just artists and developers and with no game designers: lots of things are very cool but as a video game it just keep missing the mark.

Okay I played Veloren for a bit a few years ago and I'm really impressed with the improvement, will need to give it another go.

One serious question I have, is there a reason with voxels we still need to have block based stuff? Like back when voxel tech first started taking off I kind of thought we'd get to the place where like you have so many voxels and we get so good at calcing the physics interactions it would just look like a normal game.

What are the bottlenecks there? Or is this intentionally stylistic still these days?

From looking at some of the bosses I can tell that's getting closer but we're still further than I'd think

I remember playing a very very early version of Veloren as a Cube World alternative. Happy to see where it is right now.

If you're interested in how the mountains and rivers are generated, it's mostly based on the paper "Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion": Each chunk rises (at a noise-based, constant rate) while erosion is applied based on the chunk's slope and the size of its catchment area.

The result is a river network as well as the central height of each chunk; based on this roads, caves and structures are laid out. The actual voxels are only determined when a player loads the area and are (usually) not persisted.

Also, for some technologies not related to worldgen: Rendering is done via wgpu, models are built in MagicaVoxel, and both client and server use an ECS (specs).

Couple of tips for getting this to launch (I don't have deep experience here, this is just what worked for me):

- install the Rust package rather than the Flatpak or COPR

- disable fractional scaling if you're using Wayland

- launch airshipper from a terminal rather than the Gnome app grid (and if you've already done the latter check for and kill any orphaned processes - they seem to get stuck sucking up a whole thread)

I remember the last time a tried it on the steam deck, less than a year ago through their launcher, it was completely broken and unplayable. I would love to give it another go if this was fixed.

Rust gaming is picking up.

Veloren's mainline client is built on its own engine.

Tiny Glade uses Bevy ECS, but has it's own graphics stack.

Both Bevy and Fyrox are starting to get pretty capable. They're not Godot yet, but they're getting there. Bevy and Fyrox have very different design goals, so there's something for everyone.

Bevy leans hard into ECS and has a ton of utility crates and third party libraries, such as level builders. Fyrox is not so heavily tied to ECS and tries to build everything in as a complete package. Bevy is the more mature engine, but both are viable.

Both can be easily deployed to the web as WASM bundles, so they're ideal for multi platform targeting.

Rust is shaping up to be a major game programming language. And it's already an incredible web backend / RPC / API service programming language, so you can write your game server in Rust too.

Related. Others?

Veloren, an open source game, release 0.16 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876804 - March 2024 (17 comments)

Five Years of Veloren - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259635 - June 2023 (1 comment)

Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496414 - Nov 2022 (4 comments)

Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30667022 - March 2022 (177 comments)

Veloren – Open-source MMORPG written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26037461 - Feb 2021 (143 comments)

Veloren: An open-world, open-source multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347286 - July 2019 (1 comment)

Isn't that word used as name means "lost" in German?

I tried it a while ago and it looks really interesting - especially biomes and lightning

This is an open source version of another game called Cube World, which was basically a scam when it came out. Had only a few of the promised features and didn’t update for years.

Minor note that installation via the launcher (Why a launcher!?!) seems a bit broken. Both the direct mac download, and installing from Cargo, installs Airshipper v0.15.0. This says that it's outdated and to install a new version. Clicking the button to do this takes you to the Github releases page, where the latest version is 0.14. There's a december release for v0.16 but it's a tag only and has no artifacts. Quit in frustration.

Edit: Despite having an issues page, the GitHub page of the launcher is apparently only a mirror of the GitLab repository. GitLab has artifacts for the latest version. I am mystified why they send people to the GitHub page on their officially linked and `cargo install` downloads.

Thanks for ruining my productivity. This is awesome!

Reminds me of 3D Dot Game Heroes for the PS3.