6 ms·

Veloren – Voxel action-adventure role-playing

340 points by tete 2y ago

pndy 2y ago
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
- VonTum 2y ago
  The german word is "Verloren" (Also in Dutch) But the similarity is striking still
  - rzzzt 2y ago
    "Veloren (/ vɪlɔɹn /, ve-LOR-en, from German/Dutch verloren ('lost')) is an open-world, open-source multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust Language." https://wiki.veloren.net/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.veloren.net/wiki/Main_Page
  - suavesito 2y ago
    Not a coincidence, it was derived from the word!
    - hovering_nox 2y ago
      I hate it so much. Every time I read it, all I can think is "that's a typo."
      - spacechild1 2y ago
        I didn't even spot the missing "r" until I read this comment. Now I feel you.
      - tormeh 2y ago
        If I remember correctly it actually is a typo. Someone typed "verloren" wrong and thought it was a good name for the game. The story behind names is often not so glamorous.
      - ahartmetz 2y ago
        I kinda hate many current game names, I prefer this. Otherwise, making a current_year name is easy: noun adjective: noun. How about "Dark Kingdom: Multitude"?
        ahartmetz 2y ago
        *adjective noun: adjective, obviously The first two usually make some sense together, the third one is where it gets creative / random.
    - Hikikomori 2y ago
      Is the game a quest to find the lost r?
skitter 2y ago
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).
matricaria 2y ago
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.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  I mean they're all just Minecraft clones.
  - maeln 2y ago
    Not at all. Aside from the aesthetic choice, both cube world and veloren have nothing in common with minecraft when it comes to gameplay.
    - vintermann 2y ago
      Default gameplay maybe? But I'm pretty sure there were servers that tried to do whatever Veloren is doing. The diversity of minigames and whole game concepts on Minecraft servers was pretty extreme for a while.
  - SkiFire13 2y ago
    The term you might be looking for is voxel games.
    - philipwhiuk 2y ago
      Not really - look at the feature list. You can make other voxel games. This game is not that, it's explicitly the list of features in Minecraft.
  - vmg12 2y ago
    And minecraft is an infiniminer clone which is a 3d clone of Motherload which is a clone of ...
    - 2y ago
echelon 2y ago
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.
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  What about Jai ?
  - lawn 2y ago
    Is there anything you can run with Jai yet?
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    Is it publicly available?
    - jsheard 2y ago
      Nope, there's an inner circle of beta testers but it's still effectively vaporware as far as the general public is concerned, even after a decade of development.
- wavemode 2y ago
  As the old joke goes - Rust has 50 game engines but only 5 games. The tools are there, sure, but are major studios using them?
  - 2y ago
misnome 2y ago
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.
- suavesito 2y ago
  The launcher was there to make it easier to pull the latest build without needing to check if a new version was available. A couple of years back the updates were irregular (sometimes a few days, other more than a week). We regularized the new builds once a week, but, still, the launcher now serves as a way to explore different unofficial or experimental servers that are being available (via registering in the GitLab project).
  - baal80spam 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - khimaros 2y ago
      this is a confusing take to me. could you explain your aversion to launchers?
      - doublerabbit 2y ago
        To me launchers are / can be another pattern of dark-ui. Why is a launcher required? Is the launcher spying on my system, sending information back to HQ? Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play the game and then update the game in-game? Are you going to throw me advertisement banners when you're not making or being greedy? What if the update fails? It's one thing I have to wait upon to play the game but launchers come bloated. A carousel of graphics taking a gig of space then requiring an additional 10GB download for the actual game.
muterad_murilax 2y ago
Reminds me of 3D Dot Game Heroes for the PS3.
99094 2y ago
I remember playing a very very early version of Veloren as a Cube World alternative. Happy to see where it is right now.
littlestymaar 2y ago
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.
- tormeh 2y ago
  Agreed. I've contributed to the game, so I feel like I have some sort of insight here. Veloren is a bunch of cool features in a bag, but my impression is that there is little focus on the gameplay loop and the holistic player experience. For rather obvious reasons any change that's not achievable by a single person in their free time is also just very hard to get done. Besides, Veloren is popular enough that drastic changes are unlikely to be uncontroversial. I don't blame anyone for this. I guess it's just the nature of open source game development. Still, I recommend anyone with a bit of time on their hands try it out. There's a couple of hours of decent fun in it. There's a lot to see and explore. The somewhat incoherent design is a bit of a strength at times, since it means the game is not very predictable. Just don't be disappointed when it's not a polished time sink like WoW.
talles 2y ago
[flagged]
acuntcalleddan 2y ago
[dead]
canadiantim 2y ago
Thanks for ruining my productivity. This is awesome!
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Veloren, an open source game, release 0.16 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876804 - March 2024 (17 comments) Five Years of Veloren - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259635 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347286 - July 2019 (1 comment)
daemonologist 2y ago
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)
ianbutler 2y ago
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
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  It appears to be stylistic? When I see a voxel rotating in space ... that's not really a "voxel" in my mind, it's a cube. I suppose we over-apply the word though these days.
  - ianbutler 2y ago
    Fair, I guess something like the finals is what Im thinking of? Im not sure though I think they may pre bake their destructible terrain
    - dannersy 2y ago
      The Finals destruction is not prebaked. The reason it works and is consistent is because everything is done server side and communicated to all clients. The game is very CPU heavy for this reason.
      - ianbutler 2y ago
        That's very good to know, I thought it seemed a bit too complex to be, but I wasn't sure.
- ChickeNES 2y ago
  Have you seen the game Teardown?
marsven_422 2y ago
[dead]
silverliver 2y ago
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.
dsbdhubsdh 2y ago
[flagged]
62536356732567 2y ago
[flagged]
hbbibiw8766686r 2y ago
[flagged]

340 points by tete 2y ago

pndy 2y ago

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

VonTum 2y ago
The german word is "Verloren" (Also in Dutch) But the similarity is striking still
- rzzzt 2y ago
  "Veloren (/ vɪlɔɹn /, ve-LOR-en, from German/Dutch verloren ('lost')) is an open-world, open-source multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust Language." https://wiki.veloren.net/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.veloren.net/wiki/Main_Page
- suavesito 2y ago
  Not a coincidence, it was derived from the word!
  - hovering_nox 2y ago
    I hate it so much. Every time I read it, all I can think is "that's a typo."
    - spacechild1 2y ago
      I didn't even spot the missing "r" until I read this comment. Now I feel you.
    - tormeh 2y ago
      If I remember correctly it actually is a typo. Someone typed "verloren" wrong and thought it was a good name for the game. The story behind names is often not so glamorous.
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      I kinda hate many current game names, I prefer this. Otherwise, making a current_year name is easy: noun adjective: noun. How about "Dark Kingdom: Multitude"?
      - ahartmetz 2y ago
        *adjective noun: adjective, obviously The first two usually make some sense together, the third one is where it gets creative / random.
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    Is the game a quest to find the lost r?

skitter 2y ago

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).

matricaria 2y ago

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.

philipwhiuk 2y ago
I mean they're all just Minecraft clones.
- maeln 2y ago
  Not at all. Aside from the aesthetic choice, both cube world and veloren have nothing in common with minecraft when it comes to gameplay.
  - vintermann 2y ago
    Default gameplay maybe? But I'm pretty sure there were servers that tried to do whatever Veloren is doing. The diversity of minigames and whole game concepts on Minecraft servers was pretty extreme for a while.
- SkiFire13 2y ago
  The term you might be looking for is voxel games.
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    Not really - look at the feature list. You can make other voxel games. This game is not that, it's explicitly the list of features in Minecraft.
- vmg12 2y ago
  And minecraft is an infiniminer clone which is a 3d clone of Motherload which is a clone of ...
  - 2y ago

echelon 2y ago

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.

pandemic_region 2y ago
What about Jai ?
- lawn 2y ago
  Is there anything you can run with Jai yet?
- Ygg2 2y ago
  Is it publicly available?
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Nope, there's an inner circle of beta testers but it's still effectively vaporware as far as the general public is concerned, even after a decade of development.
wavemode 2y ago
As the old joke goes - Rust has 50 game engines but only 5 games. The tools are there, sure, but are major studios using them?
- 2y ago

misnome 2y ago

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.

suavesito 2y ago
The launcher was there to make it easier to pull the latest build without needing to check if a new version was available. A couple of years back the updates were irregular (sometimes a few days, other more than a week). We regularized the new builds once a week, but, still, the launcher now serves as a way to explore different unofficial or experimental servers that are being available (via registering in the GitLab project).
- baal80spam 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - khimaros 2y ago
    this is a confusing take to me. could you explain your aversion to launchers?
    - doublerabbit 2y ago
      To me launchers are / can be another pattern of dark-ui. Why is a launcher required? Is the launcher spying on my system, sending information back to HQ? Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play the game and then update the game in-game? Are you going to throw me advertisement banners when you're not making or being greedy? What if the update fails? It's one thing I have to wait upon to play the game but launchers come bloated. A carousel of graphics taking a gig of space then requiring an additional 10GB download for the actual game.

muterad_murilax 2y ago

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

99094 2y ago

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

littlestymaar 2y ago

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.

tormeh 2y ago
Agreed. I've contributed to the game, so I feel like I have some sort of insight here. Veloren is a bunch of cool features in a bag, but my impression is that there is little focus on the gameplay loop and the holistic player experience. For rather obvious reasons any change that's not achievable by a single person in their free time is also just very hard to get done. Besides, Veloren is popular enough that drastic changes are unlikely to be uncontroversial. I don't blame anyone for this. I guess it's just the nature of open source game development. Still, I recommend anyone with a bit of time on their hands try it out. There's a couple of hours of decent fun in it. There's a lot to see and explore. The somewhat incoherent design is a bit of a strength at times, since it means the game is not very predictable. Just don't be disappointed when it's not a polished time sink like WoW.

talles 2y ago

[flagged]

acuntcalleddan 2y ago

[dead]

canadiantim 2y ago

Thanks for ruining my productivity. This is awesome!

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Veloren, an open source game, release 0.16 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876804 - March 2024 (17 comments) Five Years of Veloren - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259635 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347286 - July 2019 (1 comment)

daemonologist 2y ago

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)

ianbutler 2y ago

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

JKCalhoun 2y ago
It appears to be stylistic? When I see a voxel rotating in space ... that's not really a "voxel" in my mind, it's a cube. I suppose we over-apply the word though these days.
- ianbutler 2y ago
  Fair, I guess something like the finals is what Im thinking of? Im not sure though I think they may pre bake their destructible terrain
  - dannersy 2y ago
    The Finals destruction is not prebaked. The reason it works and is consistent is because everything is done server side and communicated to all clients. The game is very CPU heavy for this reason.
    - ianbutler 2y ago
      That's very good to know, I thought it seemed a bit too complex to be, but I wasn't sure.
ChickeNES 2y ago
Have you seen the game Teardown?

marsven_422 2y ago

[dead]

silverliver 2y ago

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.

dsbdhubsdh 2y ago

[flagged]

62536356732567 2y ago

[flagged]

hbbibiw8766686r 2y ago

[flagged]