[HN Gopher] Veloren - Voxel action-adventure role-playing
___________________________________________________________________
Veloren - Voxel action-adventure role-playing
Author : tete
Score : 325 points
Date : 2025-03-29 18:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (veloren.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (veloren.net)
| pndy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The german word is "Verloren" (Also in Dutch)
|
| But the similarity is striking still
| rzzzt wrote:
| "Veloren (/ vIlorn /, 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
| suavesito wrote:
| Not a coincidence, it was derived from the word!
| hovering_nox wrote:
| I hate it so much. Every time I read it, all I can think is
| "that's a typo."
| spacechild1 wrote:
| I didn't even spot the missing "r" until I read this
| comment. Now I feel you.
| tormeh wrote:
| 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.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Is the game a quest to find the lost r?
| skitter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I mean they're all just Minecraft clones.
| maeln wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The term you might be looking for is voxel games.
| vmg12 wrote:
| And minecraft is an infiniminer clone which is a 3d clone of
| Motherload which is a clone of ...
| itishappy wrote:
| It's Dig Dug all the way down...
| prox wrote:
| Is Boulderdash a copy of Dig Dug?
| itishappy wrote:
| Oh shoot, you right!
| zanderwohl wrote:
| And minecraft started as an Infiniminer clone intended to
| have Dwarf Fortress elements. Inspiration all the way down.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| But Cube World wasn't a crafting or mining game; rather, it
| was an open-world Zelda-like ARPG, with a lot of progression
| from randomly-generated gear. The voxel size is smaller, and
| voxels are untextured, resulting in a 3D-ified pixel sprite
| look.
| suavesito wrote:
| The project started, as you stated, as a clone of Cube World
| (the name CloneWorld was thrown a few times, did not stick).
| But it was rapidly decided that the direction we wanted was
| different. Veloren is a look-similar (and I would argue that
| not that much) of Cube Wolrd, but it is headed in a completely
| independent direction.
| tormeh wrote:
| I think this is a bit outdated. Veloren started out as a Cube
| World clone, but the goal has changed over time to Veloren
| being its own thing.
| echelon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What about Jai ?
| lawn wrote:
| Is there anything you can run with Jai yet?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Is it publicly available?
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| Guthur wrote:
| Because it has marginal to no benefit over existing c++
| stacks, and more important would be economically detrimental
| because the majority of game developers doing engine coding
| are c++ developers.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Not a major studio, but a BAFTA Nominee game[1] is not
| nothing either.
|
| [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2198150/view/655
| 9419...
| Rohansi wrote:
| Tiny Glade is not nothing but I wouldn't really call it a
| game. There is no objective and next to no simulation - it
| just lets you build dioramas.
| vintermann wrote:
| Whatever it is, it is extremely successful at it.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I'd argue that it is much more of a game than Veloren
| though.
| tormeh wrote:
| The only currently maintained generally available engines
| used by major studios are Unreal and Unity. Maybe you could
| count CryEngine, but afaik only one major developer besides
| Crytek themselves use it. Some indies use Godot, but that's
| hardly "major studios".
|
| Also, no, the Rust tools are not there. Unreal and Unity both
| have entire ecosystems around them that are at least as
| important as the engines themselves. Plus asset stores,
| support staff, console support, and all manner of other stuff
| you want when your headcount enters the triple digits. You
| can download an open source fork of CryEngine (O3DE -
| complicated story) right now. It's free, and no one uses it,
| because it lacks the non-code extras.
| prox wrote:
| Godot is picking up Steam (ha!) with more and more
| releases.
| echelon wrote:
| 781 games written with Godot were released on Steam last
| year. That's 4% of the 18,887 total games released.
|
| The percentage is growing year on year.
|
| As unencumbered engines become more capable, the reason
| to use commercial engines that extract profit decreases.
|
| AAA studios won't use Godot yet. But eventually it'll be
| good enough. There are now dozens of open source
| implementations of some of Unreal's most advanced
| features, such as Nanite.
|
| Everyone uses Blender now instead of Maya. The same thing
| will happen with game engines.
| knowknow wrote:
| I feel like there's this assumption from Rust enthusiasts that
| Rust will supersede all other languages and tools. While it's
| cool that these things are being done, it's not enough to show
| that it will become a major game programming language.
| Especially due to how mature and sophisticated other tools are
| in comparison to the Rust tools.
| heromal wrote:
| > Rust is shaping up to be a major game programming language.
|
| No it's not
| ecshafer wrote:
| You were downvoted but I think youre right. So many games are
| made in C++, C#, Lua, GML, Haxe, even Swift, Java and
| Javascript if you include mobile and web games. In terms of
| raw number of games, Rust isn't in the top 10 yearly.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Also to note, games industry is very conservative, it took
| a few decades for those languages to be adopted, and in
| many cases a push from platform owner was also required.
| heromal wrote:
| My comment didn't add much in the way of discussion, so it
| probably should have been downvoted. But like you said,
| Rust isn't making a dent so far, and it'll take much more
| than memory safety to convince the industry to switch to
| e.g. Bevy rather than the big 2.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I don't know if that's true or not but from the perspective of
| someone who's only looking at open source game engines Bevy
| looks pretty attractive.
|
| It's looks very capable (Tiny Glade looks amazing), the code
| base is new and modular. The missing stuff that keeps me away
| right now is a built-in editor/IDE and scripting and/or node
| system.
|
| So right now Godot is looking more attractive to me.
|
| I'm also keeping an eye on O3DE but that one I think needs
| better hardware than I have.
| tormeh wrote:
| Note that Tiny Glade implemented their own Vulkan renderer,
| although they do use the rest of the Bevy code base, I think.
| At least the ECS.
|
| Bevy's WGPU renderer is a lot less fancy than Tiny Glade's
| Vulkan renderer.
| misnome wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| [flagged]
| khimaros wrote:
| this is a confusing take to me. could you explain your
| aversion to launchers?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 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.
| resonious wrote:
| It's not clear to me how these are dark. You aren't being
| tricked, and all of these traits might be in the game
| client itself as well (game could phone home, auto
| update, fail to auto update, be slow, etc)
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Maybe not this game but it always ends that way.
|
| Example: EA Origins. Atrocious launcher.
|
| No one can seem to answer why does the game need a
| launcher?
| trelbutate wrote:
| You're afraid of the launcher spying on you, but not the
| actual game?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I accept that anything windows is spying on me.
|
| But I expect to play the game, when clicking the game
| icon. Not being thrown in to a launcher waiting for me
| while I then thrown advertisements for their next game.
|
| Take a look at EA Origin, it's horrific. It updates then
| the whole launcher implodes with some alien error code
| like as one of a printer.
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| chill bro all mmos and such have used launchers since the
| dawn of time
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Yeah? Sure. Quake 3 never needed required a launcher.
| viraptor wrote:
| Q3 was from times without trivially available persistent
| internet connections. You had to hunt down the patches
| and mods yourself manually, hoping not to get malware
| instead. It was a different time. The updates also were
| much more spread out - last 3 were from 2001, 2002, 2006.
|
| It's just not comparable to how things work today.
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| It was also a LAN party game more or less.
| khimaros wrote:
| in this case, the launcher and the game are both open
| source. does that change the calculus at all? this
| launcher clocks in at 22mb.
| itishappy wrote:
| > Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play
| the game and then update the game in-game?
|
| Can you explain this a little? Do you have any examples?
| Unless you're installing a completely new copy of the
| game, you're not going to be able to play while you
| update, making this look an awful lot like a launcher.
| I'm not aware of any games that are hot-updatable.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Patch files. I recall Quake requiring a binary release to
| update.
|
| Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 had in game patching when
| you went online. Both world class games.
| zesterer wrote:
| > Why is a launcher required?
|
| Because Veloren's update cadence for most servers is
| substantially more frequent than most package
| repositories are willing to handle (trust us, we've
| tried!). You can install the game without the launcher,
| but don't expect it to be compatible with most servers.
|
| > Is the launcher spying on my system, sending
| information back to HQ?
|
| Categorically, no. The only information we record is an
| incrementing counter for each architecture downloaded.
| You can see this data here: https://grafana.veloren.net/d
| /boL6rzSGk/airshipper?orgId=1
|
| > Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play
| the game and then update the game in-game?
|
| That's exactly what the launcher is doing.
|
| > Are you going to throw me advertisement banners when
| you're not making or being greedy?
|
| Categorically, no. Veloren is open-source (GPL 3), and
| developed by a close-knit and dedicated community of
| volunteers. It's a hobby project and will _always_ be
| free-as-in-liberty as well as free-as-in-beer.
|
| > What if the update fails?
|
| I'm not sure why it would (bar an iffy connection), but
| the launcher works in offline mode just fine too.
|
| > but launchers come bloated.
|
| Ours doesn't.
|
| > then requiring an additional 10GB download for the
| actual game
|
| I think we're up at a few hundred MB right now. Most of
| that is music. It's worth it :)
| alt187 wrote:
| > You can install the game without the launcher, but
| don't expect it to be compatible with most servers.
|
| How so? More specifically, if I compile the same version
| as the launcher, can I play on most servers?
| suavesito wrote:
| Yes, just that server and client are very much tied, and
| we have a release cadence of one new version per week.
| So, you would need to track the release of each week and
| compile it, to be able to connect to the official server.
| alt187 wrote:
| I see, the server is sensible to version mismatchs. Thank
| you!
| wongarsu wrote:
| Launchers have their place. For example Minecraft needs a
| launcher: different servers run on different versions
| (because of heavy customization that doesn't instantly
| update on a new game release), so being able to select an
| arbitrary version and launching it is essential. And the
| snapshot/beta channel works best if you make it easy for
| people to play the current, stable version, then quickly
| check out the latest release, then switch back to stable.
|
| Many early-access games do the same via Steam's "beta"
| feature. If you don't use Steam, you have to replicate
| the same in a launcher. Or you do it like Adobe and have
| an entire separate "not a launcher" program to manage
| which versions are installed.
|
| Verloren currently doesn't seem to actually offer much
| version management in the launcher, but it seems like a
| likely future requirement.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Is the launcher spying on my system, sending
| information back to HQ?
|
| The game and the launcher is published by the same
| people. If they wanted to spy on you, there's no reason
| not to do that in the game as well.
|
| > Can't you tell me the game needs updating when I play
| the game and then update the game in-game?
|
| While not impossible, this is _way_ more difficult to do
| safely and reliably in-game. There 's a reason most
| updaters live outside of the main app process.
|
| > What if the update fails?
|
| Then it's a lot easier to recover from this in a
| separate, dedicated, minimal app, than as part of the
| game itself.
| hansvm wrote:
| Most launchers I see aren't necessary for any technical
| reason. Most don't even bother to enable any
| functionality at all to the end user's benefit. They're
| instead used to exert some form of control in a way
| that's usually palatable enough to not cause a huge PR
| backlash. As a default stance, being anti-launcher as an
| end user seems reasonable.
| potsandpans wrote:
| Cool story
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of
| other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| muterad_murilax wrote:
| Reminds me of 3D Dot Game Heroes for the PS3.
| 99094 wrote:
| I remember playing a very very early version of Veloren as a Cube
| World alternative. Happy to see where it is right now.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| canadiantim wrote:
| Thanks for ruining my productivity. This is awesome!
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| daemonologist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's very good to know, I thought it seemed a bit too
| complex to be, but I wasn't sure.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Have you seen the game Teardown?
| prox wrote:
| Check Space Engineers 2 and Enshrouded. They push voxels in
| that direction. Similarly, SE2's watersim on planets will be
| incredible as well.
| vintermann wrote:
| It's a bit odd, because the main appeal of blocky voxels is
| that it makes building easier, and these aren't building games.
| tbillington wrote:
| There are a lot of voxel games that aren't visually cubey.
| Marching cubes algorithm is just example. Here's a voxel game
| (fully deformable/mineable world) that isn't block based
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203620/Enshrouded/.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Oh man how could I forget about Enshrouded, that's a really
| good example, thank you for bringing that up.
|
| Okay so it does just seem stylistic at this point then.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-30 23:02 UTC)