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!
Ref: https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/language_reference.html
Edit: I was mistaken about what Lobster is (potentially compiled instead of jit), but the main point stands.
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.
As if you can't program C# functional style.
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.
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.
That said, it be easy to have annotations to force the other use case, just so far that has not been needed :)
Right now the editor has a UI driven minimalistic language for specifying quests and other gameplay actions.
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.
Also, does it have a single world grid? (I saw you say octree somewhere) or many separate elements?
[1]: https://veloren.net/
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Gonna try it as soon as... I have time
Instead of the usual BS "AI will kill us all" or "AI wrote Linux in 5 secs!" style articles.
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.
https://x.com/ProgrammerLin/status/1342786223811698688 https://voxely.net/blog/
But I think the project was abandoned in 2021.
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.
IMO the effect is less compelling than you might think.