Aardappel

6 ms·

1.
by Aardappel 6mo ago
You'd prefer something more like Rust traits or Haskell Type Classes? I admit this was mostly out of simplicity/convenience/familiarity. If you're a Rust person, you'll appreciate that Lobster lets you use similar e
2.
by Aardappel 6mo ago
No. It is a fairly static language, with whole program compilation and optimization. The dynamic loading the parent refers to is like a new VM instance, very different from class/function (re)loading.
3.
by Aardappel 6mo ago
Even though this just showed up on HN (for the 10th time?) the Lobster project started in ~2010. No LLMs on the horizon back then. And while Lobster is a niche language LLMs don't know as well, they do surprisingly well coding in it, e
4.
by Aardappel 6mo ago
That is tricky with raytracing, since rays would need to be curved, and at least in this raytracer, ray steps are not all equal in size so doing that correctly could be very expensive. But is generally a cool idea. Fog is good too, though.
5.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
While Voxile has off-grid blocks of voxels for monsters etc, it is much more serious about being on-grid for everything else. The entire world is entirely on-grid, single size voxels, you can only place aligned objects, and rotate in 4 dire
6.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
Have you tried Teardown? Has incredibly good voxel physics. Definitely possible.
7.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
Lobster is meant to be a more high level language than Rust, so encoding what you want 99% of the time in the type made sense. It also makes it easier for people to read, knowing that common types like int2 are always by value. That said, i
8.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
Much appreciated :)
9.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
Both! It uses an octree, and at the leaves are bricks of small voxels.
10.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
Yup you could blur, but it is not cheap, and it doesn't feel very satisfying to look at blurry stuff in the distance. We have a "depth of field" implementation for when you're in dialog with an NPC. There it looks nice,
11.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
A voxel is about 2 inches / 5cm in size. Yes there is a single world grid, so all world objects are axis aligned and same size. On top of that it can have floating "sprites" which are used for monsters, particles and such.
12.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
It's not intended to be a Minecraft clone.. if you look a bit closer than the initial visual impression, you'll see there are many differences in gameplay. As for the rating, yes we had a rough initial launch, but we're fixin
13.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
With raytracing having a far render distance is actually fairly cheap and simple compared to polygonal worlds (good looking LOD is hard). Some reasons why we don't have a super far render distance, in order of importance: The biggest i
14.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
Haha.. yeah entirely coded without AI so far, lets see how long we keep that up :P
15.
by Aardappel 7mo ago
Yes, only the lower layers are open source right now. We will eventually expose more, when modding will more stable, etc. Right now the editor has a UI driven minimalistic language for specifying quests and other gameplay actions.
16.
by Aardappel 1y ago
Yes, that is a downside, but when you write very generic code being limited in what code you can write because it has to typecheck even for types that it doesn't apply to is one of the more frustrating things of doing this in C++ and o
17.
by Aardappel 1y ago
Would love to add Jolt at some point, yes. There's already bindings for Box2D in the "ph" namespace.
18.
by Aardappel 1y ago
if you find in files for "phong" you should be able to find samples that use it.. the actual shader is in data/shaders/default.materials
19.
by Aardappel 1y ago
In Lobster, this is `for(m) i: print(i)` Or simply `for(m): print(_)` The syntax comes from the observation that even in C-like languages, 99% of the time I want to iterate over the range (0..m-1), so that's what it is optimized for. I
20.
by Aardappel 1y ago
In Lobster you must initialize a variable declaration. Now you can produce your bad case with `var x = nil`, but that is undesirable because nil types must be explicitly checked at compile time, so typically you want to use as few nils as p
21.
by Aardappel 1y ago
Yes the author :) I make both programming languages and games / engines / maps..
22.
by Aardappel 1y ago
Yes, its somewhat similar, monomorphic specialization. I am sure it has some limitations, but it is pretty powerful, it can even do things C++ can't, like have a type error in a branch that in the current specialization is never execut
23.
by Aardappel 1y ago
Seen by creator :) It comes with a tiny minecraft clone in < 100 lines of Lobster. Agreed it could use more actual game examples. I've written a ton of game prototypes in it, and some could do with open sourcing, just haven't g
24.
by Aardappel 1y ago
the "gl" namespace is really a bit of misnomer since it is much higher level API than OpenGL, and does not really depend on OpenGL. It could pretty easily run on another API underneath. The repo comes with a LOT of graphical sampl
25.
by Aardappel 1y ago
Yup, it generally inlines lambdas passed to custom control flow functions, so it ends up pretty similar to hand-written. The name does not refer to anything in particular :)
26.
by Aardappel 1y ago
All the VM runtime functions are written in C++, as are all of the built-in functionality and the engine it uses. To use C, either all of that needs to be rewritten in C, or there needs to be a clear layer between the two, but the API surfa
27.
by Aardappel 1y ago
No, this analysis is fairly linear.. the whole compiler is pretty fast.
28.
Lobster, Programming Languages, and Game Engines with Wouter van Oortmerssen [video](youtube.com)
2 points by Aardappel 2y ago|0 comments
29.
by Aardappel 3y ago
The actual game itself, yes. Based on this open source project though which provides the language its written in and core engine tech: https://github.com/aardappel/lobster
30.
by Aardappel 3y ago
Yes, for both gameplay and most of the engine.

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