The Veloren developers seem to have forgotten to provide a page of information _anywhere_ giving a non-negligible overview of what the game is about. The main website has little more than a paragraph listing some other games as inspiration, followed by some Minecraft-like screenshots. It also has a manual which is clearly focused on developers and contributors, as it provides next to no information for a new person who just wants to know a bit more about the game without having to actually download it. How is it similar to Dwarf Fortress? How is it similar to Minecraft? How is it different? What do you do in it? Why is it so much work just to find an overview of the game and what it has to offer?
The game is extremely open-ended: there is no overarching objective, and you are free to interact with the world as you please. For most players, this means a combination of exploring, crafting, conquering challenges (dungeons, caves, etc.), finding rare items, and socialising with other players.
The game is 100% free so you have no reason not to jump in and give it a go if you're curious!
> How is it similar to Dwarf Fortress?
Veloren has an open procedural world with a history generation system. Although work on the history simulation is still very much ongoing, the world already more cohesive than those of many other voxel games. Our end goal is a world that feels as rich and as complex as that of Dwarf Fortress. Whether we end up succeeding is still to be determined!
> How is it similar to Minecraft?
Veloren is a voxel game, so... cubes and open-world exploration. Not much more to say about this one.
It's still under heavy development, AFAIK there is a long time vision but they are still far from there so it wouldn't make sense to discuss about it in the front page.
And at this point they are clearly looking for contributors much more than for players, that's why all the documentation you'll find is targeting the former.
Documentation and marketing material require a lit of work, and doing so continuously against a fast-moving target is a enormous effort.
Parent is checking out a game because it was mentioned on HN and finds that the game’s web page doesn’t have a manual and your response is essentially: “Play the game sight-unseen, learn everything about it, write a manual and contribute it back to the project”? That’s not very realistic.
I could see creating an issue in the tracker, perhaps.
Apologies; I said "submit a pull request" when indeed I just meant "make a contribution". Creating an issue is a reasonable action. Criticizing a volunteer-supported project on hacker news will possibly net you some upvotes but writing this entire complaint in an issue tracker is far more productive in my opinion.
We have a massive problem with our media being largely owned by Murdoch. The result is that our elections tend to be heavily influenced by lies and propaganda, just as is the case with Fox News in the US.
I find the whole premise odd. Meat is fundamentally associated with living creatures. How could you have a concept of meat and simultaneously find it weird that creatures would be composed of it?
Perhaps they've been growing their meat without consciousness in petri-dishes for many thousands of generations and have forgotten the organic origins of meat. Or perhaps most meat in the universe just actually consists of very simple organisms not thought to be conscious (the Great Filter [0] theory considers the possibility that simple life is common but complex life is rare).
It is a translation into English from Alien. Really they meant not meat as such, but some broader category of substances. It was translated as meat because it is the closest match to a category used by aliens.
I think this is the attitude is what the author is trying to parody. It is OUR assumption that intelligence must emanate from something biological, whereas these entities are having sentimental chats with a hydrogen core cluster.
I am not saying stellar formations couldn't be intelligent. What I am saying is that if they are, then they would fall under the umbrella of life and therefore also biological matter. Biological matter is by definition the matter of things which are/were alive.
Obviously their conception of "biological matter" would then be much different and more general from our current conception of "biological matter", but what exactly in that difference makes ours inherently funnier than theirs?
Oxford language has intelligence as:
'the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.'
Wikipedia says:
'Biological material may refer to: Organic matter, matter that has come from a once-living organism, or is composed of organic compounds'
Of course, both 'intelligence' and 'life' are words that are difficult to put a pin down. But most people imagine their 'intelligence' as being a separate entity from the body itself.(I'm not one of those, though I often wish I was) It is debated whether a virus is 'alive' but it certainly seems to exhibit something like intelligence. Most of the debate in the comments refers to AI, which may someday be something like intelligent, but will continue to not be biological.
I find the story amusing because it illuminates the limits of our understanding when we're fettered by presuppositions, and reminds us that, at the end of the day, all of our 'objective science' is colored by the inevitable prejudices that come from our biological perspective. Just because we lack the imagination to visualize intelligence without life, doesn't mean that it's impossible.
The alien accepting the report is baffled and confused because IT can't believe that intelligence DOES exist in biological matter.
> Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a
trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and
incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the
minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.
They don't just find it weird, they find it deeply offensive; but not so offensive as to want to exterminate us. And they spent at least a century studying us, just to be sure.
There is an undercurrent here that drives the discussion. They know meat well enough not to like it, without knowing of any other thinking meat. So, they know of dumb animals, and animals eating other animals, and consider them disgusting to have around, for reasons obvious to one another, that we might not even be equipped to understand.
But we have exactly their reaction to outgroups of other people. So this is a lampoon of bigots who imagine themselves a cut above some other group. But they're just meat, too, and no more fit for galactic society.
It's OK for taxes to pay for anything, you just have to remember that just because you don't swipe your credit card or get a bill it doesn't mean that something is "free".
This is just disingenuous. And perhaps the wrong way to think about it.
Sure, it's not 'free'. But when you pay taxes, everyone doesn't pay equal amounts. Those who are able to earn more money, pay more taxes. Those who can't pay less. But no one is left to fend for themselves. Even the poor can get treatment. We're also not paying anything like the insane prices you pay in America.
I would like to differ and make the claim that most of it actually is indeed "free", since we are all living very comfortably off a huge inheritance and network effects:
Does anyone have a good sense of the current performance impact of crossing the boundary between JS and WASM? I've often thought it'd be great to be able to expose high-performance data structures (and other infrastructure-level stuff) via WASM and then make use of them from JavaScript, but I seem to recall that the interop performance cost is currently too high to make it worth doing, which leaves WASM mainly only useful for long-running tasks, such as game engines, expensive graph layout algorithms and so forth.
> "The wasm-bindgen code generation has been designed with the future host bindings proposal in mind from day 1. As soon as that’s a feature available in WebAssembly, we’ll be able to directly invoke imported functions without any of wasm-bindgen‘s JS shims. Furthermore, this will allow JS engines to aggressively optimize WebAssembly manipulating the DOM as invocations are well-typed and no longer need the argument validation checks that calls from JS need. At that point wasm-bindgen will not only make it easy to work with richer types like strings, but it will also provide best-in-class DOM manipulation performance."
The cost is more than a JS->JS call, but not drastically so. Every argument must be converted from a number to an int32/float32/float64, which for SMI values is a single branch, for heap numbers a branch and a load. For other JS values, a ValueOf() operation on the JS value.
V8 generates little wrappers for these, with inline conversions. It does not currently inline the little wrapper functions, nor use ICs for the conversions inside, since branches are generally enough to get the interesting fast cases.
The idea of a super-expensive call is therefore a bit of a myth. You can try to measure the cost yourself, but be careful! Most microbenchmarks will end up comparing the difference between an inlined JS call (as low as zero overhead) versus a non-inlined WASM->JS or JS->WASM call. The proper comparison would be instead with a non-inlined JS->JS call. Defeating inlining for JS->JS calls is tricky. You can do it with cross-realm calls, or by trying manipulating polymorphism. In either case, it's pretty tricky, so good luck.
function thunk(x){ return function() { x() } }
const thunkFoo = thunk(foo)
const thunkBar = thunk(bar)
for(var i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
thunkFoo()
thunkBar()
}
This is why the "Maybe you don't need Rust to speed up your JS" author was creating functions dynamically using `new Function()`.
Maybe you cal get away with
function call(x){ x() }
for(var i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
call(foo)
call(bar)
}
I didn't test the latter though, whereas the former is empirically slower if you call more than one thunk in your benckmark loop (a single thunk will have the call inlined).
It depends how much you are expecting, for instance this WebGL demo does about 15k draw calls per frame on my 2014 MBP with integrated Intel GPU before it drops below 60Hz, that's about 1.8 million WebGL calls per second. On this machine, performance of a native executable is quite similar, so the WASM-to-JS overhead isn't big enough to be noticeable for those 1.8m calls/sec. I know, it's not a really useful benchmark, I guess what I want to say is that for most real-world problems the calling overhead shouldn't matter much, since other things will break down first.
Don't forget that screen resolutions were lower on average back then, which means that the side-by-side comparison doesn't really account for relative scale.
I'm curious; what don't you like about Aubrey De Grey? I haven't yet seen an interview or conversation with him where he doesn't seem extremely knowledgeable about his field, or lacks an understanding of anything relevant that he's queried on. He also seems to have a fairly significant number of credible people on his side in the biotech/medical fields.
