Valdala is supposed to become a game... eventually. Currently, it is primarly my excuse to tinker with technologies I'm interested in.
Like most of my projects, the idea started with me being unsatisfied with something. In this case, Minecraft. I liked building houses and towns, but after a construction project was finished, it was just... there... decoratively. There's no practical real reason in Minecraft to build anything fancy. A slightly bigger hole in the ground could contain everything you would need to survive the game.
Also, modding in Minecraft has so many unnecessary hoops to jump through, it's a miracle the community managed to do it.
That said, Valdala will not be: a Minecraft clone or a generic voxel renderer demo.
The goal is to create a solid base engine focused on performance, maintainability and extensibility from the ground up. Something like Luanti, Terasology or Vintage Story, just... my own. And while I'm aware I could just be modding one of those... I don't wanna.
And on top of that, provide core plugins forming a coherent and distinct game experience.
Valdala plays in a procedurally generated 3D world made of blocks.
You start with some basic survival gear and have to sustain yourself by gathering ressources.
You can craft basic tools and weapons and build basic shelter by yourself.
However, to get a stable source of food, more sophisticated equipment and solid housing, you need help of villagers.
Countless hostile creatures roam the world and most villagers are willing to work for you in exchange for protection.
You can guide your loyal villagers to develop their settlement, establish diplomatic ties with friendly neighbors and fight monsters and bandits to protect your towns and trade routes.
I want to build Valdala on a foundation of high quality, future-proof technologies and as few external dependencies as reasonably possible.
Currently, the tech stack looks like this:
- Zig as the primary programming language for the engine
- a fast, modern, type-safe and expressive scripting language (to be decided)
- WebGPU via wgpu-native as a cross-platform graphics API
- GLFW for cross-platform window management and input handling
- well supported open source file formats for everything, like QOI for textures, glTF for 3D assets, etc.
Valdala is a passion project and I'm willing to spend countless hours trying to make it work on my own.
However, if anyone is willing to help out and learn a thing or two on the way, I'd appreaciate that.
Since this project does not generate revenue and probably never will, there's no promise of compensation beyond that.
The project currently builds with Zig version 0.14.0
I recommend to use the same one locally, as you might have issues with the build system and other breaking changes otherwise.
We generally follow the official Zig style guide: https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.14.0/#Style-Guide
Additionally, please make use of extra line breaks after function signatures and between bigger blocks of logic.
Try to avoid abbreviations unless the names would get really unwieldy otherwise.
This is not too strictly enforced, but I generally try to keep this order per file:
- import std
- imports of other Zig standard libary modules
- imports of project dependencies
- imports of project modules
- imported functions
- imported types
- simple nested types, like Error
Self = @This- constants
- functions
Small changes like typos and formatting of few lines can be made directly on the development branch.
For bigger changes, please create a separate branch and then a pull request.
Try to keep pull requests focused on a task, preferably linked to an issue.
In particular, seprate new features and other impprovements from bigger renaming, reorganizing and reformatting sprees.
Try to keep the dependency on third parties to a minimum.
If feasible, we write and maintain it ourselves.
If maintaing a certain feature is too much work, prefer dependencies that are:
- up to date with our Zig version
- actively maintained
- focused on a specific task
Ask before adding new dependencies.
Tile grid works!
