Lobsters8 min readintermediate
Some things Veloren does differently
Summary
Veloren’s engine uses a custom ECS, a novel ‘chonks’ voxel storage, full‑world pre‑generation, physically‑based erosion, and a scalable real‑time simulation (rtsim) that keeps tens of thousands of NPCs active, achieving ~50% CPU usage on a 48‑core server with 500+ players.
- ECS chosen early (2018) gave massive scalability: 48‑core server at 50% utilization with 500 players and 10k+ interacting entities.
- Custom ‘chonks’ data structure blends homogeneous/heterogeneous chunk indexing with vertical sub‑chunks for cache‑friendly random access, avoiding typical voxel storage pitfalls.
- World is fully pre‑generated at low resolution, then refined on‑the‑fly, enabling coherent features like downhill rivers and unlimited view distance via LOD.
- Procedural generation is physically‑based (hydraulic erosion, cost‑based pathfinding) rather than purely aesthetic, yielding self‑consistent terrain and gameplay.
These engineering choices demonstrate how a Rust‑based voxel MMO can achieve high concurrency and world coherence without sharding, offering practical patterns for large‑scale game servers and procedural world pipelines.
6/10
