I do! We actually have an episode coming out tomorrow! (today? edit: it's already out!)
I'm really happy that I could get more integrated with the Rust Gamedev "Working Group", since I've been able to chat with so many cool people through the podcast, and host a monthly meetup to see what people have been working on. It's a great community!
Another great Rust gamedev link if you want to see how the ecosystem is doing: https://arewegameyet.com
We currently have an MR where we're overhauling some of the auth, and I know in the future we do want to explore what else we could add/improve for our backends :)
Ya, it's certainly a art style that gets complimented by both the artists, and the developers that work on worldgen. There's a lot of grey edges as well; at our last release party we had an artist create an entire pre-made city, and load that in for players to explore at our release party. None of the city was proc-gen, but it was really great to see how the architecture was put together when it was crafted by a human, compared to how our different proc-gen cities/forts/encampments look a lot more like they're part of the landscape.
So basically
+ Cohesive world
+ Ease for artists
+ Doesn't need to look so real
I don't think so with the current engine, however, we do have a pretty solid particle system that does allow for some cool visuals similar to Notia. But that said, I'm not sure what "Notia inspired" physics would look like in a 3d game... I guess a lot of blocks melting? Could be cool to experiment with :) I know there are voxel engines that are far more geared towareds this than we are, we try to store information about each voxel as compactly as possible for efficiency, and we use LoD at the macro level (mountains off in the distance) rather than the micro level (zoom in really close on a single vosel, more geometry becomes visible).
There are lots of other blog posts that discuss these topics, I should really aggregate some of these sections in the future. Those links go into the most detail I think, future stuff is more about tweaks than the core systems (we've been putting out a blog post each week for 160+ weeks now!)
I definitely see where you're coming form, but we're quite confident that we couldn't have made this game without Rust!
There are lots of benefits we get, but here are some of the quick highlights:
1. "Code that compiles probably works" means that we can work quite quickly as a diverse team from all around the world, and not spend so much time worrying if our code will break that of others.
2. Our goal is to eventually be able to get 1000 players on the same world, on the same server. So far, the max we've reached is 195 players at our last release party. Our multiplayer server doesn't just send the location of players, but actually runs a ton of realtime simulations of the world, including economy, trade between towns, physics, NPCs, all with more coming in the future. All this to say with all the work that has to be done, we get massive benefits from how easy it is to do multithreading/ECS paradigm work with Rust
But either way, we always like to shill whatever we like best. Still very happy to be a flagship project to show off how cool Rust is!
Of all of our inspirations, Cube World is certainly what brought us together to start the project. We originated from a Reddit post on the Cube World subreddit that asked "why not just make an open source game out of what we liked?"
Of course, since that was in mid 2018, many of the devs that have joined the project haven't played Cube World, and are inspired by other games or mechanics they enjoy. We list our inspirations as Cube World, BotW, and Dwarf Fortress as our primary ones. As is mentioned in other comments here, Minecraft is also part of this lineage, however, we aren't going down the path of buildable blocks very much.
Since the early days of Veloren, we've defintely worked to break away from "just a clone", into gameplay that is more derivative of what we can achive with our engine, but there is still a lot of work to go before we consider it "released" :)
Great question! Core developer here, and I haven't thought about this too much.
I think one benefit this gives us is on the artist contribution side. Being an art contributor on the project has a lot less overhead of being a formal "artist", since you can quite easily make fauna or creatures or just concept art. We've seen lots of this in our blog posts!
But also, in terms of terrain itself, I think it allows us to really crank up how wild and wacky our procedural generation is, and still have a great looking world (unlike something higher-fidelity like No Man's Sky). We do a lot of cool things under the hood; we have a full erosion system that creates the mountains out of the sea, a site system that places villages in places that make sense, and the ability to mash together shapes that then get "rasterized" into voxel houses. I don't know how much of this would be possible and still look alright if we weren't taking a voxel approach.
tl;dr, Discord is forcing bots that are in over 75 servers to make use of slash commands, because Discord will no longer send raw messages starting April 2022. So no more `!pause`, or whatever else you might normally type. And this change isn't easy to implement for Discord.py, and would require full bot rewrites for devs using the library. So along with a lot of other negligence towards bot developers from Discord, Discord.py's single developer has stepped down, and no other core library developers chose to step up.
I'm really happy that I could get more integrated with the Rust Gamedev "Working Group", since I've been able to chat with so many cool people through the podcast, and host a monthly meetup to see what people have been working on. It's a great community!
Another great Rust gamedev link if you want to see how the ecosystem is doing: https://arewegameyet.com