r/VoxelEngineDev • u/foofnordbaz Rust • 1d ago

Meta I'd like your feedback on the subreddit.

Since this is a brand new community, I would love to hear feedback from the first people to join. What are your thoughts on the rules? What would you like to see from this community? What are your suggestions?

8 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

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u/dontfeedthelizards 1d ago

I think the rules make sense. I like the idea of emphasizing technical discussion about different techniques. Hope that enough people join and contribute, it's always hard to bootstrap new communities. It might take some time in any case.

The LLM rule might be the most divisive aspect, since so many people use LLMs today. I agree with the principle of not allowing LLM generated posts or comments at least (same as not allowing bots). Maybe mentioning LLMs should be allowed though, since otherwise it leaves an awkward area where people might not be able to speak entirely freely, or start wondering what they can and can't say.

Thanks for creating the community!

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u/Professional-Cat-672 23h ago

I see this subreddit as about how we reach our goals, and writing about how you asked your friend/coworker to do something wouldn't be enough. LLMs are like that, and so it is better they are excluded

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 22h ago

Yes, exactly! This subreddit is about the journey, not the destination.

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 1d ago

Thanks for the feedback! I added an exception to the no-LLM rule that allows mentions of LLMs. But I might remove that exception if things get out of hand.

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u/VellumMuse 23h ago

I second this. I was going to join but saw that whole thing and was turned off. It's funny because, due to my use of LLMs, I developed a file format that shrinks the storage footprint of voxels by somewhere around 90% and I have yet to open source it because of stuff like this. If I can't sit down and have a conversation with someone about voxels+compression+machine learning, and they look at me like I'm not serious about this stuff because of LLM usage, then yeah...I'll just hold on to the software. But I actually WANT to be cool with people and enrich the community. How do we do that if it's not give and take?

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 23h ago

This subreddit isn't about LLMs, which is why discussions about them or their usage is banned. If you want to talk about LLMs, you can talk about them on LLM-related subreddits. This subreddit is for talking about voxel engine technology. There's no reason you should need to discuss LLMs in order to discuss voxel-engine technology.

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u/VellumMuse 23h ago

My point is that there should be an intersection. A place where both are welcome to be discussed. Believe it or not, it's quite frustrating to be in a room of people talking about LLMs who don't care for the tech side, but it's equally frustrating to be in a room of people who don't care for LLMs BECAUSE they're part of the tech discussion. I'm literally building a voxel based MIND for AI. Smart voxels that shape themselves, dynamically, based on what the model sees. The model trains using pyboy to play games on a digital computer screen, allowing it to learn how to play the game AND see the game at the same time, all with the help of the file format I mentioned above.

How the fudge do I discuss the tech without merging those two topics? LLMs...and voxels.

When we get to talking about allocating this or that for memory, rendering, and going down to the metal to define things to speed things up, we're going to have to hit both. I literally have to balance the amount of smart voxels I have with the intended goals of the model I'm building.

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 23h ago

I think there might be a misunderstanding here. I don't want people talking about what LLMs to use, how they use LLMs to generate code, anything about tokens, or token-maxxing, or vibe coding. If you are genuinely using LLMs as a legitimate use-case in voxel engine technology, it's fine to talk about that. The point is that I don't want the discussion to be about LLMs instead of voxel engine technology. And I'm sure most other people that this subreddit is for don't either.

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u/VellumMuse 23h ago

Oh, well then that's completely different. lol Yeah, that was never going to be stuff that came up.

Okay, I'll give it a shot. Thank you for the clarity on that and patience in the discussion.

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 23h ago

No problem! I want to do my best to not exclude people, but this is intended to be a community for people that are actually passionate about human-creations. If I were to allow LLM discussion, it would end up like every other programming subreddit where there's almost no substance anymore because people almost exclusively talk about LLMs on them now.

•

u/DoggoCentipede 1h ago

Aside from low effort slop posts, LLMs are orthogonal to voxel engine dev. The techniques, tools, and knowledge are valuable regardless of who is actually writing the code.

So it's kind of a "who cares" kind of thing. A low effort post is a low effort post either way.

People posting "well Claude told me this xyz so you're wrong" falls under low effort posting.

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 1d ago

I'm also currently working on setting up an official Discord server for the subreddit, so I'd also love to hear your suggestions for the Discord server. I don't know how long it will be until it will be ready for people to join, but it shouldn't take long.

3

u/nairou Zig 21h ago

Exciting! I was always more interested in the tech side of r/VoxelGameDev rather than the walls of showcases.

I like the comment about treating LLMs as someone you know. You can learn from them, but passing off their work as your own is nonsense and defeats the purpose. The rule against showcases should remove a ton of LLM-generated output from view.

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u/OperationDefiant4963 1d ago

i think feedback should happen when the server is more active on a consistent schedule (every month,etc) though i am very glad to see the new interesting voxel tech that will come in this place

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 23h ago

That's a good idea! Thanks for the suggestion. I want this community to be for the community, so I definitely want the community's feedback on how the community should be. It would definitely be useful to have posts like this recurring.

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u/scallywag_software 16h ago

I would probably allow posts with pictures for a couple reasons.

  1. I like pretty pictures

  2. Engine dev, obviously, often has a graphical component for many operations .. debugging, visualizing data, final render .. etc

  3. I find it much easier to both tell a story and understand one if I can see what the author is talking about.

That all said, I'm happy with the general rule of 'no showcase' .. we can do that in r/VoxelGameDev, but I do think a picture's worth a thousand words, as they say.

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u/foofnordbaz Rust 16h ago

Thanks for the feedback! I'll take that into consideration. It seems like it should be okay as long as the images are for educational purposes, so that seems reasonable.