HandsOnRust VS arewegameyet

I'm working my way through the HandsOnRust book that guides you through creating a simple roguelike using Rust and Legion ECS. It's a really enjoyable experience so far, and I'm looking towards trying out Bevy ECS afterwards to compare the two.

https://github.com/thebracket/HandsOnRust

But if you really want to follow more things then hands on rust and zero to production are two good quality books for learning rust through game dev and web development respectively. But I would still urge you to try a few things by yourself first.

Started learning rust a while ago but I needed something to walk me through the features while building something useful. I discovered Hands On Rust and have learned more in 3 hours of building flappy bird clones than in two weeks of experimenting with tutorials.

There is Zero To Production In Rust which goes through building a webserver in rust from the ground up. Or Hands on rust for learning rust by building a game.

Some (optionally) in print: * Rust in Action * Programming Rust * Hands-On Rust * Rust for Rustaceans

Game development though might be a harder place to start. You may find other more basic areas easier to get going. Though there is a good book on learning rust with game dev Hands on Rust that you might find enough.

Other books/resources you might find helpful - Rust by example - a good compliment to The Book that shows concepts with examples. Though does not explain things as much. - Zero To Production In Rust - a look at webservers and taking them to production (still being written though) - Hands on rust - a look at introducing rust with gamedev. - Easy rust - Many more listed here

This is a beginner question. I'm following Hands-On Rust to build simple games. One thing that isn't clear to me so far is how `bracket-lib` actually load the fonts and image of different characters from a single PNG file. Is the PNG file segmented in certain pixel values so that `bracket-lib` could access each square of the image like an array? Does this mean that this PNG file must be always designed in specific ways? Thanks for helping!

One year ago, I released the first beta for Hands-on Rust. What a wild and awesome ride it has been! The book has been on the publisher's best sellers list for 50 of the last 52 weeks, since the print edition came out it's been in Amazon's top 10-20 for "C Language" and sometimes "Game Development" most of the time. I had a "good grief, am I famous?" moment when a relative (who works for one of the huge American social media companies) sent me a pic showing Hands-on Rust sitting on his boss's desk.

arewegameyet

"While the ecosystem is still very young, you can find enough libraries and game engines to sink your teeth into doing some slightly experimental gamedev."

I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

On top of my head:

The pros:

- The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

- The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

- Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

- I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

- The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

The cons:

- Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

- The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

- Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.

For practical uses of Rust? Whatever you want to program. People use Rust for game development, GUIs, web dev, and more. Anything where abstraction, speed, concurrency, memory safety, etc. are important, Rust will probably be a good fit.

Are we game yet? "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue"

Not seeing anything else that's close to photo realistic. I'm hitting the tough bugs first all too often. More than half my time has been spent on ecosystem problems.

I also know of https://arewegameyet.rs/

Yes — and in fact, Firefox's implementation has been the go-to graphics API for folks trying to make Rust gamedev happen for a long time now. Bevy Engine's renderer is built on it, for example.

They're all/mostly websites about the state of the Rust language ecosystem. For example, can you write games in Rust (https://arewegameyet.rs/) or what's the state of the async (https://areweasyncyet.rs/)