Retro3DGraphicsCollection VS bevy

This is my first project using Godot's 3D renderer, all assets have been obtained from the Retro 3D Graphics Collection: https://github.com/Miziziziz/Retro3DGraphicsCollection

There's a few in this collection https://github.com/Miziziziz/Retro3DGraphicsCollection

I absolutely understand the upsides of the assets store. Although not as expansive as the asset store, there are lots of either free or extremely affordable; many of them with CC0 licenses or licenses that make them extremely easy to just use them. I wouldn't have been able to make my first game in Godot Puck Fantasy (available here: <https://www.lowkeyart.com/puckfantasy>) without them!

I would encourage you to try some of these! You'd be surprised how far you can get by using these, with and without modification.

These are my favorite resources, in order of preference.

- <https://www.kenney.nl/> is by far the best one and most expansive one. Everything he creates is CC0. A lot of great free assets available on his site. He also has a "Kenney Game Assets All-in-1" which can be bought on itch.io for $19.95. It has all assets he's ever made, neatly organized, and ready to use. All CC0. This also includes some music. The music and sound assets are much more limited than the 2D and 3D assets, but it's there, and it's solid.

- <https://kaylousberg.com/game-assets> has some fantastic assets also available for free, and has more available for a pretty affordable Patreon tier. Also has a CC0 license for the free assets. Mostly a specific style, which is great for consistency, but a bit more limited than the wide variety of Kenney; but I don't doubt that with time they'll build an equally strong library of assets.

- <https://quaternius.com/> has many free great assets. Also CC0. Has a high variety of styles and settings. Also has a very affordable Patreon to get easy access to everything they produce.

- <https://github.com/Miziziziz/Retro3DGraphicsCollection> is a general place linking to more assets that should be usable.

Separately from this, itch.io has a section for game assets that has a pretty wide variety.

Hey just wanna make sure you're aware of Miziziziz's retro 3D assets repo. All free for commercial use. It's mostly PS1-style models but there's some N64-inspired stuff in there too.

Nice job man. You should add it to https://github.com/Miziziziz/Retro3DGraphicsCollection

If you'd like even more assets in a similar style check out this collection over on GitHub.

Bevy. A very young engine where you need to write the game entirely in Rust—that was appealing. But fatal flaws overshadowed everything: no editor, the engine brutally enforces the ECS approach, and the game's architecture must literally bend to fit this paradigm. So, you won't migrate to another engine at all—you just throw away all the code and start from scratch.

Missing one of the best choices as long as "maturity" isn't on the top of your list: Bevy - https://bevyengine.org/

Game engine written in Rust, leveraging ECS in almost every place and way, with a really capable WASM export option. Wrestling ECS for the first time might take you some time, but in my experience helps you keep game code as clean and decoupled as game code could be.

I don't see WASM/WebGPU changing anything when it comes to gaming, as an industry, personally. 3d visualizations and interactive websites? Yeah definitely a nice improvement over WebGL 2, if years late.

WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.

Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.

That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.

(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)

I was working through an example in the repo for the Bevy game engine recently and came across this code

That's possible. I did spend quite a bit of time tinkering with compiler flags, and followed the recommendations.

Some notes I found just now seems to agree with my results, though: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3978#issuecomment-...

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)

I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.

I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.

If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

These days, some game engines have done pretty well at making compute shaders easy to use (such as Bevy [1] -- disclaimer, I contribute to that engine). But telling the scientific/financial/etc. community that they need to run their code inside a game engine to get a decent experience is a hard sell. It's not a great situation compared to how easy it is on NVIDIA's stack.

[1]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

This is the API you need: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/9774