SDL VS bevy

I don't know for sure, but could it be this?

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

The kit has been fun. My daughter loved helping me wire it up to a dummy box, and we decided its worth moving forward with a desktop cabinet build. I don't have a raspberry pi and can't find one, so we're using a 2012 mac mini. OpenEmu has been fun, but I'd like to be able to control the whole UI with the joystick, so we looked at EmulationStation-DE (retropie for desktop as its been explained to me). The control kit worked with OpenEmu but not EmulationStation, and the folks over in that sub said its not supported by SDL https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

There is also SDL, which is a bit of a behemoth library, but gives you a lot of firepower if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of building something from scratch with media. It provides a framework for working with graphics, sound, input hardware, etc., and is cross-platform. I haven't personally used SDL but it's a pretty well-utilized library. It's written in C so the same caveats apply as before, but works just fine with C++.

This has already been fixed in the latest SDL version, but it's likely that the game comes bundled with it's own version.

I got tired of writing C# bindings code by hand to interop with native C/C++ libraries, so I automated the process. Example for SDL: https://github.com/bottlenoselabs/SDL-cs. The repository is automated daily using Dependabot to run C2CS, generate the P/Invoke code, and push a Git commit with the code automatically when there is a change to https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.

The source code for it can be found at https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL , this may be helpful if your looking for an example of how a 'platform layer' like this it can be implemented.

Simple Directmedia Layer: a library that offers low-level access to resources like audio, video graphics, joystick, keyboard, mouse. It is mainly used for the development of video games (Stepmania and Valve's games such as Counter Strike: Source, as some examples).

Now, we'll need to source the latest SDL source tarball. You can find it [here](https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL), but you can source the latest as of this writing with the command below. Run cd, and then run:

Game library: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

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