specs VS msdfgen

The question arises from seeing a plethora of projects using ECS: hecs , Bevy , specs, legion

Instead, I'm using now the specs Library. It's a pure ECS library and much less powerful, without any visualization capabilities, but its works for me :)

writing an ECS is defined a challenging project, no matter the language or if you're a beginner. although it is entirely possible to write one in Rust, check out specs and bevy_ecs for examples.

specs

The official 3d rendering client uses a custom engine called Voxygen. They use Specs for logic.

Rust has a delightful ECS library, specs, that I absolutely love. It has safe multi-threaded execution built right in, which is fantastic for the pretty parallelizable work I was doing. Concurrency in C++ is nasty business on the best of days, and I've run into so many nasty bugs with the custom system I've had to build out to fit the web's weird threading model.

Man, this Specs [0] library is so strange to me, coming from a Unity background. Is there some sort of comparison as to why one way is better than the other?

[0] https://specs.amethyst.rs/

Hi everyone - I just picked up one of my long-unfinished side project built with Rust and would like to show it to you here. It's a clone of the famous(?) Winterbells game. It's written entirely in Rust and uses OpenGL and an entity-component-system architecture ([the `specs` crate](https://crates.io/crates/specs)) (still learning), no game engine.

Wait did the person at your company write specs or something else because they weren't pleased with it? I don't know much about amethyst and vaguely know about entity component systems but I watched a talk on someone making a game with amethyst and was pretty impressed -- it looked thoroughly approachable and I do not doubt the performance is there (since the whole reason you do ECS is performance).

This very well explained here https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and with more details in link d pdf.

Basically, signed distance fields allow high resolution renders from low resolution rasters which represent character shape.

No idea how to help you but I will just drop this since it improved the quality for me by 1000 https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

And that's the complicated state of the art version for 3D perspective. Other versions are even simpler.

This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”.

https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

I use this, free and has been very good for me https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

Distance fields are not slow to render. They don't need a powerful gpu. Valve was already using SDF for textures in 2007 and released a paper about it. MSDF (multi channel signed distance fields) is a popular text libraries for game engine devs that uses distance fields. Distance fields are fast to render in 2D and even 3D. The problem is with everything around it. Lighting, shadows, shading will all require specialized tooling and likely a specialized engine for very little benefit (imo).

Signed distance fields only work well for relatively simple characters.

If you have highly detailed characters like Chinese or emojis, you need larger resolution to faithfully represent every detail. One way to get around excessive memory requirements is to store the characters in their default vector forms and only render the required characters on demand, but then you might as well render them at the required pixel resolution and do away with the additional complexity of SDF rendering.

SDFs are still useful though if you have to render text at many different resolutions, for example on signs in computer games, as seen in the original paper https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

In the past, SDFs also had problems with sharp corners, which has been solved in https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

MSDFGen looks pretty sweet. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen