arewegameyet VS awesome-bevy

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/)

Among Bevy contributors (including myself) there is a general hesitance to invest too much time in official learning material that will be obsolete by the next release. Bevy's APIs are beginning to stabilize ... and the appetite (both from users and from Bevy devs) for official material is increasing. The time is coming (soon)!

While you wait, there are a sizeable number of tutorials on YouTube, and we have learning material linked in https://bevyengine.org/assets/#learning as well.

User code is the same as engine code. It's all Rust. Consequently, Bevy already has a surprisingly rich ecosystem

I've summarized a lot of my thoughts in this blog post, but in short: * "The Developer's Engine": most engines are built using multiple languages, with significant abstraction between "user code" and "engine code". Bevy is built with a consistent stack and data model (see the blog post I linked to for details). If you "go to definition" on a Bevy app symbol in your IDE, the underlying engine code will look the same as your app code. You can also swap out basically everything. We have a vibrant plugin ecosystem as a result. These blurred lines also make it way easier for "Bevy app developers" to make direct contributions to the engine. Bevy App developers are Bevy Engine developers, they just don't know it yet. The new Bevy renderer (in 0.6) was also built with this principle in mind. It exposes low, mid, and high level renderer apis in a way that makes it easy to "insert yourself" into the engine. * Fully embraces ECS: No popular engines are currently all-in on ECS (either they have no official support ... or they are half-in half-out). I reflect on some of the benefits we've enjoyed thanks to Bevy ECS in the blog post I linked to. Note that there is a lot of pro and anti ECS hype. Don't just blindly follow dogma and hype trains. ECS isn't one thing and Bevy ECS intentionally blurs the lines between paradigms. * Fully Free and Open Source With No Contracts: Of the popular engines, only Godot is a competitor in this space.

I would recommend going to bevy's blog post(https://bevyengine.org/news/) since the update lists are the only convenient way I know it find out what features bevy actually has implemented directly. then go over to bevy assets(https://bevyengine.org/assets/) and you can see the community-made plugins to get an idea of the sorts of things people are making available to you. and finally, as a bit of self-promo, I have a youtube series called bevy basics where I got over how bevy does things, like the ECS and systems, moving into more direct use thing like getting user input you can fine it all here www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6uRoaCCw7GN_lJxpKS3j-KXuThRiSXc6

I've summarized a lot of my thoughts in this blog post: https://bevyengine.org/news/bevys-first-birthday/#things-i-m...

But in short (slight copy-paste of my generic Bevy pitch):

The Developer's Engine: most engines are built using multiple languages, with significant abstraction between "user code" and "engine code". Bevy is built with a consistent stack and data model (see the blog post I linked to for details). If you "go to definition" on a Bevy app symbol in your IDE, the underlying engine code will look the same as your app code. You can also swap out basically everything. We have a vibrant plugin ecosystem (https://bevyengine.org/assets) as a result. These blurred lines also make it _way_ easier for "Bevy app developers" to make direct contributions to the engine. Bevy App developers _are_ Bevy Engine developers, they just don't know it yet. The new Bevy renderer (in 0.6) was also built with this principle in mind. It exposes low, mid, and high level renderer apis in a way that makes it easy to "insert yourself" into the engine.

Fully embraces ECS: No popular engines are currently all-in on ECS (either they have no official support ... or they are half-in half-out). I reflect on some of the benefits we've enjoyed thanks to Bevy ECS in the blog post I linked to. Note that there is _a lot_ of pro _and_ anti ECS hype. Don't just blindly follow dogma and hype trains. ECS isn't one thing and Bevy ECS intentionally blurs the lines between paradigms.

We can't currently compete with the "big engines" on features, but we are adding features at a rapid (and growing) pace. Bevy was released about a year and a half ago. Most popular engines have been in development for almost 20 years (Godot since 2007, Unity since 2005, Unreal since 1998), so we have plenty of "time" from my perspective.

I'm a huge fan of Godot and used it to build my game High Hat over the course of about 4 years. I also contributed to it every once and awhile. When I was initially building Bevy, Godot's design decisions were always at the top of my mind (and they still are to this day). I love they way they do scenes (and our system draws inspiration from it). We also plan on borrowing their "dogfooding" approach to editor building (the Bevy Editor will be a normal Bevy App).

Bevy still has functionality gaps in most areas. And we still warn developers about stability and missing features in our learning material. But many people are successfully making games with Bevy at this point. Some companies are already successfully building on Bevy for commercial projects. Our modular "everything is a Rust plugin" approach means that most gaps can be filled with 3rd party plugins, and we already have a large ecosystem of people doing that: https://bevyengine.org/assets/.

One of the benefits of 4.0 is also the modularity of it with GDExtension. The major parts of the engine (including the physics) can be swapped with replacements without the need to recompile the entire engine. I'd usually say that is a long shot for community run projects, but even Bevy engine has community made extensions for separate physics engines.

https://bevyengine.org/assets/#physics

Forgetting about extensions, though, I see your point and almost agree, but Godot has shown that they will put in the work to improve their project, even if that means removing features like they did with visual scripting. Their physics engine will definitely be rough at first, but based on their past work, I believe they are willing and able to maintain it.

Lots of good community-developed networking plugins over in Bevy Assets

Hi all! In the Assets tab from the Bevy official website, there is a "Making a Chess Clone in 3D" tutorial to learn Bevy written by guimcaballero. Unfortunately it was written in Bevy 0.4.0 and using bevy_mod_picking 0.3.1.