awesome-bevy VS bevy

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.

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

Most of Nanite (at least, everything but the LOD system, I haven't tried that part, and the compute rasterizer due to lack of storage image atomics because Metal lacks them...) is implementable in WebGPU actually.

I have a PR that does a lot of the same things (meshlets, visbuffer, material depth, two pass occlusion culling) open for Bevy https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/10164 that I've been working on, which uses WebGPU.

WebGPU is actually a pretty good API imo. It's missing some advanced features like raytracing, mesh shaders, and subgroup operations (coming soon!), but it can still do a lot.

The much bigger missing feature is "bindless" support (non-uniform arrays of bound resources). BindGroup overhead (and ergonomics) is a significant downside.