awesome-bevy VS gdnative

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.

It's a little less standard use, but Godot has been used to build application guis, which could be paired with rust bindings to implement app logic. I can't speak to reproducibility/scalability, but Godot's ui is extremely solid, and I'd probably choose that over Bevy until Bevy's ui progress matures.

Adding onto this, I successfully written a game in Godot using gdnative / gdext. I started with a split approach using gdscript and rust for CPU intensive but found that the API layer was slow at transferring large amounts of data (serialization?). I ended up rewriting it in all rust and it worked like a charm. I was able to target native and web assembly, the web assembly was much slower but worked on the browser.

Check this: https://github.com/tomuxmon/bevy_roguelike if you are still into bevy. Scheduling is a bit bork and I have not found time to port it to latest bevy. But most of the systems should work fine(if used on latest bevy). But again. If you want faster result go with something like Godot. In fact, just go with Godot. It is mature, easy to start, no lock in(free and MIT license), a lot of learning material. Also with Godot you can also use Rust https://godot-rust.github.io/. Ditch Unity (do not have time to explain 😅). Have fun!

Bevy Godot-Rust

> Same for Godot.

While likely true that it's "Unlikely to ever be as supported" as the 4 officially supported languages[0] ("GDScript, C#, and, via its GDExtension technology, C and C++."), Godot's GDExtension technology is specifically intended for use in adding support for other languages.

The most relevant tracking issue for Rust is presumably:

* <https://github.com/godot-rust/gdnative/issues/824>

Which links to:

* <https://github.com/godot-rust/gdextension>

[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/getting_started/step_by_...

...Godot v3.x has Rust support via godot-rust and Godot v4.0 is released as of this month?

I was curious, and looked it up. Nothing built in, but there's an interesting project that works with godot: https://godot-rust.github.io/

There's people working on it: https://godot-rust.github.io/