bevy-inspector-egui VS bevy_ecs_tilemap

With egui and some bevy related plugins you can get pretty close to a game engine editor, obviously missing a lot of things: https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy-inspector-egui

Like /u/tarkin25 already mentioned "egui" can be integrated into bevy. Bevy Inspector Egui is a plugin that not only provides a helpful way to inspect different entities in the world, but also re-exports "egui" for use.

Firstly, Bevy has an internal crate called bevy_reflect, and it can handle most of the things you would usually use reflection for. For example, https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy-inspector-egui exists which uses Bevy's internal reflect derive to make the values available via an egui-based UI. Changing simple values (like an f32, or a boolean) can be done at runtime, and if I remember correctly all you actually need to do is to add the plugin. Taking a look at the README https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/tree/main/crates/bevy_reflect you can "patch" types with new values, iterate over struct fields, serialize + deserialize, and generally do stuff like that.

Yeah runtime editing is definitely a weakness at this point. An editor is definitely a part of our plans though! We'll likely break ground on it early this year. In the meantime https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy-inspector-egui provides some nice runtime editing / inspecting / editor-like tools.

Here is the example

Bevy-inspector-egui is a most have, I think this game would not have been possible without, abuse it,

What do you miss from scriptable objects that you don't get from a class that serializes to JSON? Global access (read only access shouldn't prevent this right)? The inspector (looks like egui can help there?

There are also some super interesting experiments with hot reloading, both with code and on the fly value modification.

The one in bevy is nowhere near the requirements of a desktop application-level editor. I don't plan to involve bevy there at all. egui looks quite usable for low-level debug UI, though, especially with this crate.

For tiles map, decided to use bevy_ecs_tilemap.

https://github.com/StarArawn/bevy_ecs_tilemap Consider thumbing through this code for ideas. Generally looks fine assuming you need to individually color tiles at some point in the future.

Yeah built in texture atlas requires that you manually manage the atlas and doesn't support swapping out textures on the fly (although I'm willing to consider adding support for that). I'm pretty sure the bevy_ecs_tilemap plugin uses the "texture array" approach to texture atlases. Its very possible that it will work for your usecase (or provide an example of how to do that in bevy).

I can only speak to Bevy from firsthand use and you won't find support for any of your bullets out of the box, but some of it is available in the surrounding package ecosystem. I liked working with bevy_ecs_tilemap. I highly recommend the Cheatbook as well.

you can check out https://github.com/StarArawn/bevy_ecs_tilemap,