bevy-inspector-egui VS bevy_editor_pls

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.

I think one part that makes this extra obvious is bevy UI and the attempts at an editor. I remember when https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy_editor_pls came along and I was very excited, but since then nothing has really happened on the editor front. Not that I need an editor personally, but what I find disappointing and telling is that this whole thing has been basically halted because of bevy's idea of having UI in the ECS.

Also, there is this Bevy plugin https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy_editor_pls/

It's on of the primary initiatives right now. Games are not developed by only programmers, we're well aware of that. There are a few ongoing existing ecossytem level efforts like bevy_editor_pls. For an official editor, we're just lacking the UI tooling to fully flesh it out right now. Like Godot, Bevy's dogfooding it's own UI solution for the official editor, but it's not quite there yet. Bevy isn't alone in this. There's a smorgasbord of ongoing work in the Rust for UI space, and there's quite a bit of greenfield efforts to develop a data-oriented or ECS style approach to UI layouting and management. Once we have this a bit more hammered down, it's just a matter of time before an official editor becomes available.

It is something we've been building toward for awhile. We've been focused on core systems like the renderer and ecs for awhile now, but we're finally at the point where we can start moving up the stack.

We will be focusing on scenes, asset workflows, ui, and the editor from here on out (with scenes, asset workflows, and UI being the focus for the next release).

I'd like to have some sort of editor MVP by the end of the year.

Until then, there are community efforts like: https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy_editor_pls

P.S. There is an effort to make an editor for Bevy if you're interested, though it's not complete.

For now though, bevy_editor_pls is a surprisingly useful third-party prototype.