bevy VS specs

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...

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.

The question arises from seeing a plethora of projects using ECS: hecs , Bevy , specs, legion

specs

The official 3d rendering client uses a custom engine called Voxygen. They use Specs for logic.

Rust has a delightful ECS library, specs, that I absolutely love. It has safe multi-threaded execution built right in, which is fantastic for the pretty parallelizable work I was doing. Concurrency in C++ is nasty business on the best of days, and I've run into so many nasty bugs with the custom system I've had to build out to fit the web's weird threading model.

Man, this Specs [0] library is so strange to me, coming from a Unity background. Is there some sort of comparison as to why one way is better than the other?

[0] https://specs.amethyst.rs/

Hi everyone - I just picked up one of my long-unfinished side project built with Rust and would like to show it to you here. It's a clone of the famous(?) Winterbells game. It's written entirely in Rust and uses OpenGL and an entity-component-system architecture ([the `specs` crate](https://crates.io/crates/specs)) (still learning), no game engine.

Wait did the person at your company write specs or something else because they weren't pleased with it? I don't know much about amethyst and vaguely know about entity component systems but I watched a talk on someone making a game with amethyst and was pretty impressed -- it looked thoroughly approachable and I do not doubt the performance is there (since the whole reason you do ECS is performance).

You could also look at Entity Component Systems. Something like specs.

If you are making a game, instead of a game engine, you can have your cake and eat it too -

https://godot-rust.github.io/

Allows you to pair Rust with Godot comfortably via gdnative.

Then use one of the good ECS systems in Rust like -

https://github.com/amethyst/specs

or (archetype style ECS)

https://github.com/amethyst/legion

To get spun up on ECS in Rust I suggest -

http://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/chapter_0.h...

This won't get you a godot project but will get you a basic concepted game you can then port into godot-rust.

Fair enough on leaving parts up to other code instead of the library. I started my ECS with the idea of optimized storage (eg hash maps for sparse components) and indexing (which is why formal Not helps a lot, but indeed Maybe is only sugar for less code). I really liked this Rust ECS which also does parallelization, which makes it important for the ECS to also know which order the systems execute in, and their dependencies on each other (something I started doing but never finished): https://github.com/amethyst/specs