bevy_webgl2 VS pixels

There was a rust game jam in September 2021 and some games are playable in the browser. In that game jam the most used game engine was the bevy game engine. But most of the games made in bevy were not made playable in the browser, the ones that were playable in the browser used a third-party bevy plugin called bevy_webgl2. However now bevy has been updated to version 0.6 that has new built in WASM support, so there seems to be no need for bevy_webgl2. Targeting WASM with bevy might mean that not all features of the engine are available, so you need to limit the game’s features used to the ones that are compatible with WASM.

For web assembly there is the unofficial bevy_webgl2 plugin. Official bevy web assembly support would probably use the wgpu webgl backend, which still needs some work, and is currently untested in bevy.

Thanks to bevy_webgl2, this is actually very straightforward. I just need to add the plugin WebGL2Plugin and disable the default features of Bevy to only enable the one available on Wasm.

Bevy has bevy_webgl2, which is supposed to enable a way to compile bevy for wasm and consequently run in a browser.

https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

That gives you a simple software framebuffer, and it builds as a native app or for the web.

On a more recent machine, that same (well, more primitive) app with pixels or softbuffer struggled beyond acceptable. But was definitely poorly written.

I’ve ported the application from being based on pixels crate to the powerful bevy game engine

Well, it depends on how you use it; writing to an image buffer isn't much less efficient than writing to any normal buffer (in fact, although displaying your scene to a window efficiently is important, your main bottleneck will be the actual ray tracing loop). You may want to read this article for a practical example of using an ImageBuffer to create and draw a texture with Piston. Other window backends you could use, apart from pixels which was already mentioned in another comment, include minifb and Mini GL, though I haven't personally used them.

You can use wgpu instead of opengl as in the pixels example: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels/tree/main/examples/minimal-fltk

It might be possible but with a raycaster you probably want to be able to easily set all pixels and create your own small engine. Something like the pixels crate should fit your purpose: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

The reality is that I have used unsafe that is also unsound out of convenience because fixing it is a papercut too many. And this tends to be common! I know enough to spot unsoundness in other projects (sometimes even early). But not enough to be confident in my own abilities to write sound unsafe code. Why? Because it's really flipping hard, that's why!

Also, if you just want to get-things-done, then https://github.com/parasyte/pixels might be a bit better, to avoid reinventing the wheel.

However, I recently got a new M2 Macbook Air and started noticing some super weird behavior. While playing Pokemon Silver with an unlocked framerate, I'd notice that the game would slow down to below 60FPS, even on a release build. After printing a little debugging info I found the culprit in the rendering logic which was handled by the MiniFB crate. At first I thought switching to a GPU renderer (such as https://github.com/parasyte/pixels) would help, and it... kinda did?

pixels uses wgpu and runs fine.