microui VS symbiants

There is also microui, which I like[0].

Which I forked to work with SDL2[1], no guarantees. It's fun to hack on.

[0]https://github.com/rxi/microui

[1]https://github.com/kennethrapp/microui

I've mentioned my project a few times around HN, but might as well reiterate :)

I took some time off from work to teach myself Rust and to build a WASM colony simulation game. You've got a colony of ants, they're in a cold, foggy crater, and you help them grow and survive. The simulation runs 24/7, like a Tamagotchi, but a bit more complex, like a simplified RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress. I am hoping to design game play systems which focus on mental health, self-care, addiction, motivation, and personal growth and to use the gameplay as a means of encouraging awareness in the player.

https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

I haven't added any features in a while, unfortunately, but it's on my mind. For a while I was just adding whatever popped into my head, as a means of learning Rust, and I naively thought the full idea would crystallize with time, but it hasn't. So, I'm trying to take a step back and figure out how to actually make a coherent game that does justice to the mechanics I want to see in my simulation. I've spent a lot of time thinking rather than coding, but I'm optimistic that I'll get through this phase sooner or later. I will admit, though, that trying to take a novel approach with game design is overwhelming at times. That's okay, though! I'm enjoying the process of tinkering with the project and will likely continue tinkering on it for many years to come as a creative outlet for self-actualization.

I've experienced a lot of these concerns while building https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

I have a simple question that maybe someone smarter than me can answer confidently:

If I want to build something akin to Dwarf Fortress (in terms of simulation complexity) as a browser-first experience - what stack should I choose?

Originally, I prototyped something out using React, PixiJS, and ReactPixi (https://github.com/MeoMix/antfarm). The two main issues I ran into were the performance of React's reconciler processing tens of thousands of entities when most weren't changing (despite heavy memoization) and GC lurching due to excess object allocations. My takeaway was that if I wanted to continue writing in JS/TS that I would need to write non-idiomatic code to avoid excess allocations and abandon React. This approach would result in me effectively creating my own engine to manage state.

I decided to not go that direction. I chose Rust because no GC is a language feature (especially good since GCs in WASM are heavy) and I chose Bevy because it seemed like a fairly structured way to mutate a large amount of code.

Progress has been slow for a lot of the reasons listed in this article. I've written a lot of this off to WASM being a new frontier for game dev and rationalized it by noting there's not a lot of complex simulation games running in browser (that I'm aware of). It's not clear to me if that's actually true, though.

I'm (slowly) building an ~idle game with a twist! Here's the code: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

The idea is you're given a simulation of an ant colony that grows autonomously 24/7. You define a window of time each day in which you're allowed to make adjustments to the colony's strategy to help them live more optimally. This is paired with mental health exercises like breathwork and journaling.

The intent is to get people being more consistent with self-care by being motivated to care for a digital pet, but to not make it such an involved endeavor as to be time consuming like a traditional game.

I'm going to pair with some chill lo-fi music so you can hang out and watch your ants do their thing when you need a moment to feel less frazzled while at your desk job :)

Still a long long ways to go before I have anything really tangible and useful, but feel free to follow along with the code or ask questions!

What's the performance of this like? It seems really appealing. I would love to be able to use it to debug https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants because I use RNG heavily to add variance to the world and that, combined with indeterminate execution order of systems, can really leave me scratching my head sometimes.

However, I'm building using a tilemap that's 144x144. So I've got ~21000 entities to log. It seems impractical to snapshot the world every tick, but maybe if it were able to snapshot deltas or something?

My grid right now is 144x144, so about 20,000 tiles. Things were working OK in iOS Safari when just using colors to draw the tiles, but the browser started crashing when I tried upgrading to image sprites.

Turns out the trick is to not submit each individual tile to the GPU. You have to roll them up into larger, chunked meshes and submit those meshes to lessen the impact.

I'm sure this is game dev 101, but I've never been close enough to the GPU to have to actually care about this sort of stuff.

I wasn't trying to imply that I was making an AAA game. Just that, from the outside, it seemed like the difficulty would be in designing game mechanics, making something actually fun, marketing, etc., but in reality there's an ever-steepening technical learning curve when you want to deliver nicer looking stuff. When I look at how many days I've spent working on my game, and how terrible it looks, and then I look at something like Cyberpunk 2077... I struggle to conceive how we as humans were able to create those levels of graphics in a timeframe that allows for the game to be profitable.

https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants btw. Feel free to browse the code (or come volunteer! I've got a few other HNers tinkering alongside me these days)

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)

https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants Here's my open source game written in Rust and compiled to WASM if you want more reading material :) It uses Bevy not SDL2, though.