pixels VS gdnative

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.

It's a little less standard use, but Godot has been used to build application guis, which could be paired with rust bindings to implement app logic. I can't speak to reproducibility/scalability, but Godot's ui is extremely solid, and I'd probably choose that over Bevy until Bevy's ui progress matures.

Adding onto this, I successfully written a game in Godot using gdnative / gdext. I started with a split approach using gdscript and rust for CPU intensive but found that the API layer was slow at transferring large amounts of data (serialization?). I ended up rewriting it in all rust and it worked like a charm. I was able to target native and web assembly, the web assembly was much slower but worked on the browser.

Check this: https://github.com/tomuxmon/bevy_roguelike if you are still into bevy. Scheduling is a bit bork and I have not found time to port it to latest bevy. But most of the systems should work fine(if used on latest bevy). But again. If you want faster result go with something like Godot. In fact, just go with Godot. It is mature, easy to start, no lock in(free and MIT license), a lot of learning material. Also with Godot you can also use Rust https://godot-rust.github.io/. Ditch Unity (do not have time to explain 😅). Have fun!

Bevy Godot-Rust

> Same for Godot.

While likely true that it's "Unlikely to ever be as supported" as the 4 officially supported languages[0] ("GDScript, C#, and, via its GDExtension technology, C and C++."), Godot's GDExtension technology is specifically intended for use in adding support for other languages.

The most relevant tracking issue for Rust is presumably:

* <https://github.com/godot-rust/gdnative/issues/824>

Which links to:

* <https://github.com/godot-rust/gdextension>

[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/getting_started/step_by_...

...Godot v3.x has Rust support via godot-rust and Godot v4.0 is released as of this month?

I was curious, and looked it up. Nothing built in, but there's an interesting project that works with godot: https://godot-rust.github.io/

There's people working on it: https://godot-rust.github.io/