wg VS ui-mock

These are issues that I'm aware of that are "tracking" the status of Rust on console:

* <https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/issues/90>

* <https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-ecosystem/issues/18>

I say scare quote tracking because due to the nature of console NDAs it's unlikely you'll see much if any useful details in an open public forum.

The issues aren't dissimilar to those facing Godot (although it has the benefit it's able to use existing C++ compilers) and the project has previously outlined some of the issues involved:

* <https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/tutorials/platform/conso...>

* <https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...>

The current "solution" seems to be console-related development activity occurring via the recently established W4 Games (https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-consoles-is...) but that's obviously never going to be openly developed without console platform approval (same as any other game engine).

If as me (I am not using Rust to make commercial games yet, though), you accept that you won't be attempting to port itself to a console and let some third-party do it for you, you'll discover that there is already some discussion about it, people already managed to get it working on major consoles, but so far there are no publisher or other company officially doing port of Rust games.

A fast, Rust, JPEG 2000 decoder. Details here. The available options have either performance, cost, or licensing problems. I just need the decode part for classic JPEG 2000 at multi-resolution. Don't need tiles or video.

> Game developers should be investing their time in open tooling without contracts or restrictive licensing

Unfortunately, this is not possible in consoles, because of issues with NDA. Even Bevy can't have an open licensing there: https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/issues/90 (Godot also can't: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...)

I expect that Bevy ports to consoles will take a cut of sales rather than a flat fee :(

rust-game-ports is now officially supported by the Rust GameDev WG. By having this repo on neutral ground, we want to invite the Rust gamedev community to contribute additional game examples to this bundle, so we may collectively expand our comparison-matrix of similar/same games made in different engines. A bit like the realworld app taken one step further.

There is a Github Discussion for this form: https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/discussions/121

https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/issues/90 ("Rust on Consoles")

It's quite possible to develop Rust for Windows without using Windows.

Try my open source "ui-mock".[1] This is a test of the cross-platform stack. Just get the repository with "git clone", and make sure you have Rust installed for target "x86_64-pc-windows-gnu". See the Cargo.toml file for build instructions.

This is a game-type user interface. It's just some menus and a 3D cube. It doesn't do much, but it exercises all the lower levels. This allows debugging cross-platform problems in a simple environment. The main crates used are winit (cross-plaform window event handling), wgpu (cross-plaform GPU handling), rfd (cross-platform file dialogs), keychain (cross-platform password storage), egui (Rust-native menus and dialogs), and rend3 (safe interface to wgpu). For graphics, it uses Vulkan, so it will run on Windows back to the last release of Windows 7. Not Windows 95, though; it's 64-bit. It will also run under Wine, so you don't even need a Windows system to test.

My metaverse client uses the same stack. It's compiled on Linux, and runs on both Linux and Windows. So I'm building a high-performance 3D graphics program for Windows without even owning a Windows system or using any Microsoft software.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

Profiling on the CPU side is well handled by tracy, which is a game-oriented profiler. My programs render-bench and ui-mock are prepped for Tracy, as is Rend3, so you can try it out on them.

ui-mock -- game GUI test fixture This exercises rfd->egui->rend3->wgpu. It's a game GUI with menus and dialogs, but no game behind it, just a 3D drawing of a cube. It's useful for making bugs in that stack repeatable. That's been helpful in wringing out obscure bugs in egui.

Egui works well with Rend3. Here's my example and library for that. It's a dummy game UI; no game, but brings up menus atop Rend3 3D. Egui is very low level. Each dialog takes a lot of code. Something to generate dialogs from some kind of template would be useful. I have many of those to do. Incidentally, does anyone have examples of good color themes for egui? The default is shades of black on black, which is a bit harsh. I'd like to see some examples where the aesthetics are better.

There's an attempt to make this work for Rust desktop applications. There's the winit crate, which does cross-platform windowing and event loops. There's egui, for menus and subwindows. There's rfd, for file dialogs, which are special for security reasons. And there's wgpu, for cross-platform 3D.

I'm using all of these in my ui-mock,[1] which is a GUI for a game without the game. It has 3D graphics with 2D GUI elements on top. I'm using this to shake down all the cross-platform problems for my metaverse client. My own code, which is 100% safe Rust, has no platform dependent code.

Results are pretty good. There's minor dirty laundry in those libraries, which has been reported to the various maintainers. Stuff like this:

- You can get a file dialog hidden behind the main window, which, in a full screen program, is a real problem. Mostly a Linux problem; works fine on Windows.

- Full screen on Windows mode under Wine 7 crashes Wine. Known Wine bug.

- Warnings from WGPU, but it works around all of them with some minor performance loss.

- Cross-platform packaging, to make a Windows installer without Windows, isn't implemented yet.

So, not big stuff. A lot of stuff works that you might not expect to work, such as profiling with tracy. Wgpu is taking care of Vulkan vs Apple's Metal. (Apple just had to Think Different, to the annoyance of everybody doing 3D.) Opening a web page in the default browser is cross-platform. You can cross-compile - I build the Windows version on Linux, without using any Microsoft tools.

With some more work, I could make this work on WASM and Android as well, but that requires some special casing, mostly because WASM doesn't have proper threads.

So cross-platform desktop development is working pretty well. Most of the problems I'm running into would not appear in a more typical application.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

I have a Rend3/Egui/WGPU program, https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock