ttrpg-map-sketcher VS bevy

I GM an online TTRPG, and I wanted to replicate the experience of the players drawing the map themselves as they go along. We use Roll20, but didn't find the tools particularly well suited to updating the map in the moment.

So, I had a go at making a little tool that lets you quickly make rough sketches of the map, as well letting you move tokens (for the characters) around. It's not particularly fancy, but it seems to work for us!

https://github.com/mwilliamson/ttrpg-map-sketcher

An app for quickly and collaboratively drawing maps for tabletop RPGs.

I run a tabletop RPG for some friends over the Internet using Roll20. As a player in other (in-person) games, there have been times where we've collaboratively made a map as we've gone along rather than the GM providing one, and I wanted to be able to provide a similar experience for my players. Since we found Roll20 didn't really work for this use case, I'm cobbling together an app that tries to make the experience as fluid as possible. It's only really intended for my group when I'll be on hand to explain how it works and I'll be the only one deploying it, so the docs are somewhat sparse, but in case anyone is interested:

https://github.com/mwilliamson/ttrpg-map-sketcher

I've also been working on a compiler for the most boring programming language in the world: https://github.com/mwilliamson/clunk

I maintain a library with ports to multiple languages (JavaScript, Python, Java). They have very similar structure, which means doing the same thing in pretty much the same way three times each time I make a change.

The idea I wanted to test with my language is: is it possible to extract a common subset that compiles into reasonably idiomatic code for those target languages? The compiled interfaces should be sensible (i.e. use of the code from the target language should be as good as if written in the target language directly), while implementations can be a little less tidy, but ultimately still readable and easily refactorable if the user ever decides to eject from my language and write everything in the target language(s) instead.

I doubt I'll ever use it in anger, and since it's nowhere near ready for use of any kind there aren't really any docs. In the unlikely event someone is interested, the most illuminating thing to look at would be the very beginnings of the reimplementation of the aforementioned library. Since I use snapshot testing with examples, you can see the source code, generated code and result of running the compiled test suite in one file:

Java: https://github.com/mwilliamson/clunk/blob/main/snapshots/%5B...

Bevy. A very young engine where you need to write the game entirely in Rust—that was appealing. But fatal flaws overshadowed everything: no editor, the engine brutally enforces the ECS approach, and the game's architecture must literally bend to fit this paradigm. So, you won't migrate to another engine at all—you just throw away all the code and start from scratch.

Missing one of the best choices as long as "maturity" isn't on the top of your list: Bevy - https://bevyengine.org/

Game engine written in Rust, leveraging ECS in almost every place and way, with a really capable WASM export option. Wrestling ECS for the first time might take you some time, but in my experience helps you keep game code as clean and decoupled as game code could be.

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...

This is the API you need: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/9774