ui-mock VS rend3

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

The WGPU people are still working through lock conflicts in that area. The idea with Vulkan land is that you should be able to load content while rendering is in progress. For that to be useful, all the layers above Vulkan also have to have their locking problems hammered out. Most open source game engines don't do that yet. Unreal Engine and Unity do, which is why you pay for them for your AAA title.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BVE-Reborn/rend3/trunk/exa...

[2] https://github.com/BVE-Reborn/rend3/blob/trunk/examples/scen...

[3] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/sFPkECUxRUSxbKXRkCmjJK

The big problem I have with bevy here is that they seem to be very much against bevy being reusable across the ecosystem. Every feature has to be bevyfied into an ECS thing. There's no way one can use bevy_input for input handling outside of bevy, or bevy_audio for audio, or bevy_render to get a 3d renderer like https://rend3.rs/. The Rust ecosystem would've been so much better off if bevy wasn't creating a walled garden and draining insane amounts of effort just for itself, but say instead used rend3 for its rendering, so that other efforts in rust gamedev didn't have to reimplement everything from scratch.

We have our own engine. There aren't really full engines available in the Rust ecosystem. Bevy attempts to fill this, but it's far from being feature complete. There's also https://fyrox.rs/, but that's also work in progress. There's also https://rend3.rs/ which is just a 3d renderer, so you'll need to build the rest of the engine yourself.

That's been fixed. It was one of those things where a complicated workaround for Rust's ownership rules, one that required maintaining internal consistency between multiple tables, was inconsistent.

Rend3 crashes The library's internal memory allocator for GPU objects is losing objects and panicking. This seems to be a race condition that comes up once you get past displaying static scenes and start having moving objects. Rend3 has one overworked main developer. If you're qualified to work on GPU-level stuff, which I am not, that project could use help.

I personally use Rend3, ability to use WGPU to make my own render effects, but I still get to build my own engine around it, although I'm waiting for the vertex-pulling branch to be merged before I really get going