wander
bevy
wander | bevy | |
---|---|---|
2 | 576 | |
643 | 33,092 | |
5.1% | 2.2% | |
8.7 | 9.9 | |
about 1 month ago | 6 days ago | |
C | Rust | |
MIT License | MIT OR Apache-2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
wander
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Show HN: A simple 2D fluid and gravity simulation with WASM and WebGL
very cool! if you're exploring wasm for graphics, take a look at Wander- lets you create and execute "renderlets" — portable modules containing graphics data and code compiled to wasm https://github.com/renderlet/wander
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3D and 2D: Testing out my cross-platform graphics engine
I used to work at Adobe on the infrastructure powering big applications like Photoshop and Acrobat. One of our worst headaches was making these really powerful codebases work on desktop, web, mobile, and the cloud without having to completely rewrite them. For example, to get Lightroom and Photoshop working on the web we took a winding path through JavaScript, Google’s PNaCl, asm.js, and finally WebAssembly, all while having to rethink our GPU architecture around these devices. We even had to get single-threaded builds working and rebuild the UI around Web Components. Today the web builds work great, but it was a decade-long journey to get there!
The graphics stack continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in portability. One day I realized that WebAssembly (Wasm) actually held the solution to the madness. It’s runnable anywhere, embeddable into anything, and performant enough for real-time graphics. So I quit my job and dove into the adventure of creating a portable, embeddable WASM-based graphics framework from the ground up: high-level enough for app developers to easily make whatever graphics they want, and low-level enough to take full advantage of the GPU and everything else needed for a high-performance application.
I call it Renderlet to emphasize the embeddable aspect — you can make self-contained graphics modules that do just what you want, connect them together, and make them run on anything or in anything with trivial interop.
If you think of how Unity made it easy for devs to build cross-platform games, the idea is to do the same thing for all visual applications.
Somewhere along the way I got into YC as a solo founder (!) but mostly I’ve been heads-down building this thing for the last 6 months. It’s not quite ready for an open alpha release, but it’s close - close enough that I’m ready to write about it, show it off, and start getting feedback. This is the thing I dreamed of as an application developer, and I want to know what you think!
When Rive open-sourced their 2D vector engine and made a splash on HN a couple weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39766893), I was intrigued. Rive’s renderer is built as a higher-level 2D API similar to SVG, whereas the Wander renderer (the open-source runtime part of Renderlet) exposes a lower-level 3D API over the GPU. Could Renderlet use its GPU backend to run the Rive Renderer library, enabling any 3D app to have a 2D vector backend? Yes it can - I implemented it!
You can see it working here: https://vimeo.com/929416955 and there’s a deep technical dive here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander/wiki/Using-renderlet-with-rive%E2%80%90renderer. The code for my runtime Wasm Renderer (a.k.a. Wander) is here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander.
I’ll come back and do a proper Show HN or Launch HN when the compiler is ready for anyone to use and I have the integration working on all platforms, but I hope this is interesting enough to take a look at now. I want to hear what you think of this!
bevy
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Rust Is for the Engine, Not the Game
Not at this time, no. You can read more here: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/11969
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Voronoi, Manhattan, random
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.
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Web Game Engines and Libraries
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.
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3D and 2D: Testing out my cross-platform graphics engine
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)
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What Are Const Generics and How Are They Used in Rust?
I was working through an example in the repo for the Bevy game engine recently and came across this code
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WebAssembly Playground
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-...
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
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)
- A minimal working Rust / SDL2 / WASM browser game
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ECS, Finally
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
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Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'
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...
What are some alternatives?
armortools - 3D Content Creation Tools
Amethyst - Data-oriented and data-driven game engine written in Rust
Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine
Fyrox - 3D and 2D game engine written in Rust
piston - A modular game engine written in Rust
RG3D - 3D and 2D game engine written in Rust [Moved to: https://github.com/FyroxEngine/Fyrox]
specs - Specs - Parallel ECS
ggez - Rust library to create a Good Game Easily
raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming
macroquad - Cross-platform game engine in Rust.
gdnative - Rust bindings for Godot 3
rust-sdl2 - SDL2 bindings for Rust