zig-gamedev VS basis_universal

Two game frameworks in the making: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev & https://github.com/hexops/mach

I did a hangman game, I'm doing a file compression tool next. I asked bing chat to recommend beginner projects for zig and that's what it told me. It also suggested a cli calculator and a cli text editor, but I didn't want to do that. My next thing will be something using https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

This repo may be useful. It isn't an engine or a renderer, but rather a collection of useful libraries if you do end up writing your own tools. https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

Something like vulkano in Rust or zig-gamedev in zig might be a much more enjoyable approach: They're similarly bare metal languages but have a lot of advantages over C++ (borrow checker's safety, simpler syntax). However, they're not commonly used by big studios.

I've been working on a gamedev project in zig, using zig-gamedev. It has many libraries you can use, though my game is 2D. Feel free to check out my project if you want to see how I set things up. https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

Language-level guarantees of memory safety are not critical to all low-level programmers, and sometimes this is fine!

Developers of games, compilers, digital audio workstations, video editors, and live performance software (such as openFrameworks) likely don't rank memory safety as their top concern.

Zig is already an attractive choice for those domains because it offers:

- Great compile times compared to C++/Rust, and future plans to implement hot reloading as a core part of the tooling: https://www.jakubkonka.com/2022/03/16/hcs-zig.html

- The ability to reason about where data exists in memory: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Where-are-the-byte...

- Good readability and learnability, especially if you have a C/C++ background.

- Comptime that enables clean generics, compile-time reflection and general metaprogramming as a happy side-effect: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-is-zig-comptime/

- Better tooling than C/C++. The ability to cross-compile Zig and C/C++ from one machine lets you set up much more stable and reproducible build environments already. You can clone zig-gamedev and have the demos working with just three commands on Windows/macOS/Linux, for example, and two of those three are cloning the repo and changing to the directory: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev (to build you will need the latest copy of Zig from the 'masters' section for your platform at https://ziglang.org/download/ )

We should all be careful about insinuating that memory unsafe languages should not exist. I see “friends don't let friends use memory-unsafe languages” on social media and feel sick. It's much healthier to embrace the melting pot of Zig, Odin, D, Beef, Vale, Hare, Lobster, Jai, C3, Val, Roc and all the rest and see what new ideas and trade-offs they bring.

Also worth noting that new languages tend to take time to develop their own philosophies to memory safety (Vale's approach is only just now emerging, for example: https://verdagon.dev/blog/making-regions-part-1-human-factor ). Zig's story might not be great now ( https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ ), but then it's not Zig's priorty at the moment, and Zig's full story is not yet written.

The author of the OP also develops Basis, which is designed to take advantage of GPU texture compression formats. GPU formats have a fixed bitrate which makes them efficient to sample but not the most efficient to transmit, so Basis layers on a second level of compression that unpacks into a GPU texture.

https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

You might find https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal interesting :)

Erm, aren't both WebP and PNG rather useless for games? How do you convert those formats into one of the hardware-compressed texture formats consumed by the GPU (like BCx, ETC or ASTC)? Without those you're wasting a ton of GPU memory bandwidth when sampling textures.

(there are some alternatives, like https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal, or http://www.radgametools.com/oodletexture.htm)

In addition to this, texture compression is optimized for random access and has to use a fixed amount of bytes per each block, but there is a possibility to further compress this during the delivery. This is called the supercompression and Basis Universal is a good example of this. JPEG XL is also based on tiles for parallel decoding, but those tiles are too large (128x128 minimum, compare with 12x12 maximum of ASTC) so it is not yet suitable for GPU as it stands.

Im interested to see what image format specific compressors go gpu. JpegXL, AVIF, WebP... who wants to show up & throw down? Or even just fastpng?

Meanwhile we dont really hear or regard many of the gpu-oriented compression techs. TIL Basis/KTX2 is itself zstd compressed (formerly LZ apparently?). https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

You could check out Binomial's basis_universal. After Google bought them, they open sourced it and allowed use for free.

Another alternative you should consider is https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

Simple, open-source, standardized and supports every GPU-oriented format around. And, built-in library support for https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal

Yep. That lib is great. And, similarly https://github.com/nfrechette/acl and https://github.com/BinomialLLC/basis_universal