zig-gamedev
bgfx
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zig-gamedev | bgfx | |
---|---|---|
55 | 71 | |
1,938 | 14,194 | |
4.7% | - | |
9.7 | 9.3 | |
2 days ago | about 14 hours ago | |
C | C++ | |
MIT License | BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License |
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.
zig-gamedev
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Zig for gamedev?
Two game frameworks in the making: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev & https://github.com/hexops/mach
Zig and C interop elegantly, there are plenty of examples around. We have this repo with tons of tools for game dev made by Michael. I would also take a look at slimsag's mach engine. Remember, zig isn't 1.0 yet, there's a lot of breaking changes happening to the API.
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Projects / areas of specialization for learning zig
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
- zig-gamedev project: Monthly Progress Report - Feb 2023 (zflecs, zsdl, zopengl and more)
- zig-gamedev project: zphysics v0.0.4 - Zig API and C API for Jolt Physics
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Just found out about Zig and wonder what would be the best graphics library to pair with it?
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
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Is C++ still the language when entering 3D programming in 2023?
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.
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Gamedev in zig
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
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Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig
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.
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zig-gamedev project - zgui v0.9
Home: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev/tree/main/libs/zgui
bgfx
- WebKit Switching to Skia for 2D Graphics Rendering
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Is it possible and realistic to learn independent of an API?
Sort of, I'd recommend a modern higher level API. I'm not sure what the current recommended ones are (probably bgfx), but assuming the wrapper is "low level enough", then the concepts you learn are still going to apply.
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Ask HN: Released games built on FOSS engines?
https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx for just that FOSS intermediate rendering library (includes Minecraft)
- Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening, There Aren't Enough Players
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The Ultimate Cross-Platform Rendering Engine?
BGFX: Pretty mature and easy to use with many backends.
- Cairo – Open-Source 2D Graphics Layer/API with Fonts and Many Back-Ends
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LWJGL = SFML vs Allegro vs SDL vs Ogre vs ???
There's kind of a lack of this for C++ in 3D, I think it's often due to the necessity of a secondary scripting language in game engines with C++, which isn't necessarily needed in Java or C#. SFML is like that (but also 2D), Godot is similar (but more geared towards 2D). Ogre3D is an actual engine like I mentioned earlier, not sure how easy it is to use. Cocos2d is higher level, but is also 2D only. I'm not fond of SDL, it feels like a windowing library with slow old school immediate mode stuff attached, so it ends up not being good at the rest of the tacked on things. SDL is popular as a windowing library, and it's why you see it used everywhere (but the most notable uses of it aren't using their drawing capabilities), I often see bgfx thrown around, and for you it might be a good choice, though I have no experience with it.
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Is it a crazy idea to create a 3D operating system?
Another route could be using an abstraction over Vulkan (faster, more efficient, more difficult): bgfx, dawn, magma, or wgpu (Rust).
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The update we all want but will never get
my guess for why renderdragon made performance worse is because old bedrock was built on bgfx which is a layer of abstraction ontop of a bunch of graphics apis which benefits the programmer because they can write the graphics code once and use it on a bunch of graphics apis (just like java! i heart cross compatibility)
now, java is actually quite a performant language and even if its not most of the performance bugs in mc are due to it being single threaded, inefficient chunk generation and optimizing, and it built ontop of opengl WHICH isn't much of a performance hit but its still ehh idk it doesn't matter that much (NOW SWITCHING THE GAME TO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT GRAPHICS API WOULD SUCK ASS TO DO (and vulkan is quite verbose :))) (AND also bgfx would probably be better due to it being an abstraction layer ontop of all the graphics apis so minecraft could target many depending on your platform (and also bedrock used to (or still does i dont know) use bgfx before they switched to just two (IF IM READING MC WIKI RIGHT BECAUSE IM NOT ENTIRELY SURE IF THEY USE BGFX STILL ?? SO THEY COULD STILL BE TARGETING MULTIPLE YET THEY JUST WROTE THEIR NEW SHIT BAD IDK))
What are some alternatives?
GLFW - A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input
DiligentEngine - A modern cross-platform low-level graphics library and rendering framework
magnum - Lightweight and modular C++11 graphics middleware for games and data visualization
Ogre 3D - scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine (C++, Python, C#, Java)
sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers
The-Forge - The Forge Cross-Platform Rendering Framework PC Windows, Steamdeck (native), Ray Tracing, macOS / iOS, Android, XBOX, PS4, PS5, Switch, Quest 2
Skia - Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images.
raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming
wgpu - Cross-platform, safe, pure-rust graphics api.
urho3d - Game engine
OpenSceneGraph - OpenSceneGraph git repository
vulkan-guide - Introductory guide to vulkan.