Inline_tweak Alternatives

inline_tweak reviews and mentions

• Egregoria is a city simulation with high granularity
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jul 2023

  I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

  All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

  On top of my head:

  The pros:

  - The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

  - The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

  - Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

  - I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

  - The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

  The cons:

  - Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

  - The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

  - Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

  Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.