[HN Gopher] Bevy: A data-driven game engine and app framework bu...
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Bevy: A data-driven game engine and app framework built in Rust
Author : adamnemecek
Score : 200 points
Date : 2020-08-11 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bevyengine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bevyengine.org)
| _cart wrote:
| Creator of Bevy here. I just announced Bevy yesterday and the
| response so far has exceeded my wildest expectations.
|
| I'm happy to answer whatever questions people have!
| [deleted]
| mrec wrote:
| Great start here and a very compelling intro post. A couple of
| things I wondered about and didn't see answers to:
|
| 1. How ambitious is Bevy as an engine? Do you see it as aimed
| squarely at the casual-game space like ggez, or do you think it
| could eventually compete with Godot, growing more advanced
| features like GI? (I appreciate that competing with Unreal is
| probably, well, Unrealistic for the forseeable future.)
|
| 2. You talk a lot about keeping the build light, which is great
| to hear. Does this extend to deployment too? What kind of
| binary filesizes are you looking at for a "hello, world" game?
| Thaxll wrote:
| Video games don't really care about binary size.
| mrec wrote:
| Some don't, some do. Users living out in the sticks with
| poor satellite connectivity care about binary size. The
| HTML5 platform, which I see becoming increasingly important
| as things like wasm and webgpu mature, cares about binary
| size because you're potentially downloading it every time
| you play. It's slightly surreal poking about on itch.io
| where practically every game is 50 MB, even when most of
| them are simpler than a 4k demo.
| _cart wrote:
| 1. I want to be ambitious while also being realistic. AAA
| studios won't even consider using Bevy until it has more
| features and has stood the test of time. So in the short term
| our market is essentially "indies and enthusiasts". I want
| Bevy to cater to those people, but with an eye toward larger
| projects. We don't want to design ourselves into a "locally
| optimal" corner that prevents us from appealing to large
| studio. That being said, even in the short term I am
| extremely interested in advanced rendering techniques and
| will be investing a good portion of my time on adding things
| like GI and PBR.
|
| 2. Small binaries is absolutely something I care about. Last
| time I checked we could produce a "hello world" game with
| windowing + rendering thats just a little bit over 1 MB. I
| think we could probably make that smaller with some effort.
|
| edit for some additional clarity: this involved running a
| post-processing "strip" process on the binary.
| guscost wrote:
| As someone who may be tinkering with a game this decade,
| one big factor which favors "use prebuilt engine" in my
| thinking is that some of them abstract away the work
| required to port between different systems. Is this really
| a very big hurdle in your opinion? And do you see console
| ports being part of this engine in the future?
|
| The API looks great in any case, and I'll try it out, at
| least as a starting point to get back into Rust and ECS.
| Nice work!
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Console adoption and porting essentially require a game
| or games that need to be ported. Typically this happens
| through third party companies for games built on open
| source projects.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Everything is beautiful so far, the website is nice looking,
| the overview is self-explanitory. If I wasn't so in love with
| Godot I would use this. I think one thing that would sell this
| would be an editor like Godot has, it's one of the strongest
| selling points with Godot for me.
| GabLotus wrote:
| Hey! An editor is definitely on the roadmap. Bevy want's to
| dogfood here and make the editor using bevy!
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| That's what I figure, I saw that Bevy does support UIs,
| which is how Godot makes their own UI, and how RPG In a
| Box[0] was born from Godot itself (I'm not affiliated with
| RPG In a Box nor Godot, just someone who is learning
| Godot). I think it's going to be wonderful to see a spawn
| of powerful and open source game engines in the coming
| years.
|
| [0]: https://www.rpginabox.com/
| Xevi wrote:
| Bevy even mentions Godot as an inspiration for building
| the editor using Bevy itself. The creator of Bevy has a
| lot of experience with Godot, so I'd assume we're going
| to see bits and pieces resembling how Godot works.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I realized that recently, the author is working on a game
| in Godot as you said. It makes a lot of sense. Godot is a
| good standard to look up to. I can't wait to see this
| project as it matures.
|
| For anyone curious this is the game from the author:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxW4PcX0fa8
|
| It looks like a lot of fun honestly!
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Hi _cart, creator of Planimeter's Grid Engine (a Lua game
| engine) here. Congratulations on your phenomenal work! I'm very
| familiar with the fact that posts like these on HN that help
| drive adoption, so thanks to adamnemecek as well.
| GabLotus wrote:
| This is awesome! The focus on productivity really sets this
| apart.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Also, I setup a discord channel for Rust GPU programming.
| https://discord.gg/YbawFYt
| dgb23 wrote:
| I have to say the API seems to be very pleasant and simple at a
| glance. Kudos to the author!
|
| > Being able to use Rust functions directly as systems might feel
| like magic, but I promise it's not! You may have noticed that we
| do this when registering systems in our App (...)
|
| > (...) This works because we implement the IntoQuerySystem trait
| for all functions that match a certain set of function
| signatures.
|
| This pattern is a great example of how Rust achieves to be both
| very ergonomic or dynamic (in the sense of expressiveness) and
| type safe at the same time.
| cthonicthulu wrote:
| That's pretty cool! Is there any material you'd recommend me
| reading that gives examples of these kinds of ergonomics with
| traits as they pertain to, say, vanilla web development?
| dgb23 wrote:
| I merely a beginner and learn the language on the side.
|
| Things that come to mind are (incomplete list):
|
| - From trait
|
| - derive
|
| - traits you can implement to convert a data structure into a
| iterator
|
| - Deref, Drop traits, MutexGuard
|
| These things appear magical at first but make for very
| expressive abstractions.
|
| In regards to web-dev: a framework that makes heavy use of
| traits and macros is Rocket.
|
| As for material: when I'm learning I typically have The Book,
| Rust by Example and some tabs of the standard library open.
| Then just go by curiosity. Perhaps not the best approach?
| rozgo wrote:
| Got the chance of running the examples and glance over the code.
| Also checked the book and docs. As I mentioned in another post
| about Bevy, it looks incredibly elegant and clean. Almost feels
| like this could make engine development fun again. And custom
| engines feasible.
|
| Contrary to popular belief, the need to build your own engine is
| real for a significant amount of projects. I look forward to
| being able to quickly put together a few building blocks,
| customize the renderer and experiment with new systems.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Purely a question. So why would I use rust instead of C++ or C#
| to develop games? what are the potential advantages of that.
| rainbow-road wrote:
| Over C#:
|
| * Garbage collectors often scare game developers since they can
| lead to hard-to-fix latency spikes.
|
| * Rust has some cool libraries (specs, rayon, etc.) that let
| you _safely_ parallelize computation.
|
| Over C++:
|
| * It's a memory-safe language, which instantly avoids tons of
| bugs.
|
| * Library interfaces are usually higher-level in Rust than in
| C++, for various reasons (sum types being a big one).
|
| * It's a much smaller language, so there aren't any dark
| corners that you'll randomly be forced to learn.
|
| * It has an easy-to-use package manager, and I'm not sure where
| C++ is on that front.
| implfuture wrote:
| There are many reasons, but to name a few important to me: rust
| gives performance on the level of C++, but with the memory
| safety of a garbage-collected language. It also provides
| protection against data races so that you can use concurrency
| with less chance of hard-to-debug issues.
| kibwen wrote:
| The original link posted here (the homepage) doesn't really get
| in to what makes Bevy interesting, I would recommend this great
| blog post instead that introduces it:
| https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/
|
| Yesterday's thread on /r/rust:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/i7bcwu/introducing_be...
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we'll change the URL to that from https://bevyengine.org/.
| Thanks!
| AbuAssar wrote:
| Impressive!
|
| this has the potential to be rust's flutter! (Bevy UI)
| xfour wrote:
| MIT License, well done! It's so refreshing to see things released
| with no strings attached. Yes there is value being created, and
| the creator should be compensated. But, it's such a breathe of
| fresh air as a potential end user to not have to worry about
| intricacies of GPL etc. inclusion.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yep, it is so refreshing to have shareware and PD back.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Github link https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy
|
| dang, do you want to swap the link to github?
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| Rather than the GitHub link, I would recommend this page:
| https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/
| Keats wrote:
| I've already posted it in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121947 but it didn't
| get traction :/ +1 on using that URL
| donpdonp wrote:
| I'd like to see how it compares to
| https://github.com/amethyst/specs, a rust-based ECS engine, for
| use in the multiplayer voxel world game Veloren
| (https://veloren.net), or https://github.com/TomGillen/legion
| meheleventyone wrote:
| There's not a particularly thrilling benchmark here:
| https://bevyengine.org/news/introducing-bevy/
|
| Basically an ECS is not really a secret easy pattern to cache
| coherent data access. This benchmark shows its fast for the
| easy cases but says nothing about typical game requirements.
| donpdonp wrote:
| Here's a writeup comparing Specs (Amethyst sub-project) and
| Legion ECS. https://csherratt.github.io/blog/posts/specs-and-
| legion/
| CraftThatBlock wrote:
| What would be the difference between this (which looks really
| cool!) and https://amethyst.rs ?
| brundolf wrote:
| From my limited experience (doing Amethyst's Pong tutorial and
| glancing through Bevy's home page), Amethyst is more mature and
| also seems more complex (and presumably more powerful). There's
| quite a bit of boilerplate to get started, but it gives you
| very fine-grained control over everything like how assets are
| loaded, how components are laid out in memory, etc. It seems
| like it's aiming more for the "real game studio" market than
| for enthusiasts, although last I checked it's also mainly
| focused on 2D for the time being.
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(page generated 2020-08-11 23:00 UTC)