logloggamesHere's also our postmortem of 3 years of Rust gamedev, and why we're leaving Rust
Jérôme Humbert@logloggames Excellent article. This is very valuable insight.
As a Bevy user and crate maintainer, and from my limited game jam experience, I also feel like Bevy is more of a game engine framework to build your own custom engine. It's missing a layer above ECS where you'd find game logic, with all the requirements you mentioned (mostly single threaded, fast iteration, easier access to data, etc.). But I don't have a good intuition of what that'd look like in practice.
@logloggames I'd be interested to hear if you want to share about 2 things in particular:
- On dynamic game UI, did you try something like Rive? Otherwise, what would be the ideal language or framework? (Flash? 😉) This is an area I've always been unsatisfied with any existing solution.
- On VFX, I'm curious about your mention of "time synchronized events" and what issue you found with existing solutions? Lack of built-in support, or blockers?
(disclaimer: I'm the bevy_hanabi author)
Thanks!
@djee Haven't tried Rive, but looks interesting. Last time I checked solutions like these they were quite expensive.
About VFX, I think the problem is just that once you try UE's Niagara or Unity's VFX graph, it becomes painfully obvious how behind we are in thinking that "particle system is something that just spawns a bunch of particles". By time synchronized events I mean doing more than just spawning a particle, e.g. spawning a few in a chain with SFX and some other things (1/)
@djee A partial solution here could be coroutines, but after going down that route with https://github.com/darthdeus/koryto and realizing how painful it is to do in Rust (can't take a reference to anything across time barriers) I kind of gave up on that.
There could definitely be a nice data driven approach, just like VFX graph/Niagara, but that's basically impossible without an editor. Bevy is really the only hope here, assuming it can build an editor, and a graph editor for VFX (2/)
@djee FWIW I have a lot more experience in Unity than UE, and only tried Niagara for simple things, but from what I understand VFX graph is basically the same thing. I'd suggest looking at these, and how AAA-ish particles are designed with multiple things synchronized together. Spawning multiple different types of particles on a time schedule and managing that all at once is mainly a UI editor problem. (3/3)
> Last time I checked solutions like these they were quite expensive.
Yes they don't look cheap indeed. I don't know any free alternative.
> from what I understand VFX graph is basically the same thing
Yes, bevy_hanabi is basically modeled after Unity's VFX Graph. It's currently missing GPU events to chain effects into triggering other effects though. But it's relatively versatile on triggering from CPU I think. That's why I was asking, curious if something was missing. 😊