Alright, with the help of a little bit of Earl Grey, I'm feeling ready for my weekly #bevymergetrain. A little sleep deprivation won't stop me from doing a final pass on the community approved #opensource #rust PRs for Bevy!
Follow along, as we review the 11 PRs in our backlog :)
1. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/18031
Very nice, I've been looking forward to landing light textures (mmm cookies!) for a couple months. A simple effect (create a mask over a light), but really useful artistically.
Pleased with the quality and reviews, but needs merge conflict resolution. Pinging.
The history of the term "light cookie" is actually really interesting. This comes from "cucoloris", which is an old film trick of literally cutting out objects made of plywood or other materials to block lights! The Wikipedia page is quite fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucoloris
Bad name still though!
2. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19196
Improved example descriptions for our fog example :) Straightforward and clear; I really love this work.
Module docs in examples are a really nice #rust patern; you can give a lot of helpful context and motivation. With a review from Charlotte, it's time to merge!
This is a bit of a test case in writing the explanation for an example whose subject (DistanceFog as a component on cameras) is the focus, but isn't that complicated either. Not certain if this...
3. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19414
Networking folks are up to their nonsense again: they really push Bevy's ability to operate generically to its limit. This time, we're taking a look at how to improve ergonomics for entity mapping, used to reconstruct webs of entities across a serialization boundary.
Objective The objective of this PR is to enable Components to use their MapEntities implementation for Component::map_entities. With the improvements to the entity mapping system, there is definite...
Oh boy, we're at solution D?! This needs a bit of chewing. Thankfully, this is pretty well-scoped, and we have collaboration across the networking authors, which are the primary consumers right now.
Code is clean, docs are excellent, solution is simple and consistent. I'm happy with this: merging.
4. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19192
Okay, apparently tilemap chunk rendering has been approved by our SME-Rendering?? Was not expecting this today, but I'll take it! The core ideas here are a) Bevy should really be shipping with tilemap support for 2D games and b) efficient rendering is hard.
Hmm. So we're living in bevy_sprite for now: I suppose that's a fine-enough spot for now. Rendering crates are a mess. I would *prefer* clearer / strong ECS design, and I've left some suggestions on how to do that, but I think that's fine in follow-up.
I trust the SMEs-Rendering here: merging.
If you're interested in helping out, join the Tilemap working group on Discord: https://discord.com/channels/691052431525675048/1367261228459884604
I think we can land something significantly more advanced than this in 0.17 if folks pitch in. Lots of prior art and expertise: the trick is getting folks to move stuff along ;)
5. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19192
Ah window grabbing :( I know a bunch of jammers struggled with this, since the behavior on web is not great. Looks like it's better on Windows now though, so we should update the docs. Great, merging!
6. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19426
Nice, another step towards always-strong-handles and general rendering cleanup. This time, making the fullscreen shader patterns cleaner. Good, I'm happy with that :) Last I heard we were blocked on assets-as-entities for a full fix, but this progress matters too. Merge!
Objective Related to "Always Strong" Asset Handles / Remove asset weak handles #19024. Solution Remove the FULLSCREEN_SHADER_HANDLE weak_handle with a resource holding the shader handl...
7. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19462
A simple enough bug fix for resizing images while on the GPU, a functionality that we introduced earlier this cycle. To fix it, we need to pass in the old asset, which apparently is broadly useful. Neat! Happy to merge this, especially since then we never ship the bug.
Objective #19410 added support for resizing images "in place" meaning that their data was copied into the new texture allocation on the CPU. However, there are some scenarios where an ima...
8. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19649
Oh good, the EntityCloneBuilder stuff is ready :) I think we hit this last week but something was slightly off? Anyways, Eugineerd has done an awesome job mentoring this work: the overall design and polish are much improved thanks to that. Merging!
Objective Further tests after #19326 showed that configuring EntityCloner with required components is bug prone and the current design has several weaknesses in it's API: Mixing EntityClonerBu...
9. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19685
Man, really just hammering me with X-Contentious stuff today. I guess "making decisions" is a huge part of the job. This is a follow-up for the GLTF coordinate conversion stuff, allowing a global setting. Definitely useful. Did it get contextualized properly?
Objective Followup to Allow users to fix glTF coordinate system imports #19633 As discussed, it's a bit cumbersome to specify that you want the correct orientation every single time Also, glTF...
10. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19723
Oh interesting, Cart's extremely preliminary reactive systems PR got a second approval. Sure, might as well move that can down the road :) It doesn't do much yet, but it's the direction we want to move, and it's not a big maintenance burden. Merging to keep it moving.
11. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19743
Whee contentious PRs! This time, it's mesh serialization! There's been a whole bunch of back-and-forth about how we should do this: it's immediately useful, but our mesh format is overdue for changes, and handle serialization is a huge can of worms.
Looks like the rendering folks finally hashed out a compromise with the BRP / tooling folks who wanted this: create a dedicated `SerializableMesh` struct and cast to / from that. Okay, I'm down.
Very clear docs on limitations, clean impl. Great conclusion to the debates; let's merge :)
12. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19775
Ah good, another PR for "our weird rendering data structures need more utility methods". I bet this came up at work for IceSentry :) Uncontroversial, cleanly implemented, nicely documented, and I trust that this is helpful. Merging.
13. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19778
My job really is to make the final call, huh... Today, we have another simple widget (!): radio buttons. Generally clean, and very nice to have but ickshonpe is displeased that there's no built-in mechanism for enforcing mutual exclusion.
Phew! That's it for the merge train: this ended up being a fuller day than I was hoping for. Don't stay up until 2 am kids. At least, not if you're Old™.
Anyways, I'm feeling really pleased about the progress on a lot of controversial features today, between the merge train and the meeting!
Alice I. Cecile
