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Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

arewegameyet.rs

121–130 of 139 posts

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#121

Are there any resources for developing 2D game graphics, especially for hobbyists? It seems like game development articles focus so much on frameworks and just assume everyone knows where to find / how to make graphics, audio, etc. I would be especially interested in a high level "how to make a game" that didn't go so in-depth into the programming details but which did include procuring the assets and perhaps some st…

A bunch of other comments threw out the Pico-8 I wanted to recommend the Tic80 as an open source alternative. https://tic80.com/ I just started playing around with it and honestly, I like it a lot. I've never used Pico-8 before, but from what I understand the Tic80 is pretty much the same, but with about twice the 'specs' of the pico-8. The community is a lot smaller, but it'd be awesome to see it get more support. I…

Hmmm looks fun.

I'm a mobile app (not game) perspective. For many years, I always want to make cool 3D game like GTA, unfortunately due to it's complexity it's impossible to write such game alone.

Probably I'll learn writing smaller games, instead :D

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#122

Are there any resources for developing 2D game graphics, especially for hobbyists? It seems like game development articles focus so much on frameworks and just assume everyone knows where to find / how to make graphics, audio, etc. I would be especially interested in a high level "how to make a game" that didn't go so in-depth into the programming details but which did include procuring the assets and perhaps some st…

If you want to experience the high level game dev fun, DON'T use Rust, I recommend look at - love2d ( https://love2d.org/ ) - PICO-8 ( https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php ) - Clickteam Fusion ( https://www.clickteam.com/clickteam-fusion-2-5 ) - Godot ( https://godotengine.org/ ) - Stencyl ( http://www.stencyl.com/ ) - pygame ( https://www.pygame.org/ )

I wrote a video game in pygame. It was fun!

I used it to master how to write a basic video game, without falling into the intricacies of C++ to hack out a video game.

I mastered all the mechanics of 2D video games, similar to the Nintendo and PlayStation games of the 1980s and 1990s.

I finished it in a weekend. Well, I put in 16 hour days, so it was more like a week’s work. Granted, I did have other development experience, but this was my first foray into video games.

I was driven to complete it, when I realized it was possible to actually make money as an independent video games developer. Still difficult, but possible.

I was thinking of turning this into a book or a video tutorial series. It would be helpful to crack the mysteries of game development for the new programmer.

I wonder if anybody would be interested in such a book? Or such knowledge.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#123
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of other comments threw out the Pico-8 I wanted to recommend the Tic80 as an open source alternative. https://tic80.com/ I just started playing around with it and honestly, I like it a lot. I've never used Pico-8 before, but from what I understand the Tic80 is pretty much the same, but with about twice the 'specs' of the pico-8. The community is a lot smaller, but it'd be awesome to see it get more support. I…

Hmmm looks fun. I'm a mobile app (not game) perspective. For many years, I always want to make cool 3D game like GTA, unfortunately due to it's complexity it's impossible to write such game alone. Probably I'll learn writing smaller games, instead :D

The thing that's been nice working on the tic80 is being able to work on both my phone and the computer it's kind of a hassle copying the cart back and forth, but it's cool being able to program features on the go.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#124
post #53
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, but information about if a project is still actively maintained or if it's simply feature complete (data structures come to mind), should be automated in some way, otherwise information becomes stale if the maintainer of that site isn't actively maintaining it (ironically). From what I've experienced, these sites largely go via passive maintainance, ie, based on pull requests and issues, not actively develo…

I'd love to see some kind of metric on crates.io to designate the quality of a crate. I appreciate that creating such a metric could lead to freak economics, so this is obviously not a trivial task, and the metric(s) may have to be mixed up every now and then to avoid to much gaming. Also it might be useful if such metrics are a geometric mean of the crates own score and all its dependencies.

The important metrics I'd be interested in is the Bus Factor, the Active Maintenance and Passive Maintenance activity as well as when the last release tag was created.

Bus Factor could be a bucketed 90-percentile count on the contributors. Active Maintenance and Passive Maintenance could be established by looking at PRs and Issues and how many commits aren't directly related to them. Last Release Tag is easy.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#125
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see some kind of metric on crates.io to designate the quality of a crate. I appreciate that creating such a metric could lead to freak economics, so this is obviously not a trivial task, and the metric(s) may have to be mixed up every now and then to avoid to much gaming. Also it might be useful if such metrics are a geometric mean of the crates own score and all its dependencies.

The quality of a crate is based on how well it solves the goal it set out to do. To assess that, users need to skim the code and documentation to gauge for themselves. There is no universal score. This is a feature, not a bug.

That is the quality of the crate, but the maintenance going on in the crate can be separate. A crate can be good quality but also unmaintained.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#126
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many interesting SDKs come with C++ APIs that aren't necessarily translatable to C. Choosing Rust for engine development has the potential of severely hamstringing the team. It is the same tough uphill battle for all languages that aren't C++. Even more so now that the smoke is slowly rising from the battlefield of licensed engines and only a few contenders remain standing. And all of them have a massive C++ codebase…

There is an effort to automate generating mid-level C bindings for C++ code automagically, to enable easier wrapping in high level Rust APIs, by an unofficial Academy [of Motion Pictures] Software Foundation group. It is called C++-- [1]. At this time we only target the VFX C++ ecosystem but I'd be surprised if people wouldn't use (and extend) this to cover a broader set of C++ libs. Maybe you can give an example of…

For example, OpenVDB uses templates with user provided arguments at the very heart of its tree structure. Similar things happen in PCL and CGAL. They are template-heavy libraries by design.

OpenCV on the other hand seems to instantiate all possible variants of cv::Mat for their Python bindings. They don't such a big space of valid and useful template parameters and IIRC the specifics are abstracted away from the algorithms working on them.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#127

Are there any resources for developing 2D game graphics, especially for hobbyists? It seems like game development articles focus so much on frameworks and just assume everyone knows where to find / how to make graphics, audio, etc. I would be especially interested in a high level "how to make a game" that didn't go so in-depth into the programming details but which did include procuring the assets and perhaps some st…

> Also, even the general approach for game development--presumably there's some white boarding phase followed by a wireframe phase etc like you have with app dev? What does that look like in game dev land, what are some reasonable tools for hobbyists for each stage, etc? This is called "greyboxing" in game dev, where you build functionality (often levels) with plain grey boxes rather than actual art assets to test wh…

They're often not literally grey. You're kit-bashing for form rather than aesthetics. As such you need some ability to differentiate things. Similarly there's a minimum amount of FX feedback and UI you also need to make a game understandable.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#128

Tangentially related - if anyone is new to Rust and wants to see some simple mini text game examples, I've been working on a bunch [0]. It also includes some more complicated text games: Asylum - Choose your own adventure style interactive narrative Knights and Barbarians - Simple turned based strategy game Legend of the Rusty Dragon - Simple adventure game inspired by Legend of the Red Dragon [0] https://github.com/…

Neat! I used these as an excuse to play with / work on WASM build tools / WASI interop. I've uploaded a built version to github so you can play them directly in your browser:

https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/cargo-html/wiki/Examples#ru...

I've sent a couple of PRs for things I found useful - feel free to ignore them if they're not to your liking ;)

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#129
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of a crate is based on how well it solves the goal it set out to do. To assess that, users need to skim the code and documentation to gauge for themselves. There is no universal score. This is a feature, not a bug.

That is the quality of the crate, but the maintenance going on in the crate can be separate. A crate can be good quality but also unmaintained.

A support contract aligns incentives nicely when crate maintenance is a risk point.

Re: Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem

#130
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the quality of the crate, but the maintenance going on in the crate can be separate. A crate can be good quality but also unmaintained.

A support contract aligns incentives nicely when crate maintenance is a risk point.

Hardly a thing that 99% of crates are even viable for. What company would pay me 3k$ a month to full-time (or 1k$ for part-time) maintain some crate that barely anyone uses?

Only popular crates would have a chance to have support contracts like this.

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