Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
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Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#2I worked through this book a couple of weeks ago and I had a blast. I heartily recommend it to roguelike fans that haven’t tried out participating in the 7DRL game jam yet.
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#3I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of sum types as enums make many of them all the more powerful.
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#4I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…
The reason ECS is so common for roguelikes, is because they provide a simulationist experience. The main draw of several roguelikes is having enemies on the same footing as the player, and a good way to do that is to have them use the exact same systems. It's also a good way to make interesting interactions between environment and objects happen.
Also, having collections of entities works well for Rust's borrow checker.
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#5I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…
> The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community
I don't think it's very entrenched, although it's certainly present. The reason for this perception, I guess, is that Bevy (which is based on ECS) is all the rage.
Amethyst was ECS as well, but it's dead now (and Bevy is essentially its successor). Veloren is ECS though, and active.
The remaining major engine (AFAIK) is RG3D, but it's not ECS. Macroquad provides a node graph (but it's a smaller engine).
All the other game engines are comparatively small, and they don't provide storages/ECS engines.
(edit: added Veloren)
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#6I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…
I think Jonathan Blow's take is right:
> ECS only starts to make sense when you are big enough to have multiple teams, with one team building the engine and the other using the engine to make the game; or you are an engine company and your customer makes the game. If that is not your situation, do not rathole. https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1427358365357789199
Most of the arguments I've seen for ECS in Rust suggest it helps to work with memory management/borrowing. For example, here's Patrick Walton's take:
> There's a reason why Rust game engines all use ECS and it's not just because the traditional Unity OO style is out of fashion. It's because mutable everywhere just doesn't work in Rust. Mutex and RefCell explosion. https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1440519425845723139.
And here's Cora Sherratt's discussion of ECS options in Rust:
> So why do you need one? Well all ECS developers will claim it’s largely about performance, and show you a mountain of numbers to back it up. The more honest answer probably comes down to the difficulty of making ownership work in Rust without some type of framework to manage the transfer of ownership for you. Rust punishes poor architecture, so ECS’ are here to help. https://csherratt.github.io/blog/posts/specs-and-legion/ (This post also has the best visualisation and explanation of an ECS I've read.)
I've read Hands-On Rust and you could definitely implement the game without an ECS. But at the same time it was useful to play with that pattern because it's in common usage in the Rust community. (Bevy also makes heavy use of it, for example, where it feels pretty lightweight because they made some good design decisions: https://bevyengine.org/news/bevys-first-birthday/#bevy-ecs.)
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#7I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…
> The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community I don't think it's very entrenched, although it's certainly present. The reason for this perception, I guess, is that Bevy (which is based on ECS) is all the rage. Amethyst was ECS as well, but it's dead now (and Bevy is essentially its successor). Veloren is ECS though, and active. The remaining major engine (AFAIK) is RG3D, but it's not ECS. Macroquad prov…
I think Kyren's 2018 CustConf talk [0] caused it to become popular earlier. Arewegameyet has an entire section for ECS crates, with 10 different entries. I'm aware of multiple smaller homegrown solutions, too.
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#8I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…
I think Jonathan Blow's take is right: > ECS only starts to make sense when you are big enough to have multiple teams, with one team building the engine and the other using the engine to make the game; or you are an engine company and your customer makes the game. If that is not your situation, do not rathole. https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1427358365357789199 Most of the arguments I've seen for ECS in Rust…
I think the idea that you need something like ECS to deal with mutability everywhere is a misconception. Traditional architectures you'd use in C or C++ are all going to more or less have a tree-based ownership graph, and these translate very well to Rust. Long-lived pointers to things that you don't own are a great way to get UAF errors or similar, and having a collection of entities you can look up by ID is a common pattern to use outside of ECS.
> But at the same time it was useful to play with that pattern because it's in common usage in the Rust community.
And in doing so it perpetuates it. ECS is a good solution for lots of problems (in particular I don't agree with jblow's take) but parading it as _the_ way to make games in Rust feels a lot like how OOP has been championed in the past. If you're going to teach someone how to make games in Rust, doing with extra patterns that don't add much other than complexity (in this case) doesn't seem like a good strategy for teaching or introducing people to the language.
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#9Book is also online: https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/
and on Github: https://github.com/amethyst/rustrogueliketutorial
Re: Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play
#10I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of…
ECS is for me the natural way to design games. I wouldn't even know to design them any other way.
I started game dev with love2d which is a pretty minimalist framework. When I participated in a game jam, I needed a very flexible system that would allow for quick prototyping and would handle many different entities. I ended up writing something which I later realized would be an ECS system. It worked great and I would copy it over for other games.
I know there is that ECS-faction that is talking about performance benefit and stuff but honestly I don't care. I don't even know most of the terminology these people use. I just use ECS to structure my code while being very flexible. I use OO in other domains but it would never occur to me to structure games that way. OO just feels way to brittle for a domain where you do lot's of experimentation and can't really know what you will need and how your entities might end up looking.