You might not need memory safety.
Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
521–530 of 996 posts
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You were flagged for no such thing. You were flagged for a pointless quip about "woke"ness. Other people repeated more civil and reasonably argued forms of your same point about the language and its community and received no such downvotes. No need to play martyr.
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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#523C minus minus is needed to strip away as much as possible from C++
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#524I wonder if Rust is just much better suited for making game engines than it is for making games.
The relative abundance of game engines made in Rust compared to actual games is a bit of a meme, but I think there's something to it. Maybe Rust's feature set is just not the best fit for gamedev, for reasons outlined in TFA. Maybe it means that game engines built in Rust (which I do feel Rust is well suited for) should try to integrate an interpreter for some higher level language, IDK.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#525That's a good article. He's right about many things. I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for several years now. Works with Second Life and Open Simulator servers. Here's some video.[1] It's about 45,000 lines of safe Rust. Notes: * There are very few people doing serious 3D game work in Rust. There's Veloren, and my stuff, and maybe a few others. No big, popular titles. I'd expected some AAA title to be writ…
> I'd expected some AAA title to be written in Rust by now. I'm disinclined to believe that any AAA game will be written in Rust (one is free to insert "because Rust's gamedev ecosystem is immature" or "because AAA game development is increasingly conservative and risk-averse" at their discretion), yet I'm curious what led you to believe this. C++ became available in 1985, and didn't become popular for gamedev until…
The concept of AAA games didn't even exist back in 1985, very few people were developing games at that era, and even fewer were writing "complex" games that would need C++.
The SNES came on 1990 and even then it had it's own architecture and most games were written in pure assembly. The PlayStation had a MIPS CPU and was one of the first to popularize 3D graphics, the biggest complexity leap.
I believe your are seeing causation were only correlation should be given. C++ and more complex OOP languages just joined the scene when the games themselves became complex, because of hardware and market natural evolution
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is actively developing his new game in parallel to creating the language. Not to mention smaller projects like 'Braid- anniversary edition'.
Yeah, and it's taking him YEARS to implement a simple grid-walking Sokoban clone, and Braid anniversary edition had to be delayed.
Last I heard, the Sokoban game has a ridiculous number of puzzles on it. Can't find a source but I seem to recall hearing that it would take 400+ hours to finish it all. So.. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable it's been taking this long.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#527This is a decent article, but although the points themselves are valid, I think there's a core "issue" with (indie) gamedev itself. The vibe that I'm getting is that it's filled with people that don't particularly care about programming, they just want to get stuff done(TM), this is also highlighted by the fact that they are willing to write completely inadequate code just to see things working. Rust is not that, and…
It's said that software is never finished, only abandoned, but games actually do get finished. And at that point any maintainability is absolutely irrelevant. It's just very different to web programming.
Some software (other than games) can actually be fully finished, provided that it's scope is narrow enough.
It's really a question of differentiating between "finished" and "abandoned". Finished usually means that no new features are added, the only changes are bugfixes or minor improvements. Abandoned means no changes at all.
> And at that point any maintainability is absolutely irrelevant
This goes in line with my point though. The fact that Rust encourages writing maintainable code makes it unsuitable for gamedev, where speed of development and flexibility (even where it's bad) trumps everything else. That's why you need to have a scriptable layer on top of the core engine anyway.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arbitrary recovery to null pointers isn't a good way to do robust programming. I recommend doing the exact opposite actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software https://medium.com/@vamsimokari/erlang-let-it-crash-philosop...
A crash of an actor in BEAM is incomparable to a crash of a video game.
But if your video game uses a DSL for actors then you can do it in the DSL, which avoids special arbitrary bug-hiding behavior.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#529As a game developer for about two decades, I've never considered Rust to be a good programming language choice. My priorities are reasonable performances and the fastest iteration time possible. Gameplay code should be flexible, we have tons and tons of edge cases _by design_ because this is the best way to create interesting games. Compilation time is very important, but also a flexible enough programming structure,…
I had similar thoughts, about Rust being a good match for game engines but not games. Maybe it suggests Rust game engines might want to include an interpreter for some higher level language to actually do the gamedev in.
Rust is pretty good for writing PL interpreters (and similar tooling) too, actually.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#530You might not need memory safety.
You do need memory safety for multiplayer games, though. Either that or you should use a GC language, which frankly is good enough for most indie games.