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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

loglog.games

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#611

Post by sullyj3 »

gpm wrote: post #107
mjr00 wrote: post #73

In my experience, fundamentally when you're starting a software project, you need to make a strong up-front decision between two things: 1. I am using technology in order to build this thing. 2. I am building this thing in order to use this technology. Developers often fall in the (2) camp but don't admit it. There's an allure to using the new, sexy tech that will solve all their problems, whether that's Rust, Kubern…

I know rust, I don't know game development (I've dabbled slightly). If I choose to build a game I either need to make it work in rust* or I need to learn a new language (Unity -> C#, Unreal -> blueprints, Godot -> gdscript). So your advice to "just use Unity/Unreal/Godot" is the opposite of your advice "you should stick with what you know" in my case. I suspect the former is good advice, and the latter is therefore w…

Learning a new language is basically trivial relative to the effort of bootstrapping everything yourself to compensate for a lacking ecosystem, or the effort of banging your head against the fundamental unsuitability of a tool for a job.

Anyone who's learned one or two languages should be able to pick up the basics of any of the standard ones pretty much instantaneously.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#612

Post by kazinator »

astrange wrote: post #556
kazinator wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that, say, C programmers, as such, don't get painted according to what has historically gone on in the comp.lang.c newsgroup?

Probably because there's so many more of them. Maybe because being called not a real UNIX programmer feels different from being called a Blub programmer.

Maybe I should ask: why should someone interested about Lisp today have to hear stories about some Erik Naggum who posted to a Usenet newsgroup, and died 15 years ago?

Let's assume that the newsgroup is important. Legendary Lisp hacker Alan Bawden posted there just last week or so. Nobody ever mentions him.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#613

Post by VS1999 »

pcwalton wrote: post #604
VS1999 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that most of the gameplay code is linear, and people have already gotten good at splitting parallel work across threads. Serious physics engines (see jolt) are already designed to run on another thread and distribute the work across multiple cores. The main part of graphics drivers when using opengl or vulkan run on another thread and the UI you access just passes data to it. Rust's parallelism hasn't…

Among those who have tried both, I can confidently say that the idea that C/C++ parallelism is as easy to achieve as parallelism in Rust is very much a minority view. There's a reason why nobody tried to parallelize CSS styling in a production browser before Stylo came along.

I'm talking about games specifically. I don't know much about the needs of web browsers.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#614

Post by thegeekpirate »

mr_00ff00 wrote: post #321
dario_od wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You more or less described Zig

Sort of, although Zig certainly pushes itself towards the embedded world. I have tried Zig a bit and like it a lot, and I am sure it would be better for game dev than Rust, but I don't want to pass allocators around all day to all the objects in my game. Go without GC is more like a Go and Zig baby.

Odin is almost precisely that, and has many useful gamedev features and bindings.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#615

Post by lumost »

kibwen wrote: post #221
Animats wrote: post #137

That'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…

I sometimes wonder if the problem with rust is that we have not yet had a major set of projects which drive solutions to common dev problems.

Go had google driving adoption, which in turn drove open source efforts. The language had to remain grounded to not interfere with the doing of building back-end services.

Rust had mozilla/servo which was ultimately unsuccessful. While there are more than a few companies uinf rust for small projects with tough performance guarantees - I haven't seen the “we manage 1-10 MM sloc of complex code using rust” type projects.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#616

Post by DangitBobby »

pcwalton wrote: post #549
TheRoque wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bevy has the advantage of being built using the "right way" from the start I think the article is precisely criticizing this type of comment... You make people believe that Bevy is some kind of safe bet for the future, that it took inspiration from the greatest to build even better foundations for a game engine... And it seems common in the Rust community: make audacious unverifiable claims to enroll other "believe…

I don't think anyone ever claimed that Bevy is finished. As for audacious unverifiable claims: it's quite verifiable that Bevy never used DirectX 9, DirectX 10, shadow volumes, HLSL, Cg, Vulkan, or Metal (I'm not sure about OpenGL or GLSL; those were before I got involved with the project). It chose the better path (wgpu) early on. That's all I was saying.

It can't be "built the right way" if it isn't finished. We actually don't know if it can be built the right way until it is finished.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#617

Post by Repulsion9513 »

kbenson wrote: post #564
mrkeen wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My priorities are reasonable performances and the fastest iteration time possible. I bought Mount & Blade II Bannerlord in 2020-03-30. I love it to death, but come on... // 2024-02-01 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/552 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 29 // 2023-12-21 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/549 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 6 // 2023-12-14 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/…

I can't really comment on the quality of the game or experience or how buggy it feels because I've never played it, but I will say that counting fixed crash situations is a somewhat arbitrary and useless metric. If each of those crashes affected and was reported by a single person or even nobody because no regular person could really encounter it is a vastly different situation than if each of those crashes was exper…

> If each of those crashes affected and was reported by a single person or even nobody

Then do you really think they'd be spending time fixing it?

(Actually, you know what, they probably would.)

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#618

Post by Repulsion9513 »

CJefferson wrote: post #599
mrkeen wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My priorities are reasonable performances and the fastest iteration time possible. I bought Mount & Blade II Bannerlord in 2020-03-30. I love it to death, but come on... // 2024-02-01 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/552 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 29 // 2023-12-21 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/549 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 6 // 2023-12-14 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/…

I love Rust, but a crashing released game is better than a half-finished "perfect" game, or a game where you couldn't iterate quickly, and ended up with a perfectly tuned, unfun game.

> a crashing released game is better than a half-finished "perfect" game

For who? I, and I'm pretty sure most other gamers, would rather a fully-finished "perfect" game that took twice as long.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#620

Post by pcwalton »

VS1999 wrote: post #613
pcwalton wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among those who have tried both, I can confidently say that the idea that C/C++ parallelism is as easy to achieve as parallelism in Rust is very much a minority view. There's a reason why nobody tried to parallelize CSS styling in a production browser before Stylo came along.

I'm talking about games specifically. I don't know much about the needs of web browsers.

I've parallelized emulators in C++ and work on parallel parts of Bevy now, which is probably the closest you're going to get to someone who has worked on parallelizing parts of large game engines in both C++ and Rust. It was far easier in Rust.
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