How do you guys debug bevy? Especially on Windows?
Bevy game engine 0.6
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#72Lead Bevy developer here: feel free to ask me anything!
I spent a few days making a (very) basic 2D game engine in Rust for fun. One thing I found is that I didn't find Rust that helpful in preventing bugs due to the nature of game engine code. For instance, I was using a generational array to store components. At some point I had a use-after-free bug in the generational array code that the Rust compiler could never catch. Also, components tend to have circular references to one another, which was very annoying to program in Rust. I'm curious if you've experienced something similar and what your thoughts are now, after many months in the trenches, on Rust's suitability for a game engine.
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#73Lead Bevy developer here: feel free to ask me anything!
Congratulations on release!
I was wondering if there is any low hanging fruit for WebGL build size improvements.
I did a Unity test build for comparison against your rect example, with a cube and a single script that does nothing (so they can't e.g. strip out Mono).
Listing sizes uncompressed, 7z Ultra (a decent proxy for Brotli), and wasm-opt + 7z Ultra respectively:
Rect example: 13473kb, 1964kb, 1720kb
Basic Unity: 9528kb, 2304kb, 2291kb
Bevy is still leading, but it's getting uncomfortably close.
The uncompressed sizes matter a lot more than any other asset type, as it's all code that has to be compiled, running poorly until the optimized compiler has finished with it. On a Chromebook, my experience is that much code gives you 30-60s of poor FPS before it comes good.
I understand this is not necessarily a focus of Bevy, but I do think that you have an opportunity here to build the first game engine without significant downsides on any single platform. Filling the code base with a bunch of feature flags may not be worth it to achieve that goal, though.
The modularity of Bevy is super exciting (I've asked you before about WebGL builds on here before and you mentioned this). But Unity ships quite a bit of stuff in a basic build and is probably fairly similar in scope to Bevy with all crates.
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats for the release, looks great! Not a criticism, but model projected shadows (not prebaked on lightmaps) are very jagged or really low-res, reminds me of early Unity shadows. I know Unity worked hard to improve them for years and acquired experts on shaders, because users complained and even moved to Unreal for that reason alone. Not sure if there are now well known solutions to get highly defined shadows, but…
Yup shadows are notoriously difficult to make pretty in all situations. Fortunately we do have a number of "shadow quality" improvements in progress: https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-6/#more-renderer-features . And we'll probably be improving shadows indefinitely from now on. The tech in that space is constantly evolving.
I'd like to see irregular Z buffers deployed in a modern graphics engine, as they actually provide pixel-perfect shadows without the need for raytracing hardware. They're pretty experimental, though. Maybe I'll take a stab at implementing them in Bevy sometime :)
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#75Lead Bevy developer here: feel free to ask me anything!
Evil question: I wonder why do you have version zero.something - this looks good enough for a version 1. What do you like to accomplish? And... What kind of help you'll need to get there??
Well, lack of skeletal animation is a showstopper. Every 3D game needs that no matter what.
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#76Looks like a good reason to finally try out Rust. Does HN have any recommended IDEs?
I _love_ the Rust plugin for Intellij. I have used VSCode a ton as well, but never for Rust. In general, I think Intellij is heads and shoulders above VSCode, but it is possible that 'rust analyzer' makes all the difference (I might check it out sometime).
It does, rust-analyser is much better than IntelliJ rust right now.
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#77Lead Bevy developer here: feel free to ask me anything!
Evil question: I wonder why do you have version zero.something - this looks good enough for a version 1. What do you like to accomplish? And... What kind of help you'll need to get there??
I wondered why the Rust community seemed so averse to 1.0 releases, but Rust for Rustaceans makes the interesting point that there are a lot of cases in the Rust language where adding new features technically qualifies as a breaking change. There doesn't seem to be a lot of room for the minor version number - everything is either a revision or a major release, and people aren't ready to commit to that level of strictness until they're feature-complete.
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#78Lead Bevy developer here: feel free to ask me anything!
Congratulations on release! I was wondering if there is any low hanging fruit for WebGL build size improvements. I did a Unity test build for comparison against your rect example, with a cube and a single script that does nothing (so they can't e.g. strip out Mono). Listing sizes uncompressed, 7z Ultra (a decent proxy for Brotli), and wasm-opt + 7z Ultra respectively: Rect example: 13473kb, 1964kb, 1720kb Basic Unity…
There are a number of techniques available to shrink wasm size in rust, this is the best collection of them I'm aware of https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/book/reference/code-size.htm....
Please also consider Unity web used to be significantly worse and it took multiples of bevy's lifetime for it to get to where it is now :)
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#79Lead Bevy developer here: feel free to ask me anything!
Not a game or rust dev, but going thru the quickstart tutorial - Bevvt looks pretty nice. Good job and thanks
Re: Bevy game engine 0.6
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've tried Bevy v0.5 and it was very immature (as a matter of fact, all the Bevy "games" are single-screen). By looking at the release notes, it's not clear if it now supports OpenGL, which means that on some setups, it's not even possible to run correctly at all. It may be fun to write a hello world, but in this case, there are much easier (and more stable) engines. A typical setup if VSCode + Rust Analyzer. RA wasn…
What do you mean by single screen? There's no technical reason for that to be the case and there are already games that have multiple screens, even past the basic main menu + main game loop ones. You can find multiple functioning and fun, if small, games here https://bevyengine.org/assets/#games . > it's not clear if it now supports OpenGL Why do you need opengl when you have support for D3D, Vulkan, Metal, OpenglES,…
> Why do you need opengl when you have support for D3D, Vulkan, Metal, OpenglES, and WebGL2? What amount of the market are you missing?
My take: Software isn't used exclusively on new computers.
I was just reading a forum thread full of complaints that a certain emulator won't work on 4th-gen i5 laptops. I want the software I write to be accessible to owners of machines at least as old as that, and I hope I can do that with Bevy.