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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I'm about to build a stack on top of Unreal, but I don't really need the "game" parts, just the "real time rendering" ones.

I consider building on Unreal to be an (acceptable) risk, but I'd prefer to build on something not owned by another company.

I'm really hoping some of these Rust projects start to focus on rendering, not just the game pieces.

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Have you considered Godot engine? Godot is free software, so legally you have the right to do basically anything with it that Godot engine's owners do. It's years ahead of the engine in the OP in terms of features+polish, and seems likely to continue being developed for a long time. I'd definitely suggest using Godot unless you really need a specific feature of Unreal engine.

Here is a nice project : https://github.com/godot-rust/godot-rust

If GP is interested in real time rendering features, they may end up butting against the same wall I do every time I try to use godot for a quick 3d experiment: a lot of features you may want when it comes to rendering have been combined with the swap to vulkan, coming in Godot 4.0, which has been a long time coming, with an alpha this year hopefully, but one of the devs has already joked that it will be delayed until next year.

How much of rendering you need? Are you providing the shaders yourself?

If you only need multi-platform rendering (including Emscripten, and a shader abstraction), have you looked into BGFX, or even Sokol GFX? They provide the bits you need to render. Unity is even using BGFX in its "Tiny" version. Sokol GFX is new but very easy to use.

I believe both have Rust bindings if this is important to you.

I'm not sure using Unreal is a risk. It's used commercially by a lot of companies for much more than gaming. It's also open source. Obviously not written in Rust though, if that's important.

PBR is on the todo list. https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/179

Have you considered Godot? You can use wrappers.

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