Hacker News Reader

Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

There are other attempts to build a game engine in Rust. In my opinion, what sets Bevy apart is the pace at which they’re developing. Look at the release notes for Bevy 0.4 (https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-4/), released 6 weeks after Bevy 0.3 (https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-3/). They have momentum, plenty of contributors (50+), improving the ergonomics of existing APIs, improving the performance of pieces already performing well.

If I was making a game today, I’d probably pick Unity. A year from now? I’d take a good look at where Bevy is then. Good luck to cart and the other contributors.

View on HN

Bevy has a full time developer working on it and has benefited from a whole lot of lessons learned from past attempts at building an engine in Rust.

I really like Bevy but I think that's a bit optimistic and based on the size of the studio.

Godot is in a much better spot at being the next Unity and it took a long time. It's still not there because of assets availability: you can find assets for anything for cheap on Unity.

For an indie developer with little budget and time to build complex features, it's a life saver.

For a mid-size studio (Embark?), happy to build their own technology, Bevy could be a great starting point, but the feature set is still not there.

As a solo developer trying to build a game, I tried going Bevy / Godot / tons of others and ended up back to Unity: I don't like it and it's a complete disorganised and buggy mess but it gets stuff done incredibly quick.

I didn't pick Unreal Engine because of the 5% cut over 3k. It's a marginally nicer environment to work in but I don't think it's worth the price tag over Unity (free under 100k revenue).

Fwiw, this: "I didn't pick Unreal Engine because of the 5% cut over 3k"

Is out of date by almost a year now, Unreal is now royalty free until 1 million dollars of revenue, at which point they take a 5% cut

They even backdated the change to start of the year so that developers who were charged under the 3k arrangement got refunds

From all the game engines I've seen in the last years, Bevy looks the most promising.

The API looks very clean and the development speed is outstanding for an open-source product.

After reading that Rust now plays in the C/C++ league I'm really excited about Bevy.

What does it mean that "Rust now plays in the C/C++ league"? Is this referring to the Rust Foundation announcement or some other recent news?

I believe they're talking about Rust's performance vs C/C++, but I could be wrong

Yes, sorry.

I was talking about performance.

Is that only a recent phenomenon, though? Hasn't it always been competitive?

What they likely mean is that C++ gamedev libraries have been heavily optimized over the course of many years, so while there is no theoretical limitation on Rust's equivalents, polishing them to the same degree is nontrivial and takes time. Bevy is the closest and that is a recent development (last couple of months).

Rust while nice still has to catch up with 30 years ecosystem of tooling.

Many game studios won't bother using it if it doesn't come on the console vendors devkit, just like it happened with C, C++, or middleware like Unreal and Unity.

True.

But it also doesn't have to put up with 30 years of legacy cruft.

Don't you want Rust to still be around 30 years from now?

Sure, but with the cruft of the next 30 years, and not the cruft of the last 30 years

Thing is, where some see cruft, others see infrastructure ready to use today.

I certainly have nothing against this, but even at the pace they are going it will take a long time before this is anything but just another unnecessary "rewrite it in Rust" project to me. I think Godot engine is a lot more promising for general purpose use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com