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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This looks like it has a lot of features, but that it's still miles behind Unreal. (I'm not downplaying the amazing technical achievement, and I'm very interested in watching RG3D evolve.)

Is this the most mature Rust game engine? There seem to be a lot of entrants in that race now. This one has the best video demos with technical rendering specifics, AFAICT.

If a coalition of companies were to band together and build an open source engine, what tech should they back, or is there no good starting point?

Amazon was open sourcing Lumberyard, right? Is that more mature? (I'd love to see Rust take off and "win" over C++, but there's a lot of ground to make up... Especially if you're chasing after Unreal.)

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If you want to back an open source engine that’s already very mature and has a big community, you want Godot. It’s not written in Rust, but it supports an FFI API that allows you to write your game logic in Rust. The killer feature that sets it apart from pure-Rust engines is console support.

If you want to see a skilled team with strong leadership building on a carefully designed foundation, and you’re not afraid to wait years for the payoff, there’s Bevy, which has made a splash on HN a couple times over the past year.

If you want an engine that’s comfortably mature today, and you want it to be written in Rust for no particular reason, then RG3D is the clear winner.

One level down, and underneath Bevy, there's WGPU, which was on HN a few days ago. That's an all-Rust layer of middleware which connects to Vulkan, and makes Apple's Metal and Microsoft's Direct-X look a lot like Vulkan. So you get cross-platform graphics. All three APIs are really very similar; the differences exist mostly for "product differentiation". WGPU also supports WebGL, but not consoles or phones. Having a common interface for all those targets is a big win.

Now, that's not a game engine. It's just a graphics API, and a low level one. One level up from that is Rend3, which handles GPU memory allocation and queuing for WGPU. At this level, you put in meshes, textures, material parameters, and transforms. Images come out. No rigged mesh yet, so no characters.

I've been using Rend3/WGPU, and here's some early video.[1] This is a small area of Second Life. I'm working on the issues of handling very complex user-created content efficiently. Most games are constantly reusing the same textures and objects, but Second Life user created content is not like that.

Frankly, it's to soon to be using these libraries for a project with a deadline.

[1] https://vimeo.com/553030168

From this outsider's perspective, RG3D and Bevy are the two most mature engines. The Bevy folks are a bit better about getting the word out, so you hear a lot more about it, but both are doing really impressive stuff.

>build an open source engine

Not sure on "coalition of companies" but godot[0] is probably close.

[0]https://godotengine.org/

And there are Rust bindings for Godot as well[0].

[0]https://github.com/godot-rust/godot-rust

Thank you! There are number of cool 2D game engines, but almost no such developed 3D engines, so rg3d is the most feature-rich game engine so far.

If you're interested in a 2D engine you might be interested in https://github.com/ensisoft/gamestudio

Godot is the leading open source engine right now. It has a rust community. Lumberyard is iirc a CryEngine derivative which... maybe I'm biased but the two games I know in that ecosystem are MechWarrior Online and Star Citizen and neither left an excellent taste in my mouth.

> Is this the most mature Rust game engine?

It is.

> There seem to be a lot of entrants in that race now.

None of them are anywhere close to rg3d. Amethyst is kind of dead.

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