Fyrox 0.25 Feature Highlights | Hacker News Reader

Fyrox 0.25 Feature Highlights

fyrox.rs

66 pointsgigagoogoo13 comments

> Before 0.25 the engine was mainly used as framework backed by the scene editor. Now the situation has changed, now it is possible to run your game in the editor, like in many other mainstream engine such as Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, etc.

That’s a major usability improvement. It’s truly a ‘Godot lite’ engine now, which is a noteworthy milestone for the Rust gamedev ecosystem!

Hi, engine author here, ask me anything.

Join engine community in Discord - https://discord.com/invite/xENF5Uh

"You probably already asking: why not just use DLL hot-reloading? The answer is very simple: Rust does not guarantee ABI stability across projects. What does that mean for a typical engine user? Well, in short: subtle bugs and crashes. There were a lot of experiments with hot-reloading and all of them failed."

That sucks. I'm used to C++ not caring about ABI stability, but Rust takes it to another level.

Yeah, I've spent almost a week trying to go through compiler issues, like mismatch TypeId for the same type across projects (game DLL and engine) was a main source of headache. I did some workarounds (use UUIDs as type ids), but that wasn't enough - some libraries use `Any` trait inside to do dynamic type casting. It is done by comparing TypeIds and simple pointer type cast, but TypeId does not match across projects! Even if I would fixed those issues, I still playing with fire - everything that passing DLL boundary is a source of undefined behavior and potential crashes. So I decided to use static linking instead, as the post says, it have its own pros and cons, but at least it is super safe.

It is possible to use C ABI, via C bindings but in this case you losing all benefits that Rust provides.

Two concerns about the name Fyrox:

1) slight name collision with Firefox when spoken, or...

2) Viking afficionados can correct me on this, but AFAIK "Fyr" would be pronounced "Fear"

About point 2), I don't know why the question is aimed at Viking enthusiasts but if Danish or Norwegian counts, the r is silent and almost pronounced as the letter A. Not really close to fear at all.

I was thinking about this Old Norse deity:

https://wikiless.org/wiki/T%C3%BDr

I acknowledge that Fyrox does not use the same characters as in that deity's spelling, but pretty close.

Is the editor an existing project or based on an existing project, or is it brand new for the engine?

The editor has been developed alongside the engine, and has been one of its distinguishing features, for quite some time. What they added here was the ability to run the game inside the editor, instead of having to switch between them.

The editor is built specifically for the engine, it is a bit younger than the engine - the engine is 3+ years old and the editor is 2 yo. Asking a potential question - the editor is built using fyrox-ui library which is made from scratch too.

Very cool. It looks impressive.

Sorry for stupid question, but how does it actually draw stuff onto screen? I see lots of GUI abstractions in fyrox-ui/src/lib.rs but I can't find where it actually interacts with the underlying OS. I'm very curious about how GUIs work in general but I am layman. I assume that you have to go through some API to push your graphic buffers onto screen. So something like SDL, OpenGL, or something native to Linux/Windows (Direct Rendering Manager?). Thanks in advance!

I briefly looked at the renderer code, it looks like it's using the "glow" library which is a wrapper that provides common OpenGL API abstraction over OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com