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Comment by zith | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if Embark are still using a lot of rust in their production games? They seem to be a very well funded studio (lots of employees, big fancy office, competes with other AAA FPS-games). I wonder if these experimental-sounding projects have given way to more classic tech in the churn of building games that are profitable.

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According to the article, Rust is (or was) used in the kajiya renderer and in the "creative platform", not in their production games:

> Our Rust project has different requirements than a video game. It’s a platform that will enable everyone — not just professional game makers — to build new small interactive experiences.

The kajiya renderer is available on GitHub, but contributions have slowed down since mid 2022: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/kajiya/graphs/contributors

The "creative platform" is now apparently available under wim.live (and has a twitter account called @createplaywim): https://wim.live/en/ - but the website only seems to play a video, I couldn't find any other functionality.

They seem to be using Rust in a lot of tools though: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios

The author of the linked article (and Kajiya) quit Embark to work on an indie title with his wife around mid 2022 if memory serves me right.

Nope, their two flagship games (The Finals, and the soon-to-be-released Ark Raiders) are all using Unreal Engine.

Seems that they're trying to earn money by shipping games in Unreal first, while developing their Rust-based engine behind the scenes.

Their Rust game is currently in closed alpha: https://wim.live/en/.

Last time I tried it, they were working on integrating wasm support for user-accessible custom scriptable scenarios (a la Roblox).

The games embark has released are made in Unreal Engine, maybe the game using rust hasn't been released yet.

One obstacle is that at least one of the major console vendors prohibits using anything other than C++ plus their official compiler. So shipping on that platform using i.e. Rust, Swift, C# is currently against the rules. (Unity gets an out here since they compile C# down to C++ using IL2CPP.)

I expect some studios are just quietly breaking the rule and not telling anyone, but I'd be worried, personally.

Which console vendor is that?

They get really upset if you disclose things like that :)

My gut says Nintendo, because Microsoft doesn't give a shit what you use as long as you write for them, and Sony doesn't feel like they'd be that petty.

You can ship games for Nintendo with private modification of NativeAOT + FNA: https://viridiansoftware.com/blog/csharp-on-game-consoles

But Microsoft _does_ have a widely known C++ compiler. I doubt Sony does. Does Nintendo?

Sony

What would the reasoning for such a decision be?

CrossCode was written in JS/HTML5 and was ported over to consoles just fine, though.

They mention stuff like "an interpreter which translates the [JavaScript] code but locks it up in a cage"¹, their presentation² mention JS interpreters and a JS AoT compiler, so I'm not really sure how they did it

¹: https://www.radicalfishgames.com/?p=6892 ²: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfBzlzvt8RU

People outside of the industry woudn't believe how it is to work with first party such as Sony, just to get SDK / api / documentation / forums access you need to have a very complicated process that involves public IP whitelisting etc..

https://www.scedev.net/index.html

Even NVidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service is like that. I tried to get a developer account and they wanted US$10,000 just to talk. It's not like getting an AWS account.

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