Animation in Bevy: The Big Picture | Hacker News Reader

Animation in Bevy: The Big Picture

glocq.com

72 pointsibobev12 comments

Bevy is awesome! I've been helping build out a visual editor for it and things are exciting (https://github.com/jbuehler23/jackdaw). More contributors are always welcome! jackdaw discord: https://discord.gg/jQT6gee3V

This took me 24 minutes to compile on an M1 macbook pro. Is there just an absolutely enormous amount of code in here, or is the project hitting some pathological compiler slowdowns?

Yes

The animation system is good for most use cases but it's also super hard to do anything procedural like UI animation. If you want to animate a button you need to write 5 helpers to make it less painful. It's mostly designed for importing from a file.

A bit off topic but their handling of async IO tasks is awful. The engine polls them for you but you also need to poll them yourself in a separate system, because you can't access a `Commands` instance from inside the future without blocking the main thread and there is no way to pass a callback that runs when it's finished. That's not a problem most games will see but for anyone loading content from a server (like patch notes or server lists) or using Bevy as a UI library it can add up.

I don't know about animation, but it seems the UI system and their widget library was overhauled.

"The Feathers widgets have migrated to BSN, Bevy's next-generation scene system. BSN is a better foundation for widgets than the old spawn-function approach: it reduces boilerplate, lets you compose widgets together, parameterize widgets with SceneComponent props, reference font/image assets, and register observers in the same declaration."

https://bevy.org/news/bevy-0-19/

Bevy resources for those interested in learning:

- https://bevy.org/learn/book/intro

- https://taintedcoders.com

https://bevy-cheatbook.github.io/

This one is great for filling in some of the gaps in official docs.

Most games require more than just a basic animation player, they have their animation tied to gameplay/input systems, you want a full blown animation timeline system, so you can play specific events (vfx, cancel windows) at specific frames

That's something most game frameworks don't provide as a first class, gameplay oriented systems

Anyone with familiarity know when an engine like Bevy will have (or already has) plugins for simulated movement animation?

In my most recent experimental game I’d like to be able to just assign BiPed / QuadPed to the asset mesh + rig and let the engine handle the rest. Ideally, allowing me to build custom animations for attacks (or even custom movement animation like a limp) and have those blend into each other and also blend into / outof the default movement animations.

Inspired by https://youtu.be/FM8yNkWad1w?is=XV3FmLG4IPvTWknh

Haven't touched it in a few years but Bevy was a really nice breath of fresh air when I dipped my toes back into hobby game dev. I wasn't used to being able to create a game almost purely as code without having to touch a WYSIWYG editor.

I've used Bevy a few times (plain old coding), and recently again a few months ago with Claude Code and Opus.

I wasn't happy with Opus's grasp of Bevy. Opus and Fable are both great at Rust, but the results in Bevy have been historically middling. (But so was ThreeJS at the time.)

Does anyone know how Astra fares? I see all of these incredible Blender and ThreeJS results, but I'd love to work in Rust and Bevy. But if the model can't emit it, then there's nothing that can be done.

The one other downfall of this might be the fact that the compile times make iteration difficult.

Any anecdotes?

crazy to see bevy on the front page of hacker news. thanks for sharing!

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