7 ms·

The Bevy Foundation

102 points by _cart 3y ago

pjmlp 3y ago
Good luck with the efforts, we need more variety in programming language landscape for game engines.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_cart 3y ago
Bevy's creator, project lead, and now president of the Bevy Foundation here. Feel free to ask me anything!
- rahkiin 3y ago
  How does it feel to have a small project where you are the only programmer turn into such an organization which asks very different things from you?
  - _cart 3y ago
    It has certainly been a wild ride. Running an organization is certainly a different skill set. I've learned that I'm pretty good at that side too, but it drains me in a way that programming does not. Bevy's success has definitely been a mixed bag for me. It has been extremely fulfilling and a dream come true. But things were also much simpler, calmer, and pleasant when I was building Bevy alone incognito.
- tekacs 3y ago
  Nothing to ask right now, just -- thank for your (and Alice's) work! The (non-game) things that I do would be infinitely more painful without Bevy ECS, so I sponsored personally at Diamond for now. Very excited for relations and I'm hoping that the Bevy Foundation can attract the support it's looking for (and I'll switch over to corporate in a few months if things don't go unexpectedly sideways with my company). :)
alice-i-cecile 3y ago
Hi! I'm the fabled "project manager" that we'd like to hire! Helping run Bevy has been an incredible experience, and I'm very excited about the idea of being able to do this full-time. There are a ton of efforts I'd like to lead, and even more that I'd like to be able to help nudge along.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Any plan for Physics? There is no mention on front page of the website. When do the team think the would be comfortable telling people they can build and release game on it?
  - alice-i-cecile 3y ago
    Physics is 3rd party currently, but it's on our roadmap for "some day, definitely". Writing your own physics engine is... a lot of work, and not something that I'm excited to volunteer the engine itself for immediately. There are two popular physics engines used in Bevy today: Rapier[0] and bevy_xpbd[1]. Both are candidates for upstreaming, but both have their own challenges. I've spent some time working with each of the authors recently, laying out my concerns and thoughts. On the Rapier side, the documentation is sparse and aggressively mathematical, it uses a distinct math library from the rest of Bevy, the API to work with Bevy is sometimes clunky and unidiomatic, and it can be quite hard to figure out how to do Ordinary Game Dev Things with it. On the bevy_xpbd side, the performance is subpar, there can be physical stability issues, it's generally immature, and the XPBD solver that they use is, unbeknownst to the young author at the time of the crate's creation, patented by NVIDIA [2] :( Both of them are working to improve (and I'm very pleased to see that even independent of this discussion), but neither is ready for imminent official endorsement or integration. One day we'll have a Blessed Choice though. As for telling people "go forth and build your game!": things are stabilizing, and key functionality gaps are gradually getting filled. I have a terrible tendency to be overly honest, even in my marketing text, so there's going to be a long period of time where the actual answer is "it depends on what you're making". Today, if you're building a weird game-adjacent bit of software (think CAD) for desktop platforms: totally ready! There are several very happy companies doing that. If you wanna mess around with Rust and nurse the Next Great Solo Dev Science-Based MMORPG Voxel Game: you'll have a blast, and it won't affect your chance of shipping a whit. If you want to build a simulation-y desktop game with lots of procedural generation and complex logic: honestly probably a good fit. You'll hit bugs and limitations, but you will in every other engine you use so... If you want to ship high-performance web games, AAA graphics or mobile: eh, probably doable but dicey. If you want to ship to console: uh we'll find out if we can jump through all of the hoops and convince the right people to get Rust on console before the Steam Deck knockoffs devour the market (please!). These will all slowly change, but an answer for "is it ready" will be hard to pin me down on until it's a full-fledged competitor to Unity, Unreal and Godot. [0]: https://rapier.rs/docs/ https://rapier.rs/docs/ [1]: https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd [2]: https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd/issues/346 https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd/issues/346
OtomotO 3y ago
Any particular reason these 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity designations are no longer granted as freely as before?
- alice-i-cecile 3y ago
  From what we could tell, not really! It seems like a slow policy change, basically dictated at the level of the individual bureaucrat. That said, the Zig Foundation got status in 2020, and the Amethyst Foundation (another Rust gamedev group) also got status recently, so we figured it was worth it to apply since we really do feel like it's the best-fitting designation for how we want to run things and what we want to do.
CooCooCaCha 3y ago
Great news!
Woshiwuja 3y ago
Bevy is great!
29athrowaway 3y ago
If you are trying Bevy for the first time, and it runs slow, put this on your Cargo.toml [profile.dev.package."*"] opt-level = 3
- diggan 3y ago
  This + more is described if you follow the Quickstart, which if it's your first time, is probably the best place to get started quickly :) https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/getting-started/setup/ https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/getting-started/set...
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    Yes. But when I tried the tutorials, the performance issue was an instant turn down. With this, the frame rate immediately went from 13 fps to 60 fps.
    - flohofwoe 3y ago
      The curse of "zero cost abstraction" strikes again :/ A 5x performance difference between debug and release mode isn't uncommon in C++ either and a real problem for game development (plus the slow build times, but those two problems go hand in hand - you can have "high-level abstractions" that build slowly and run fast, or build fast and run slowly). That's why there's so much advice to write C-like C++ and also ignore the stdlib in gamedev circles. The Rust equivalent is probably to write "embedded style Rust".
      - kookamamie 3y ago
        Debug mode isn't always needed, though - E.g. C++ with RelWithDebInfo gets you far enough, unless you specifically want to run debugger - I'm one of those who do not use a debugger in their workflow, so a non-issue for me.
        flohofwoe 3y ago
ramon156 3y ago
Loved bevy since the reddit post (i think that was even pre 0.1). It's a bummer I was in the middle of learning rust, so I wasn't of much help. Would've loved to contribute
- BD103 3y ago
  Don't worry, you still can! I've been actively contributing to the past 4 months, working on improving CI and the website. I started out doing PRs for typos and little improvements, and so can you! (I recommend looking for issues marked as "Good-First-Issue," they are the best entry-level things to work on.)
- Cilvic 3y ago
  Which post?
lyu07282 3y ago
I hope this will one day become as large and productive as the Blender Foundation
noelwelsh 3y ago
I've been using Bevy recently so here are some thoughts on this: Firstly, the overall quality is high and seeing this attention being paid to the project's organization is another good sign. Documentation is not great. The Bevy book runs out of content very quickly. The "Cheat Book" has additional useful information: https://bevy-cheatbook.github.io/ https://bevy-cheatbook.github.io/. With these plus the examples I've been able to figure out everything I need, but it's slow going. I'm not 100% sold on ECS. It loses a lot of type safety and there doesn't seem to be any way to ensure cleanup of entities and their components.
- ioasuncvinvaer 3y ago
  How does it lose type safety? I was under the impression that bevy's Query system is type safe.
  - noelwelsh 3y ago
    ECS is basically a very simple relational database. There is no equivalent of foreign keys or other constraints between components. I can't say, for example, "every entity that has a location must also have an associated mesh". If I forget to add a component it's just a silent failure. Everything runs fine, just the expected result doesn't happen.
    - suby 3y ago
      You can probably write runtime tests for this. Some system which queries for component Location, and then does an assert for each component that the associated entity also has a mesh. Granted, this is annoying and not a particularly great solution, but it would serve to give you a reminder for when you forget. I don't mean to diminish from your overall point either, it's a valid and good one I think.
      - noelwelsh 3y ago
        Yeah, runtime checks are not very desirable. I have this vague thought that Rust needs a different kind of type system. Standard type systems[0] basically rely on references between values[1]. I seem to read about numerous Rust systems that don't use references for various reasons. Usually the borrow checker gets in the way or they want a different memory layout[2]. This makes me think that what's needed is a type system that allows constraints to be expressed between values without requiring a reference between them. I don't know what this type system looks like, though. [0]: Rust's type system is a fairly standard type system from an academic POV. The novelty is that it's the first language with traction to use a linear / affine type system, but these are relatively well studied in academia. [1]: The theory is not formulated this way, but the representation they compile into is a bunch of references. [2]: ECS, as I understand it, is not a reaction to Rust's type system but an architecture driven by memory layout, parallelism, and breaking-out-of-OO-hierarchy concerns. However the net result is the same.
999900000999 3y ago
Why can't I just donate once? I'm too stupid to use Rust, I just don't have it in me right now, but I really want to support this engine. Please add a one-time donation option!
- alice-i-cecile 3y ago
  https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy-website/issues/1097 https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy-website/issues/1097 Yep, on our wishlist and will be added :)
  - 999900000999 3y ago
    Thanks, I'll donate soon. Also this is a long shot, but any chance of supporting higher level languages. Maybe it calls the underlying Rust code from C#
    - LegibleCrimson 3y ago
      I think that's impossible. Bevy works heavily with Rust types and generic monomorphization. You couldn't do that in another language without literally generating Rust code and calling the compiler.
    - james7132 3y ago
      A scripting language is an explicit non-goal for first-party support, but there have been tools for using the ECS entirely without Rust types which can be exposed via FFI or embedded languages like Lua. Just search "_by_id" in the bevy_ecs docs, and you'll find all of the associated APIs for access. There are then (unsafe) APIs for creating the internal mappings necessary to use them. These are normally called via the monomorphized generics automatically, but need to be manually called since we don't have compile time knowledge of the data being stored and accessed.
      - 999900000999 3y ago
        So basically it's possible, but not recommended. Maybe the next time I'm on vacation I'll embrace rust...
masto 3y ago
Apparently Bevy is a game engine.
weinzierl 3y ago
I applaud the decision for a 501(c)(3) and not a 501(c)(6).
- lars_francke 3y ago
  Can you explain the difference?
  - h4ch1 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization This has complete sections defining both.
    - sph 3y ago
      A summary for people not expert in legalese and American law?
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    Not a lawyer and what I'm going to say is vastly oversimplified, but the gist is: - A 501(c)(3) is for the benefit of the public - A 501(c)(6) is for the common interests of their members They both have advantages and disadvantages and are appropriate for certain scenarios. Examples are: - A 501(c)(3) Python, Scala, Zig, Mozilla, Apache, SFC, FSF - A 501(c)(6) .NET, Rust, Eclipse
  - dcre 3y ago
    It sounds like 3 is for charities and 6 is for business organizations like a chamber of commerce. The former has tax-deductible donations and can’t participate in lobbying or political campaigns. It seems like 6 would have been a weird choice here.
    - weinzierl 3y ago
      Not so weird, the Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) after all, like the .NET Foundation or the Eclipse Foundation, but from all I know about Bevy and the people behind it a 501(c)(3) suits it much better.
ajuc 3y ago
I write a simple 2d game in bevy to learn rust and ECS. I like it a lot. I just wish it was slightly better with backward compatibility. There's many useful libraries I can't use because they depend on different bevy versions, and updating the code to new major versions is a hassle. And the bevy cheatbook has some pages refering to behavior that changed several versions earlier.
xyst 3y ago
You had me at: > game engine built in Rust I hope it succeeds and gets significant market penetration. Will donate monthly
- ajuc 3y ago
  The joke goes: "rust has 5 games and 120 game engines written in it" :)
  - timeon 3y ago
    "did you write frontend or backend in rust?" "??? No. The browser"
unsungNovelty 3y ago
The first thing I looking for was whether it is 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6). While that alone doesn't guarantee anything, it is still a good indication on the motivation of a project. Thank you Team Bevy! https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/05/2023/open-source-projects-and-non-profit-501c3-vs-non-profit-501c6/ https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/05/2023/open-source-proj...
weinzierl 3y ago
"You may notice that every member of the board is an active Bevy Maintainer. This is not a coincidence. We believe that people actually developing the project should be at the helm. There is currently no way to buy a board seat. We have no plans to hire "professional board members" that aren't in the thick of it. For now we plan to stick to the Maintainer == Board Member policy. Functionally, new Board Members are selected via an election of the current board. "Board Member" is currently not a paid position." Thank you for setting the Foundation up like this! To make this work in the long run donations are crucial: https://bevyengine.org/donate/ https://bevyengine.org/donate/
brundolf 3y ago
Does Bevy have a graphical editor yet (or one on the roadmap)? It seems like it has good bones, but taking real territory away from Unity or Godot will be hard without an editor (not just for non-programmers; some game dev tasks are just way easier with a GUI) Of course it's open so somebody could build one, but it seems to me this deserves to be a first-class citizen
- voxal 3y ago
  Bevy is working on a graphical editor, but its still in its prototyping phase. https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-13/#more-editor-experimentation https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-13/#more-editor-experimen...
- hannofcart 3y ago
  > ...taking real territory away from Unity or Godot I used to think this too. But having written a lot of hobby code using Godot (via Gdext, an excellent Rust wrapper for it) I feel the editor is a nice to have but not indispensable. Very soon into the game you'll find that you need an editor that lets you add your own game abstractions into the game. And at that point you're better off writing an editor "in game" than shoe horning your abstractions into the game engine editor. There's a bit more nuance I probably outght to the above description but too tired to type it all out on my phone now.
- pcwalton 3y ago
  There are a few third-party ones. https://github.com/rewin123/space_editor https://github.com/rewin123/space_editor is the one I use. It's not pretty, but it works well enough. Having an official editor is definitely on the roadmap.
LarsDu88 3y ago
Love where Bevy is going. On the UI/UX side it has a long way to go, but on the non-rendering backend architecture side it can beat Unity, Unreal, and Godot in the long run. Just crossing my fingers because by the time Bevy reaches that goal, compute power may have just 10x'd again, and the existing game engine giants will have added AI creation tooling by then.
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  Can't wait for the days when bug reports are closed with "don't know why this is happening, the AI did it, can't fix"
dang 3y ago
Related: Revy – proof-of-concept time-travel debugger for the Bevy game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39590683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39590683 - March 2024 (36 comments) Bevy 0.13: ECS-driven game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39412940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39412940 - Feb 2024 (59 comments) Bevy 0.12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144417 - Nov 2023 (84 comments) Three Years of Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37477971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37477971 - Sept 2023 (1 comment) Bevy's Third Birthday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081501 - Aug 2023 (6 comments) Bevy 0.11: ECS-driven game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657970 - July 2023 (29 comments) Bevy XPBD: A physics engine for the Bevy game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642867 - July 2023 (20 comments) Bevy and WebGPU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35994106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35994106 - May 2023 (40 comments) Bevy 0.10: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045224 - March 2023 (91 comments) Scaling Bevy Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387062 - Jan 2023 (20 comments) Bevy 0.9: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577284 - Nov 2022 (50 comments) Automated testing in Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32802402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32802402 - Sept 2022 (81 comments) Bevy 0.8: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32287828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32287828 - July 2022 (18 comments) Bevy 0.7: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31043668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31043668 - April 2022 (63 comments) Bevy game engine 0.6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29854416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29854416 - Jan 2022 (89 comments) Bevy's First Birthday: a year of open source Rust game engine development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28132114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28132114 - Aug 2021 (13 comments) Bevy 0.5: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26716166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26716166 - April 2021 (65 comments) Bevy: A game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131350 - Feb 2021 (117 comments) Bevy 0.4: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25480321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25480321 - Dec 2020 (23 comments) Making a Snake Clone with Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999073 - Nov 2020 (11 comments) Bevy 0.3: game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983956 - Nov 2020 (55 comments) Bevy 0.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530698 - Sept 2020 (43 comments) Bevy: A Game Engine in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334307 - Aug 2020 (42 comments) Bevy: A data-driven game engine and app framework built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123283 - Aug 2020 (103 comments)
llmblockchain 3y ago
Although Bevy says it's an engine, I think that's a bit of an overstatement. It's more of a library/framework. There's a lot you need to do from scratch. If you are looking for a more full featured game engine-- I recommend Godot. I have been using Godot lately and it's refreshing how nicely it flows and how the experience mirrors other OSes (from a Linux user's perspective). If you haven't tried Godot lately, give it a try. Plus, the whole thing is a single binary (~100mb).
- Austizzle 3y ago
  I actually recently switched a project from bevy to Godot and agree, it was really nice and easy to get started. Godot is shockingly simple and intuitive compared to something like unreal engine. Bevy was also great, but is definitely more of a library and there's not a lot of mature plugins. My use case was a web browser compatible game (wasm compiled bevy) that used websockets for networking. It didn't seem like too much of a stretch, but I didn't end up getting anywhere I wanted to be with bevy unfortunately. Hopefully as it grows it becomes a better option! But with Godot I ported my code and had it working in the browser with websockets based multiplayer shockingly fast, even having never touched gdscript before!

The Bevy Foundation

102 points by _cart 3y ago

pjmlp 3y ago

Good luck with the efforts, we need more variety in programming language landscape for game engines.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

_cart 3y ago

Bevy's creator, project lead, and now president of the Bevy Foundation here. Feel free to ask me anything!

rahkiin 3y ago
How does it feel to have a small project where you are the only programmer turn into such an organization which asks very different things from you?
- _cart 3y ago
  It has certainly been a wild ride. Running an organization is certainly a different skill set. I've learned that I'm pretty good at that side too, but it drains me in a way that programming does not. Bevy's success has definitely been a mixed bag for me. It has been extremely fulfilling and a dream come true. But things were also much simpler, calmer, and pleasant when I was building Bevy alone incognito.
tekacs 3y ago
Nothing to ask right now, just -- thank for your (and Alice's) work! The (non-game) things that I do would be infinitely more painful without Bevy ECS, so I sponsored personally at Diamond for now. Very excited for relations and I'm hoping that the Bevy Foundation can attract the support it's looking for (and I'll switch over to corporate in a few months if things don't go unexpectedly sideways with my company). :)

alice-i-cecile 3y ago

Hi! I'm the fabled "project manager" that we'd like to hire! Helping run Bevy has been an incredible experience, and I'm very excited about the idea of being able to do this full-time. There are a ton of efforts I'd like to lead, and even more that I'd like to be able to help nudge along.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Any plan for Physics? There is no mention on front page of the website. When do the team think the would be comfortable telling people they can build and release game on it?
- alice-i-cecile 3y ago
  Physics is 3rd party currently, but it's on our roadmap for "some day, definitely". Writing your own physics engine is... a lot of work, and not something that I'm excited to volunteer the engine itself for immediately. There are two popular physics engines used in Bevy today: Rapier[0] and bevy_xpbd[1]. Both are candidates for upstreaming, but both have their own challenges. I've spent some time working with each of the authors recently, laying out my concerns and thoughts. On the Rapier side, the documentation is sparse and aggressively mathematical, it uses a distinct math library from the rest of Bevy, the API to work with Bevy is sometimes clunky and unidiomatic, and it can be quite hard to figure out how to do Ordinary Game Dev Things with it. On the bevy_xpbd side, the performance is subpar, there can be physical stability issues, it's generally immature, and the XPBD solver that they use is, unbeknownst to the young author at the time of the crate's creation, patented by NVIDIA [2] :( Both of them are working to improve (and I'm very pleased to see that even independent of this discussion), but neither is ready for imminent official endorsement or integration. One day we'll have a Blessed Choice though. As for telling people "go forth and build your game!": things are stabilizing, and key functionality gaps are gradually getting filled. I have a terrible tendency to be overly honest, even in my marketing text, so there's going to be a long period of time where the actual answer is "it depends on what you're making". Today, if you're building a weird game-adjacent bit of software (think CAD) for desktop platforms: totally ready! There are several very happy companies doing that. If you wanna mess around with Rust and nurse the Next Great Solo Dev Science-Based MMORPG Voxel Game: you'll have a blast, and it won't affect your chance of shipping a whit. If you want to build a simulation-y desktop game with lots of procedural generation and complex logic: honestly probably a good fit. You'll hit bugs and limitations, but you will in every other engine you use so... If you want to ship high-performance web games, AAA graphics or mobile: eh, probably doable but dicey. If you want to ship to console: uh we'll find out if we can jump through all of the hoops and convince the right people to get Rust on console before the Steam Deck knockoffs devour the market (please!). These will all slowly change, but an answer for "is it ready" will be hard to pin me down on until it's a full-fledged competitor to Unity, Unreal and Godot. [0]: https://rapier.rs/docs/ https://rapier.rs/docs/ [1]: https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd [2]: https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd/issues/346 https://github.com/Jondolf/bevy_xpbd/issues/346

OtomotO 3y ago

Any particular reason these 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity designations are no longer granted as freely as before?

alice-i-cecile 3y ago
From what we could tell, not really! It seems like a slow policy change, basically dictated at the level of the individual bureaucrat. That said, the Zig Foundation got status in 2020, and the Amethyst Foundation (another Rust gamedev group) also got status recently, so we figured it was worth it to apply since we really do feel like it's the best-fitting designation for how we want to run things and what we want to do.

CooCooCaCha 3y ago

Great news!

Woshiwuja 3y ago

Bevy is great!

29athrowaway 3y ago

If you are trying Bevy for the first time, and it runs slow, put this on your Cargo.toml [profile.dev.package."*"] opt-level = 3

diggan 3y ago
This + more is described if you follow the Quickstart, which if it's your first time, is probably the best place to get started quickly :) https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/getting-started/setup/ https://bevyengine.org/learn/quick-start/getting-started/set...
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Yes. But when I tried the tutorials, the performance issue was an instant turn down. With this, the frame rate immediately went from 13 fps to 60 fps.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    The curse of "zero cost abstraction" strikes again :/ A 5x performance difference between debug and release mode isn't uncommon in C++ either and a real problem for game development (plus the slow build times, but those two problems go hand in hand - you can have "high-level abstractions" that build slowly and run fast, or build fast and run slowly). That's why there's so much advice to write C-like C++ and also ignore the stdlib in gamedev circles. The Rust equivalent is probably to write "embedded style Rust".
    - kookamamie 3y ago
      Debug mode isn't always needed, though - E.g. C++ with RelWithDebInfo gets you far enough, unless you specifically want to run debugger - I'm one of those who do not use a debugger in their workflow, so a non-issue for me.
      - flohofwoe 3y ago

ramon156 3y ago

Loved bevy since the reddit post (i think that was even pre 0.1). It's a bummer I was in the middle of learning rust, so I wasn't of much help. Would've loved to contribute

BD103 3y ago
Don't worry, you still can! I've been actively contributing to the past 4 months, working on improving CI and the website. I started out doing PRs for typos and little improvements, and so can you! (I recommend looking for issues marked as "Good-First-Issue," they are the best entry-level things to work on.)
Cilvic 3y ago
Which post?

lyu07282 3y ago

I hope this will one day become as large and productive as the Blender Foundation

noelwelsh 3y ago

I've been using Bevy recently so here are some thoughts on this: Firstly, the overall quality is high and seeing this attention being paid to the project's organization is another good sign. Documentation is not great. The Bevy book runs out of content very quickly. The "Cheat Book" has additional useful information: https://bevy-cheatbook.github.io/ https://bevy-cheatbook.github.io/. With these plus the examples I've been able to figure out everything I need, but it's slow going. I'm not 100% sold on ECS. It loses a lot of type safety and there doesn't seem to be any way to ensure cleanup of entities and their components.

ioasuncvinvaer 3y ago
How does it lose type safety? I was under the impression that bevy's Query system is type safe.
- noelwelsh 3y ago
  ECS is basically a very simple relational database. There is no equivalent of foreign keys or other constraints between components. I can't say, for example, "every entity that has a location must also have an associated mesh". If I forget to add a component it's just a silent failure. Everything runs fine, just the expected result doesn't happen.
  - suby 3y ago
    You can probably write runtime tests for this. Some system which queries for component Location, and then does an assert for each component that the associated entity also has a mesh. Granted, this is annoying and not a particularly great solution, but it would serve to give you a reminder for when you forget. I don't mean to diminish from your overall point either, it's a valid and good one I think.
    - noelwelsh 3y ago
      Yeah, runtime checks are not very desirable. I have this vague thought that Rust needs a different kind of type system. Standard type systems[0] basically rely on references between values[1]. I seem to read about numerous Rust systems that don't use references for various reasons. Usually the borrow checker gets in the way or they want a different memory layout[2]. This makes me think that what's needed is a type system that allows constraints to be expressed between values without requiring a reference between them. I don't know what this type system looks like, though. [0]: Rust's type system is a fairly standard type system from an academic POV. The novelty is that it's the first language with traction to use a linear / affine type system, but these are relatively well studied in academia. [1]: The theory is not formulated this way, but the representation they compile into is a bunch of references. [2]: ECS, as I understand it, is not a reaction to Rust's type system but an architecture driven by memory layout, parallelism, and breaking-out-of-OO-hierarchy concerns. However the net result is the same.

999900000999 3y ago

Why can't I just donate once? I'm too stupid to use Rust, I just don't have it in me right now, but I really want to support this engine. Please add a one-time donation option!

alice-i-cecile 3y ago
https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy-website/issues/1097 https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy-website/issues/1097 Yep, on our wishlist and will be added :)
- 999900000999 3y ago
  Thanks, I'll donate soon. Also this is a long shot, but any chance of supporting higher level languages. Maybe it calls the underlying Rust code from C#
  - LegibleCrimson 3y ago
    I think that's impossible. Bevy works heavily with Rust types and generic monomorphization. You couldn't do that in another language without literally generating Rust code and calling the compiler.
  - james7132 3y ago
    A scripting language is an explicit non-goal for first-party support, but there have been tools for using the ECS entirely without Rust types which can be exposed via FFI or embedded languages like Lua. Just search "_by_id" in the bevy_ecs docs, and you'll find all of the associated APIs for access. There are then (unsafe) APIs for creating the internal mappings necessary to use them. These are normally called via the monomorphized generics automatically, but need to be manually called since we don't have compile time knowledge of the data being stored and accessed.
    - 999900000999 3y ago
      So basically it's possible, but not recommended. Maybe the next time I'm on vacation I'll embrace rust...

masto 3y ago

Apparently Bevy is a game engine.

weinzierl 3y ago

I applaud the decision for a 501(c)(3) and not a 501(c)(6).

lars_francke 3y ago
Can you explain the difference?
- h4ch1 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization This has complete sections defining both.
  - sph 3y ago
    A summary for people not expert in legalese and American law?
- weinzierl 3y ago
  Not a lawyer and what I'm going to say is vastly oversimplified, but the gist is: - A 501(c)(3) is for the benefit of the public - A 501(c)(6) is for the common interests of their members They both have advantages and disadvantages and are appropriate for certain scenarios. Examples are: - A 501(c)(3) Python, Scala, Zig, Mozilla, Apache, SFC, FSF - A 501(c)(6) .NET, Rust, Eclipse
- dcre 3y ago
  It sounds like 3 is for charities and 6 is for business organizations like a chamber of commerce. The former has tax-deductible donations and can’t participate in lobbying or political campaigns. It seems like 6 would have been a weird choice here.
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    Not so weird, the Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) after all, like the .NET Foundation or the Eclipse Foundation, but from all I know about Bevy and the people behind it a 501(c)(3) suits it much better.

ajuc 3y ago

I write a simple 2d game in bevy to learn rust and ECS. I like it a lot. I just wish it was slightly better with backward compatibility. There's many useful libraries I can't use because they depend on different bevy versions, and updating the code to new major versions is a hassle. And the bevy cheatbook has some pages refering to behavior that changed several versions earlier.

xyst 3y ago

You had me at: > game engine built in Rust I hope it succeeds and gets significant market penetration. Will donate monthly

ajuc 3y ago
The joke goes: "rust has 5 games and 120 game engines written in it" :)
- timeon 3y ago
  "did you write frontend or backend in rust?" "??? No. The browser"

unsungNovelty 3y ago

The first thing I looking for was whether it is 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6). While that alone doesn't guarantee anything, it is still a good indication on the motivation of a project. Thank you Team Bevy! https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/05/2023/open-source-projects-and-non-profit-501c3-vs-non-profit-501c6/ https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/05/2023/open-source-proj...

weinzierl 3y ago

"You may notice that every member of the board is an active Bevy Maintainer. This is not a coincidence. We believe that people actually developing the project should be at the helm. There is currently no way to buy a board seat. We have no plans to hire "professional board members" that aren't in the thick of it. For now we plan to stick to the Maintainer == Board Member policy. Functionally, new Board Members are selected via an election of the current board. "Board Member" is currently not a paid position." Thank you for setting the Foundation up like this! To make this work in the long run donations are crucial: https://bevyengine.org/donate/ https://bevyengine.org/donate/

brundolf 3y ago

Does Bevy have a graphical editor yet (or one on the roadmap)? It seems like it has good bones, but taking real territory away from Unity or Godot will be hard without an editor (not just for non-programmers; some game dev tasks are just way easier with a GUI) Of course it's open so somebody could build one, but it seems to me this deserves to be a first-class citizen

voxal 3y ago
Bevy is working on a graphical editor, but its still in its prototyping phase. https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-13/#more-editor-experimentation https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-0-13/#more-editor-experimen...
hannofcart 3y ago
> ...taking real territory away from Unity or Godot I used to think this too. But having written a lot of hobby code using Godot (via Gdext, an excellent Rust wrapper for it) I feel the editor is a nice to have but not indispensable. Very soon into the game you'll find that you need an editor that lets you add your own game abstractions into the game. And at that point you're better off writing an editor "in game" than shoe horning your abstractions into the game engine editor. There's a bit more nuance I probably outght to the above description but too tired to type it all out on my phone now.
pcwalton 3y ago
There are a few third-party ones. https://github.com/rewin123/space_editor https://github.com/rewin123/space_editor is the one I use. It's not pretty, but it works well enough. Having an official editor is definitely on the roadmap.

LarsDu88 3y ago

Love where Bevy is going. On the UI/UX side it has a long way to go, but on the non-rendering backend architecture side it can beat Unity, Unreal, and Godot in the long run. Just crossing my fingers because by the time Bevy reaches that goal, compute power may have just 10x'd again, and the existing game engine giants will have added AI creation tooling by then.

mostlysimilar 3y ago
Can't wait for the days when bug reports are closed with "don't know why this is happening, the AI did it, can't fix"

dang 3y ago

Related: Revy – proof-of-concept time-travel debugger for the Bevy game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39590683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39590683 - March 2024 (36 comments) Bevy 0.13: ECS-driven game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39412940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39412940 - Feb 2024 (59 comments) Bevy 0.12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144417 - Nov 2023 (84 comments) Three Years of Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37477971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37477971 - Sept 2023 (1 comment) Bevy's Third Birthday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081501 - Aug 2023 (6 comments) Bevy 0.11: ECS-driven game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657970 - July 2023 (29 comments) Bevy XPBD: A physics engine for the Bevy game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642867 - July 2023 (20 comments) Bevy and WebGPU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35994106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35994106 - May 2023 (40 comments) Bevy 0.10: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045224 - March 2023 (91 comments) Scaling Bevy Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387062 - Jan 2023 (20 comments) Bevy 0.9: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577284 - Nov 2022 (50 comments) Automated testing in Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32802402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32802402 - Sept 2022 (81 comments) Bevy 0.8: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32287828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32287828 - July 2022 (18 comments) Bevy 0.7: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31043668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31043668 - April 2022 (63 comments) Bevy game engine 0.6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29854416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29854416 - Jan 2022 (89 comments) Bevy's First Birthday: a year of open source Rust game engine development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28132114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28132114 - Aug 2021 (13 comments) Bevy 0.5: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26716166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26716166 - April 2021 (65 comments) Bevy: A game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131350 - Feb 2021 (117 comments) Bevy 0.4: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25480321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25480321 - Dec 2020 (23 comments) Making a Snake Clone with Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999073 - Nov 2020 (11 comments) Bevy 0.3: game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983956 - Nov 2020 (55 comments) Bevy 0.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530698 - Sept 2020 (43 comments) Bevy: A Game Engine in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334307 - Aug 2020 (42 comments) Bevy: A data-driven game engine and app framework built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123283 - Aug 2020 (103 comments)

llmblockchain 3y ago

Although Bevy says it's an engine, I think that's a bit of an overstatement. It's more of a library/framework. There's a lot you need to do from scratch. If you are looking for a more full featured game engine-- I recommend Godot. I have been using Godot lately and it's refreshing how nicely it flows and how the experience mirrors other OSes (from a Linux user's perspective). If you haven't tried Godot lately, give it a try. Plus, the whole thing is a single binary (~100mb).

Austizzle 3y ago
I actually recently switched a project from bevy to Godot and agree, it was really nice and easy to get started. Godot is shockingly simple and intuitive compared to something like unreal engine. Bevy was also great, but is definitely more of a library and there's not a lot of mature plugins. My use case was a web browser compatible game (wasm compiled bevy) that used websockets for networking. It didn't seem like too much of a stretch, but I didn't end up getting anywhere I wanted to be with bevy unfortunately. Hopefully as it grows it becomes a better option! But with Godot I ported my code and had it working in the browser with websockets based multiplayer shockingly fast, even having never touched gdscript before!