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I didn’t know Godot supported Rust. How has the experience been? Have you tried any other game engines?

by ra1n85 7y ago

gridspy 7y ago
Really positive, since I love Rust very very much. It's great to have modern conveniences but insanely fast and safe. I switch between developing a pure simulation framework and working in Godot. The sim is 100% rust and then I have another crate which binds with Godot. There I can concentrate on updating the scene tree based on the simulation. Since only the simulation needs to be synchronized for multiplayer I expect this will work better long term. I use these opensource bindings https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-rust https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-rust - Godot supports dynamically loading your game code in a DLL - Called "GDNative" - so you can use any compiled language. For an old discussion of my Godot pros/cons see this post on Reddit. The community stepped forward and was very supportive, so I have decided to stay. https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/ch1xsx/i_might_switch_to_unity3d_heres_why/ https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/ch1xsx/i_might_switc... I have also tried unity, I wrote a Rust chess AI against it for the "four kings one war" variant. My experience with Rust in Unity was more painful. For instance you need to restart the unity editor to reload the DLL. It crashes painfully often. Loading and switching targets can be very slow, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/c0e5yf/i_created_a_rust_chess_ai_for_16x16_variant_4k1w/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/c0e5yf/i_created_a_ru... However, the Unity game itself works very well now and the rust story was very very good. Building on Mac after building on PC was trivial - it just worked. Setting up a new dev machine was just checkout, rustup, cargo test - it just worked. Getting things to look nice in Godot is trivial. I really just set up basic lighting, ticked some boxes and imported some basic meshes from Blender. I'm only getting started and I think my screenshots look quite nice :D
- robterrell 7y ago
  Did you try doing your Rust dev on Mac? I've built Unity plugins in Rust and have been able to load and unload them without crashes, but I've only tried on a Mac.
  - gridspy 7y ago
    It is possible that the choice of Unity version was a factor here. We were using quite an old version of Unity. It might also be because I was loading the DLL "manually" from C# - a fully fledged plugin might work better.
- gridspy 7y ago
  UPDATE: This inspired me to finally write something more long-form: https://medium.com/@recallsingularity/how-i-use-rust-and-godot-to-explore-space-806bb810e950 https://medium.com/@recallsingularity/how-i-use-rust-and-god...
  - canadaduane 7y ago
    It's great to see these technologies coming together. Thanks for writing this!
  - alexanderdmitri 7y ago
    Great write up, now I'm inspired!
    - gridspy 7y ago
      Horay! All it takes is a few hours every few days. You'll look back and say -- Wow! I made that!

I didn’t know Godot supported Rust. How has the experience been? Have you tried any other game engines?

by ra1n85 7y ago

I didn’t know Godot supported Rust. How has the experience been? Have you tried any other game engines?

Really positive, since I love Rust very very much. It's great to have modern conveniences but insanely fast and safe. I switch between developing a pure simulation framework and working in Godot. The sim is 100% rust and then I have another crate which binds with Godot. There I can concentrate on updating the scene tree based on the simulation. Since only the simulation needs to be synchronized for multiplayer I expect this will work better long term. I use these opensource bindings https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-rust https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-rust - Godot supports dynamically loading your game code in a DLL - Called "GDNative" - so you can use any compiled language. For an old discussion of my Godot pros/cons see this post on Reddit. The community stepped forward and was very supportive, so I have decided to stay. https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/ch1xsx/i_might_switch_to_unity3d_heres_why/ https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/ch1xsx/i_might_switc... I have also tried unity, I wrote a Rust chess AI against it for the "four kings one war" variant. My experience with Rust in Unity was more painful. For instance you need to restart the unity editor to reload the DLL. It crashes painfully often. Loading and switching targets can be very slow, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/c0e5yf/i_created_a_rust_chess_ai_for_16x16_variant_4k1w/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/c0e5yf/i_created_a_ru... However, the Unity game itself works very well now and the rust story was very very good. Building on Mac after building on PC was trivial - it just worked. Setting up a new dev machine was just checkout, rustup, cargo test - it just worked. Getting things to look nice in Godot is trivial. I really just set up basic lighting, ticked some boxes and imported some basic meshes from Blender. I'm only getting started and I think my screenshots look quite nice :D

robterrell 7y ago
Did you try doing your Rust dev on Mac? I've built Unity plugins in Rust and have been able to load and unload them without crashes, but I've only tried on a Mac.
- gridspy 7y ago
  It is possible that the choice of Unity version was a factor here. We were using quite an old version of Unity. It might also be because I was loading the DLL "manually" from C# - a fully fledged plugin might work better.
gridspy 7y ago
UPDATE: This inspired me to finally write something more long-form: https://medium.com/@recallsingularity/how-i-use-rust-and-godot-to-explore-space-806bb810e950 https://medium.com/@recallsingularity/how-i-use-rust-and-god...
- canadaduane 7y ago
  It's great to see these technologies coming together. Thanks for writing this!
- alexanderdmitri 7y ago
  Great write up, now I'm inspired!
  - gridspy 7y ago
    Horay! All it takes is a few hours every few days. You'll look back and say -- Wow! I made that!