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Contributor here: there's so much cool stuff in this release. I was personally most involved in improving the docs, the reliable change detection work (you can

Contributor here: there's so much cool stuff in this release. I was personally most involved in improving the docs, the reliable change detection work (you can now detect changes no matter when your system runs, even skipping arbitrary numbers of frames), and a great deal of the other ECS work. AMA if you have any questions or requests ;) I'm particularly curious about "I'd like to use Bevy but..." stories.

anchpop 6y ago
Thank you for your contributions! I'm most excited about labeled run criteria and the other ECS improvements. For those not following along, the goal is to eventually implement statecharts [0], which are kind of a generalization of finite state machines that are more practical for specifying the behavior of complex systems. I think that's going to really put Bevy's ECS above most of the competition and push the field forward. [0]: https://statecharts.github.io/ https://statecharts.github.io/
kodablah 6y ago
> I'm particularly curious about "I'd like to use Bevy but..." stories. I am a game dev novice, but the concept I am wanting to develop requires mesh loading (fbx/dae), animation/skeleton/bone loading, and custom bone manipulation. Granted Bevy does seem to have the physics I need via the rapier plugin. I have been working with Godot to achieve my PoC, but would love to use Bevy instead. I admit to not keeping up with the current state of these features.
- alice-i-cecile 6y ago
  Thanks for chiming in :) Animation is a common request, and definitely still not-very-usable. Thanks to the work of lassade, our resident animation expert, I expect we should have basic animation in place for 0.6. For skeletal animation in particular, they've been prototyping with a crate of their own [0] to hook into Bevy that seems like an excellent proof-of-concept. 0: https://github.com/lassade/bevy_spine https://github.com/lassade/bevy_spine
hn8788 6y ago
I've been using Godot for some small gamedev projects, but have been interested in Bevy because Rust is my primary language. The Bevy Book stil says that Godot should be picked for any big projects; is there a rough estimate of when Bevy would be at a point where you'd be confident recommending it for a Next Big Project™? I know timelines can be tough to nail down, but even something like "a very long time" or "a couple of years" would be helpful. Thanks for your work btw :)
- alice-i-cecile 6y ago
  Depends on your iteration speed, exact needs, and willingness to work on engine development. Personally, I'm building my turn-based tactical RPG in it, which is absolutely a Big Project, but I'm not planning to release for a year or two, don't need complex 3D features and am devoting half of my effort to engine dev. For single-player games that aren't very asset-heavy, I would say 3 months or so for UI to stabilize is a safe point to start work. For games that have complex animation or sound needs, require networking or want to use a ready-to-use physics library, I'd estimate about 2 years from now. If you're trying to build a game with very-little coding (and want something comparable to Unity or Godot), "a very long time" :)
  - kibwen 6y ago
    Off-topic, but is your game open source? I'd love to see more examples of Bevy being used in the wild.
    - alice-i-cecile 6y ago
      Source-available for now, we're still sorting out the exact licensing strategy. The Bevy code itself isn't very impressive at all yet; most of the work at the moment is on improving the engine and solving some of the remaining design challenges. We're currently blocked on "clone-able entities" (and ideally "indexes"), and I'm working on an RFC for each of those. Source: https://github.com/leafwing-studios/fop-game https://github.com/leafwing-studios/fop-game Rules / design doc: https://rules.fontsofpower.com/#/ https://rules.fontsofpower.com/#/
beatothewitch 6y ago
I'm a novice game dev and I'm currently using Godot so i'd like to use Bevy but i'm waiting for an editor UI. What's the roadmap looking like for that?
- alice-i-cecile 6y ago
  Great question; it's hotly awaited by a lot of the community. Rough (and very unofficial) road-map is looking like: 1. 0.6 (June 2021): First-class ECS-integrated UI solution is architected and released. Asset management, animation and scenes are improved. Plugin architecture and data-driven workflows get a closer look. 2. 0.7 (August 2021): Editor MVP launches as a separate application built in Bevy, focusing on supplementing code-first Bevy workflows with things like property inspectors, scene management, system visualization and so on. Once that's launched, I expect that we'll be working on making Bevy more usable through the editor for low-code users, although the goal is to ensure that pure-code (and pure Rust) Bevy games have feature parity with anything you can do in the editor.
lazybean 6y ago
I really liked your (now abandonned) understanding-bevy book. So I'm so glad you are involved in improving the docs!

anchpop 6y ago

Thank you for your contributions! I'm most excited about labeled run criteria and the other ECS improvements. For those not following along, the goal is to eventually implement statecharts [0], which are kind of a generalization of finite state machines that are more practical for specifying the behavior of complex systems. I think that's going to really put Bevy's ECS above most of the competition and push the field forward. [0]: https://statecharts.github.io/ https://statecharts.github.io/

kodablah 6y ago

> I'm particularly curious about "I'd like to use Bevy but..." stories. I am a game dev novice, but the concept I am wanting to develop requires mesh loading (fbx/dae), animation/skeleton/bone loading, and custom bone manipulation. Granted Bevy does seem to have the physics I need via the rapier plugin. I have been working with Godot to achieve my PoC, but would love to use Bevy instead. I admit to not keeping up with the current state of these features.

alice-i-cecile 6y ago
Thanks for chiming in :) Animation is a common request, and definitely still not-very-usable. Thanks to the work of lassade, our resident animation expert, I expect we should have basic animation in place for 0.6. For skeletal animation in particular, they've been prototyping with a crate of their own [0] to hook into Bevy that seems like an excellent proof-of-concept. 0: https://github.com/lassade/bevy_spine https://github.com/lassade/bevy_spine

hn8788 6y ago

I've been using Godot for some small gamedev projects, but have been interested in Bevy because Rust is my primary language. The Bevy Book stil says that Godot should be picked for any big projects; is there a rough estimate of when Bevy would be at a point where you'd be confident recommending it for a Next Big Project™? I know timelines can be tough to nail down, but even something like "a very long time" or "a couple of years" would be helpful. Thanks for your work btw :)

alice-i-cecile 6y ago
Depends on your iteration speed, exact needs, and willingness to work on engine development. Personally, I'm building my turn-based tactical RPG in it, which is absolutely a Big Project, but I'm not planning to release for a year or two, don't need complex 3D features and am devoting half of my effort to engine dev. For single-player games that aren't very asset-heavy, I would say 3 months or so for UI to stabilize is a safe point to start work. For games that have complex animation or sound needs, require networking or want to use a ready-to-use physics library, I'd estimate about 2 years from now. If you're trying to build a game with very-little coding (and want something comparable to Unity or Godot), "a very long time" :)
- kibwen 6y ago
  Off-topic, but is your game open source? I'd love to see more examples of Bevy being used in the wild.
  - alice-i-cecile 6y ago
    Source-available for now, we're still sorting out the exact licensing strategy. The Bevy code itself isn't very impressive at all yet; most of the work at the moment is on improving the engine and solving some of the remaining design challenges. We're currently blocked on "clone-able entities" (and ideally "indexes"), and I'm working on an RFC for each of those. Source: https://github.com/leafwing-studios/fop-game https://github.com/leafwing-studios/fop-game Rules / design doc: https://rules.fontsofpower.com/#/ https://rules.fontsofpower.com/#/

beatothewitch 6y ago

I'm a novice game dev and I'm currently using Godot so i'd like to use Bevy but i'm waiting for an editor UI. What's the roadmap looking like for that?

alice-i-cecile 6y ago
Great question; it's hotly awaited by a lot of the community. Rough (and very unofficial) road-map is looking like: 1. 0.6 (June 2021): First-class ECS-integrated UI solution is architected and released. Asset management, animation and scenes are improved. Plugin architecture and data-driven workflows get a closer look. 2. 0.7 (August 2021): Editor MVP launches as a separate application built in Bevy, focusing on supplementing code-first Bevy workflows with things like property inspectors, scene management, system visualization and so on. Once that's launched, I expect that we'll be working on making Bevy more usable through the editor for low-code users, although the goal is to ensure that pure-code (and pure Rust) Bevy games have feature parity with anything you can do in the editor.

lazybean 6y ago

I really liked your (now abandonned) understanding-bevy book. So I'm so glad you are involved in improving the docs!