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Oh! I have so much to ask you but feel so ill prepared! I literally have the Bevvy website open-and-pinned in my browser at the moment. I have never written in

Oh! I have so much to ask you but feel so ill prepared! I literally have the Bevvy website open-and-pinned in my browser at the moment. I have never written in Rust or built a serious game, but have 10+ years programming experience and have worked heavily in frameworkless canvas/webgl rendering. I've become very used to declarative programming after sinking my teeth into React. As I start to learn more about game programming I've realized that almost all engines expect an imperative approach. Recently, started poking at game engines trying to find something reasonable. I thought I'd start with PixiJS + react-pixi (not a full engine, I know), but found my FPS getting absolutely crushed trying to run a simulation game through React's reconciler. Code was simple to reason about, though! I started to feel like I was forcing a round peg through a square hole by doubling-down on React frameworks to interface with WebGL. So, I'm abandoning that approach and looking for other options that don't push me towards a fully imperative approach. Bevvy is, by an incredibly large margin, what I am most interested in using. If there were even vague notions of having a stable API in the next year I'd start building now, but I am trying to be respectful of the message on your website, "If you are currently trying to pick an engine for your Next Big Project™, we recommend that you check out Godot Engine. " Do you have any estimations on when you might reach 1.0? Do you have guidance on which areas you feel are most stable and/or experimental? If I'm a noob with game development am I likely to challenge Bevvy in ways that I'd regret as the interface changes or is it too early to tell? What trade-offs are you making in building Bevvy that would cause someone to choose Godot over your long-term vision? Are there any concerns specific to Bevvy around compiling its output to WASM? I assume not, but might as well ask.

alice-i-cecile 4y ago
So, I'm currently part of a team making a Real Commercial Video Game in Bevy. The stability issues aren't bad: it's half a day of work fixing compiler errors every 3 months, even on a massive project. The Rust compiler (and tests!) make it way easier, and ecosystem crates are pretty good about updating (and will often merge PRs to do so, even if the author isn't super active). I would expect 1.0 in two to three years, but of course, that's not a promise. Missing features are definitely the larger challenge still: animation is crude, there's no editor yet (but `bevy_inspector_egui` rocks), UI is very heavy on boilerplate and needs widgets. But the ability to rapidly prototype and refactor rock-solid, high performance gameplay code simply can't be matched. Rust's type system makes writing robust code easy and Bevy's ECS nearly eliminates data plumbing nuisances. > What trade-offs are you making in building Bevvy that would cause someone to choose Godot over your long-term vision? Even in the long-term, I would choose Godot if you're looking for a more traditional, editor-driven approach. Bevy is likely to prioritize code over nodes for gameplay purposes, and you really want anyone implementing game designs to have some Rust (it's not that bad when working in an established framework!). > Are there any concerns specific to Bevvy around compiling its output to WASM? I assume not, but might as well ask. Bevy generally works quite well on WASM [0], but there's some frustrations. Audio has weirdness at startup, there are random compiler issues, some graphics APIs are unavailable, and of course, parallelism is still very limited. Steadily improving, but most of that work is being done upstream from us. [0]: https://itch.io/jam/bevy-jam-2 https://itch.io/jam/bevy-jam-2
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  Awesome! Thank you for the thoughtful response. It's really encouraging to hear that a RCVG™ is building using Bevy and happy with it! I'll start playing this weekend based on that feedback. I am not super interested in an editor-driven approach at the moment, but perhaps I'll regret that as the project grows in complexity. Thanks for the specific remarks on WASM, Animation FX, etc. I'll be happy with those problems if I can get my project to the point of experiencing them. Good luck on your project! Let me know when it's out and I'll give it a spin :)
nextaccountic 4y ago
It's called Bevy and not Bevvy

alice-i-cecile 4y ago

So, I'm currently part of a team making a Real Commercial Video Game in Bevy. The stability issues aren't bad: it's half a day of work fixing compiler errors every 3 months, even on a massive project. The Rust compiler (and tests!) make it way easier, and ecosystem crates are pretty good about updating (and will often merge PRs to do so, even if the author isn't super active). I would expect 1.0 in two to three years, but of course, that's not a promise. Missing features are definitely the larger challenge still: animation is crude, there's no editor yet (but `bevy_inspector_egui` rocks), UI is very heavy on boilerplate and needs widgets. But the ability to rapidly prototype and refactor rock-solid, high performance gameplay code simply can't be matched. Rust's type system makes writing robust code easy and Bevy's ECS nearly eliminates data plumbing nuisances. > What trade-offs are you making in building Bevvy that would cause someone to choose Godot over your long-term vision? Even in the long-term, I would choose Godot if you're looking for a more traditional, editor-driven approach. Bevy is likely to prioritize code over nodes for gameplay purposes, and you really want anyone implementing game designs to have some Rust (it's not that bad when working in an established framework!). > Are there any concerns specific to Bevvy around compiling its output to WASM? I assume not, but might as well ask. Bevy generally works quite well on WASM [0], but there's some frustrations. Audio has weirdness at startup, there are random compiler issues, some graphics APIs are unavailable, and of course, parallelism is still very limited. Steadily improving, but most of that work is being done upstream from us. [0]: https://itch.io/jam/bevy-jam-2 https://itch.io/jam/bevy-jam-2

SeanAnderson 4y ago
Awesome! Thank you for the thoughtful response. It's really encouraging to hear that a RCVG™ is building using Bevy and happy with it! I'll start playing this weekend based on that feedback. I am not super interested in an editor-driven approach at the moment, but perhaps I'll regret that as the project grows in complexity. Thanks for the specific remarks on WASM, Animation FX, etc. I'll be happy with those problems if I can get my project to the point of experiencing them. Good luck on your project! Let me know when it's out and I'll give it a spin :)

nextaccountic 4y ago

It's called Bevy and not Bevvy