4 ms·

The context matters entirely. Is the person looking to choose an engine a hobbyist, hopeful indie, tech lead for a team? Is the project content driven or very

The context matters entirely. Is the person looking to choose an engine a hobbyist, hopeful indie, tech lead for a team? Is the project content driven or very procedural? What’s the timeline? Are there resources to dedicate to significant tooling, or handling cross-platform insanity? List goes on of course. But my highly opinionated answer to your question is the only people using a rust game engine are hobbyists and hopeful indies who aren’t on a time crunch.

saghm 4y ago
Maybe that's a feature and not a bug? From what I understand, crunch is supposed to be one of the worst parts of professional game development. If the argument is that Rust forces you to handle all of the edge cases up front and requires more development time to fix a poorly chosen design after the fact, I'd argue that those sound like things that would both technically and socially incentivize not relying on last minute crunch to get a game released. If Rust is widely known to be ineffective when used in a time crunch, seeing that a company chose to develop a game with Rust despite that might be a positive sign about what type of development culture they have.
- noduerme 4y ago
  I don't know enough about Rust development, but definitely agree that it's a good sign to see a culture that pays attention to potential future issues early in development. On the other hand, if an approach leads to constant tear-downs early on, it opens up the risk of runaway refactoring before you have a playable demo. I feel like "Crunch" is sort of baked into a certain business model anyway, and the type of management that relies on it would probably find other ways of creating aggressive and unachievable last minute goals.
- hesdeadjim 4y ago
  Poor word choice on my part, I did not mean 'crunch' in the traditional game development sense. I meant that a hopeful indie who doesn't have a timeline to worry about and can work at their leisure.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  > ...crunch vs Rust... Crunch is a management problem, programming language details won't help in this regard (and the entire role of programming languages in game development seem way overblown in the comments here anyway - you pick an engine mainly for the artist workflows it provides, and then use whatever programming language that engine supports best).
- cardanome 4y ago
  Game dev is highly iterative. Chances are the code you wrote will get deleted or rewritten anyway so forcing you to handle potential edge cases means forcing you to waste time. I think Rust can play a similar role as C++ in driving the actual game engine code which is more static but I don't think writing the actual game logic in it plays to its strength. For that more dynamic languages with faster iteration times shine. As for crunch time, that is a organizational problem, there will be not technical fix for that.

saghm 4y ago

Maybe that's a feature and not a bug? From what I understand, crunch is supposed to be one of the worst parts of professional game development. If the argument is that Rust forces you to handle all of the edge cases up front and requires more development time to fix a poorly chosen design after the fact, I'd argue that those sound like things that would both technically and socially incentivize not relying on last minute crunch to get a game released. If Rust is widely known to be ineffective when used in a time crunch, seeing that a company chose to develop a game with Rust despite that might be a positive sign about what type of development culture they have.

noduerme 4y ago
I don't know enough about Rust development, but definitely agree that it's a good sign to see a culture that pays attention to potential future issues early in development. On the other hand, if an approach leads to constant tear-downs early on, it opens up the risk of runaway refactoring before you have a playable demo. I feel like "Crunch" is sort of baked into a certain business model anyway, and the type of management that relies on it would probably find other ways of creating aggressive and unachievable last minute goals.
hesdeadjim 4y ago
Poor word choice on my part, I did not mean 'crunch' in the traditional game development sense. I meant that a hopeful indie who doesn't have a timeline to worry about and can work at their leisure.
flohofwoe 4y ago
> ...crunch vs Rust... Crunch is a management problem, programming language details won't help in this regard (and the entire role of programming languages in game development seem way overblown in the comments here anyway - you pick an engine mainly for the artist workflows it provides, and then use whatever programming language that engine supports best).
cardanome 4y ago
Game dev is highly iterative. Chances are the code you wrote will get deleted or rewritten anyway so forcing you to handle potential edge cases means forcing you to waste time. I think Rust can play a similar role as C++ in driving the actual game engine code which is more static but I don't think writing the actual game logic in it plays to its strength. For that more dynamic languages with faster iteration times shine. As for crunch time, that is a organizational problem, there will be not technical fix for that.