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Fyrox is such a blackpill for me (makes me doubt the Rust gamedev scene), because Fyrox appears to be the most mature Rust game engine, but nobody uses it or ca

Fyrox is such a blackpill for me (makes me doubt the Rust gamedev scene), because Fyrox appears to be the most mature Rust game engine, but nobody uses it or cares about it. Instead everyone is excited about the Entity-Component-System in Bevy, but once all the rough edges of Bevy are smoothed out, people excited about the ECS are going to realize they don't actually want to make art, or create game mechanics, they were just excited about a neat system (and in fairness, ECS is neat), but they never really wanted to do the things required for a game.

HelloNurse 1y ago
ECS hype and the traditional make a game/make an engine dilemma shouldn't be considered reasons to avoid the Fyrox library (or other Rust projects). Are you trying to tell something more logical? Does the "Rust gamedev scene" affect the technical merits of libraries?
- Chris2048 1y ago
  Perhaps you should read the comment again, your questions don't follow from it.
pie_flavor 1y ago
What makes Fyrox better than Bevy? I don't think the hundred people commenting under every Bevy point release on HN are thinking of the ECS. It has features and it has tools and it has games.
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echelon 1y ago
> because Fyrox appears to be the most mature Rust game engine, but nobody uses it or cares about it. Bevy gets all the hype, but Fyrox has more maturity in a lot of surface area. Bevy is led by a large team, and the leadership is ex-Google. Fyrox is one solo Russian developer with 10x engineering output. Bevy is ECS, Fyrox isn't. Bevy does a great job marketing itself, it has a foundation and a large community, and people are excited to try and use ECS.
zelphirkalt 1y ago
That's OK though. Other people will then be able to use Bevy for actually making a game. And to be fair, not every great engineer is a great writer, artist, composer, or any other role one might like to have on board for making a game.
- diath 1y ago
  > Other people will then be able to use Bevy for actually making a game. Nobody makes games in Bevy though, Bevy is just a very good, modern graphics tech demo, not something suitable for developing actual games. Even the biggest title out there, Tiny Glade, is just a level editor with precisely zero gameplay features. Bevy's "popularity" (on social media, not among game developers) is entirely hype-driven by people that do not actually make games at all.
  - Tuna-Fish 1y ago
    Why? What does Bevy lack?
    - diath 1y ago
      There are two primary issues. In game development, for developing game features, iteration speed is the most important factor, you usually want a higher level scripting language in your game engine, so that a developer's workflow looks like this: make a simple change, hit a reload button, issue a few inputs, go back to the editor, make a simple change, repeat. Other popular game engines, more or less, solve this problem by providing a way to make gameplay features in a higher level language (GDScript in Godot, C# in Unity, BluePrints in Unreal Engine, often Lua with custom game engines), with Bevy, you make a change, and you rebuild the code, and often times, making a simple gameplay logic change (for a spell, an item, or some NPC interaction), will also change the ownership rules in case of Rust, because you may want to now access the same item mutably in two places or other things, and that requires you to restructure your simple script to appease the borrow checker, which also brings us to the second issue, in game development, a lot of bad practices, become good practices, take cyclic references for example, which are a common pattern in video games, in other lower level languages, or languages that allow embedding a higher level language, it's not that big of a deal, in Rust you have to do some shenenigans with things like RefCell<Vec<Rc<RefCell<Item>>>> which is simply not very ergonomic and adds a lot of development friction. A lot of people don't realize that game engine and gameplay programming are two vastly different things that have different requirements, and Rust is a poor fit for the latter.
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dicytea 1y ago
I mean I get this in theory. But the lineup of high-quality games in production with Bevy just never stops to impress me. I'm always surprised by the new cool stuff they're making every time I take a peek at their community. Yes, most of them are not finished yet, but the engine is still young so that's understandable (gamedev can take years). On the other hand, I'm still not really seeing any games being made in Fyrox despite it being a few months older than Bevy. Huge respect to the dev though, he's making great stuff. But if I ever need to pick a pure Rust game engine at all, it's def going to be Bevy.
the__alchemist 1y ago
This is a bit of a microcosm of Rust OSS libs in general; the libraries that get the most PR, articles, popularity are often not the best ones. I see this in the rust embedded and GPGPU areas as well, for example. The smell for me is if the library is designed based on a plan, or attempting to be X ecosystem in Rust instead of built around one or more practical piece of software, and evolving to meet the needs of these softwares. With that in mind: I adore EGUI. I hadn't heared of GPGUI before, but because of its origin as being purpose built for the Zed editor, this immediately gives it credibility, and I'm excited about it!
theLiminator 1y ago
For better or for worse fyrox is not something too novel/new. So people don't really see a reason to use it over godot or other engines. Doesn't mean bevy is better or anything, just that because it's so different people tend to flock to it.

HelloNurse 1y ago

ECS hype and the traditional make a game/make an engine dilemma shouldn't be considered reasons to avoid the Fyrox library (or other Rust projects). Are you trying to tell something more logical? Does the "Rust gamedev scene" affect the technical merits of libraries?

Chris2048 1y ago
Perhaps you should read the comment again, your questions don't follow from it.

pie_flavor 1y ago

What makes Fyrox better than Bevy? I don't think the hundred people commenting under every Bevy point release on HN are thinking of the ECS. It has features and it has tools and it has games.

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echelon 1y ago

> because Fyrox appears to be the most mature Rust game engine, but nobody uses it or cares about it. Bevy gets all the hype, but Fyrox has more maturity in a lot of surface area. Bevy is led by a large team, and the leadership is ex-Google. Fyrox is one solo Russian developer with 10x engineering output. Bevy is ECS, Fyrox isn't. Bevy does a great job marketing itself, it has a foundation and a large community, and people are excited to try and use ECS.

zelphirkalt 1y ago

That's OK though. Other people will then be able to use Bevy for actually making a game. And to be fair, not every great engineer is a great writer, artist, composer, or any other role one might like to have on board for making a game.

diath 1y ago
> Other people will then be able to use Bevy for actually making a game. Nobody makes games in Bevy though, Bevy is just a very good, modern graphics tech demo, not something suitable for developing actual games. Even the biggest title out there, Tiny Glade, is just a level editor with precisely zero gameplay features. Bevy's "popularity" (on social media, not among game developers) is entirely hype-driven by people that do not actually make games at all.
- Tuna-Fish 1y ago
  Why? What does Bevy lack?
  - diath 1y ago
    There are two primary issues. In game development, for developing game features, iteration speed is the most important factor, you usually want a higher level scripting language in your game engine, so that a developer's workflow looks like this: make a simple change, hit a reload button, issue a few inputs, go back to the editor, make a simple change, repeat. Other popular game engines, more or less, solve this problem by providing a way to make gameplay features in a higher level language (GDScript in Godot, C# in Unity, BluePrints in Unreal Engine, often Lua with custom game engines), with Bevy, you make a change, and you rebuild the code, and often times, making a simple gameplay logic change (for a spell, an item, or some NPC interaction), will also change the ownership rules in case of Rust, because you may want to now access the same item mutably in two places or other things, and that requires you to restructure your simple script to appease the borrow checker, which also brings us to the second issue, in game development, a lot of bad practices, become good practices, take cyclic references for example, which are a common pattern in video games, in other lower level languages, or languages that allow embedding a higher level language, it's not that big of a deal, in Rust you have to do some shenenigans with things like RefCell<Vec<Rc<RefCell<Item>>>> which is simply not very ergonomic and adds a lot of development friction. A lot of people don't realize that game engine and gameplay programming are two vastly different things that have different requirements, and Rust is a poor fit for the latter.

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dicytea 1y ago

I mean I get this in theory. But the lineup of high-quality games in production with Bevy just never stops to impress me. I'm always surprised by the new cool stuff they're making every time I take a peek at their community. Yes, most of them are not finished yet, but the engine is still young so that's understandable (gamedev can take years). On the other hand, I'm still not really seeing any games being made in Fyrox despite it being a few months older than Bevy. Huge respect to the dev though, he's making great stuff. But if I ever need to pick a pure Rust game engine at all, it's def going to be Bevy.

the__alchemist 1y ago

This is a bit of a microcosm of Rust OSS libs in general; the libraries that get the most PR, articles, popularity are often not the best ones. I see this in the rust embedded and GPGPU areas as well, for example. The smell for me is if the library is designed based on a plan, or attempting to be X ecosystem in Rust instead of built around one or more practical piece of software, and evolving to meet the needs of these softwares. With that in mind: I adore EGUI. I hadn't heared of GPGUI before, but because of its origin as being purpose built for the Zed editor, this immediately gives it credibility, and I'm excited about it!

theLiminator 1y ago

For better or for worse fyrox is not something too novel/new. So people don't really see a reason to use it over godot or other engines. Doesn't mean bevy is better or anything, just that because it's so different people tend to flock to it.