There are good reasons for having them, but for someone who wants to write pong it’s a bit scary. What is that? You might cry, but have no fear, I kind of had the same reaction when I saw that a state needed two lifetime annotations. ![]() For example, for the Amethyst engine, a simple game of Pong starts out with the following code: In this space, there are also some Rust game engines but compared to Unity tutorials they have a higher barrier of entry. People have explained it way better than me here and there are resources available, but it’s something to keep in mind - for more info and solutions see Catherine West’s excellent Rustconf 2018 keynote There’s no it works by the power of luck here and sometimes that feels bad. Rust punishes you for being wrong more than other languages, and it does at compile time so you have to do things right in order for them to work. One problem that I’ve found is that you kind of have to be an expert to make a game and if you start with the wrong path you get into somewhat frustrating situations. Why did mention this category if I think we’re there already for most cases?īecause there are unsolved issues and nuisances here too. As I said in the intro, it’s not only me as a mad, game developer who thinks this, others have jumped on board way before me and announced that they will develop their next game fully or by using rust as much as possible. I believe that Rust as a language is ready and has enough maturity and features for this to be possible. Yes it still happens even today and that’s fine. I’ve put engines / games in the title place since we have cases where the engine is a custom-built thing for one game. Here we have the small-medium sized companies that don’t use an off-the-shelf engine, like Chucklefish, Killhouse, and many others (even lone-wolf gamedevs like me, I do a game in my spare time in Rust). For example custom memory allocators for the standard containers has a great RFC, but it’s not done yet. Some of these are already doing quite well in Rust, but others not so well. To achieve this kind of performance a lot of optimization work is put into data structure layouts, SIMD, custom memory allocators, etc. ![]() Sure, you might say consoles are powerful today, but as we said in the intro, you only get 16ms and players expect a lot of things to happen in today’s AAA game worlds. These mammoth engines also care about performance. While Rust is available on many platforms and architectures, that doesn’t mean it just works on console X or console Y and it’s supported out of the box if you write a hello world program.Ĭonsole game development is a strange, NDA-filled space, unknown to many, and while things are moving in the right direction, there are still problems that need to be solved. This applies to both categories, but it is really important for this one. I am not saying we need to solve C++ to Rust bindings, but we need to consider how do we solve fitting Rust systems in an existing engine. Most didn’t care about ABI compatibility since it’s all compiled at once so this makes communication to a new Rust module less than ideal. There are a few restrictions here, most of them are written in C++ under the hood (even Unity). These are represented by the big companies that build their own, equally big engine (Ubisoft, DICE, Epic, Unity, Lumberyard, etc.). After doing this step, we have two problems, but trust me they are a bit easier. That’s a lot of things that need to happen and that’s why C++ is usually language of choice for game engine development. If you’re lucky you get about 32 milliseconds.Įven if we ignore rendering, you need to do: physics, animation, updating various gameplay systems, AI, pathfinding and it usually doesn’t stop here. In games you your work 16 milliseconds fast. ![]() In game development you have to do your work fast. ![]() Games are made of complex systems where a lot of things usually need to happen in a short amount of time. but in order to really excel I’d love to organize some structured efforts to improve the ecosystem and I think it would be great if the 2019 roadmap will include game development. Rust has already seen a bunch of interest from games developers like Chucklefish, Embark Studios, Ready at Dawn, etc. Rust is excellent for performance crucial applications that run on multi-processor architectures and these two aspects are also critical for game development.
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