Rust GameDev WG

This Month in Rust GameDev #52 - June 2024

Unknown — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the 52th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p>

You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p>

Announcements</a></li>
Game Updates</a></li>
Engine Updates</a></li>
Learning Material Updates</a></li>
Tooling Updates</a></li>
Library Updates</a></li>
Interviews</a></li>
Blog Posts</a></li>
Jobs</a></li>
Engine Newsletters</a></li>
Future News</a></li> </ul>
Announcements
recent survey</a>. We’re happy to announce that this feature is now available! When you visit our homepage</a>, you can now scroll down and find an email subscription form. We’ll send you an email whenever a new post is published, which currently is once per month.</p>
The emails are currently sent from gamedev-rs@proton.me</a>. We will switch this to an actual @gamedev.rs address in the future. Please tell us if you encounter any issues with the emails.</p>
Game Updates #</a> </h2>
Untitled Pixel Wizards Game</a> #</a> </h3>
</video>
Untitled Pixel Wizards Game</a> is a local-multiplayer Noita</a>-like platformer about killing baddies using spells powered by pixel physics. This month was focused on juicing up said baddies:</p>

Pew Pew Pew</a>: baddies learned to shoot at players.</li>
Hot Pursuit</a>: baddies also learned to chase players! (They’re real smart.)</li>
Status Update</a>: physically-simulated pixels learn to burn & poison players & baddies.</li>
Ragdolls</a>: corpses of dead baddies learn to tumble around all realistic-like.</li>
Fiddling with Fire</a>: the fire mechanic figures out how to better burn baddies.</li> </ul>
Way of Rhea</a>
</a>
Way of Rhea: a puzzle game. Available on Steam and 20% off for the Steam Summer Sale!</figcaption> </figure>
Way of Rhea (Steam</a>, Newsletter</a>) is a color-based puzzle game with difficult puzzles, but forgiving mechanics developed by Mason Remaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. Since its release in May, Mason has fixed many bugs and implemented quality-of-life improvements.</p>
They recently conducted an AMA on /r/rust_gamedev</a> about their experience developing and shipping a game after six years in Rust. They then curated the questions and answers into a blog post</a>. It includes questions about Rust, libraries, experiences writing a custom game engine, and game development in general.</p>
Gunbug</a>
</a>
Gunbugs shooting at a bunch of eggplants</figcaption> </figure>
Gunbug is a 2D online co-op horde survival shoot’em up game.</p>
It focuses on shooting lots of enemies with lots of guns. It can be played solo or with up to 10 players.</p>
It is built with Bevy</a> and uses bevy_rapier</a> for ray casting, bevy_kira_audio</a> for audio, and renet</a> for networking. The iOS and macOS versions are built with xbuild</a>.</p>
You can wishlist the game on Steam</a>. Playtests start in the upcoming months. iOS and Android builds already work, but store pages don’t exist yet.</p>
Engine Updates
godot-rust</a>
GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Mastodon</a>, Twitter</a>) by @Bromeon</a> provides Rust bindings for the Godot engine</a>.</p>
After quite a bit of development on GitHub, the Godot 4 bindings are now available on crates.io</a> – you can immediately get started using cargo add godot</code>. Furthermore, the GDExtension API level can now be specified with a Cargo feature, e.g. api-4-1</code>.</p>
The ScriptInstance</code> API has matured a lot over the past months. This feature allows users to write Godot scripts in Rust, which can be attached to nodes (just like GDScript). Scripts allow for quickly attaching/detaching functionality in a scene.</p>
The overall API has seen several consistency improvements: reorganized modules, self</code>/&self</code> receivers on geometric types, easier element access for Array</code>/Dictionary</code>/Packed*Array</code>. The library has also benefited from Rust’s#[diagnostic::on_unimplemented]</code></a> to improve user-facing error messages.</p>
Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Mastodon</a>, X</a></em></p>
See also the devlog article</a>.</em></p>
Bevy 0.14 Release Candidate</a> #</a> </h3> Sharp Screen-Space Reflections in Bevy 0.14</figcaption> </figure> The Bevy game engine is gearing up to release version 0.14. The (probably) last release candidate is out now and ready for testing. If you want to help out, check out the draft release notes</a> and the draft migration guide</a> and report any issues you find.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy Cheatbook</a> #</a> </h3> The community-beloved unofficial Bevy Cheatbook</a> by Ida “Iyes” is a collection of Bevy tutorials, recipes and advanced documentation. The cheatbook is currently in the process of being updated to Bevy 0.14 and now features the following new chapters:</p> Transform Interpolation/Extrapolation</a>: How to get smooth-looking movement on-screen for things you simulate in FixedUpdate</li> Internal Parallelism</a>: Multithreading within a Bevy system</li> One-Shot Systems</a>: Systems that you run on-demand, not in a schedule</li> Background Computation</a>: How to do processing that may span multiple frame updates and not hold up the game’s framerate with long CPU work.</li> </ul> Game development in Rust with Macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> Olle Wreede of Agical</a> published a complete guide</a> on how to develop a classic 2D shoot ’em up game using the game library Macroquad and the Rust programming language.</p> It covers everything from a simple Hello World Macroquad application to adding graphics, audio, a shader, a graphical menu, and how to release the game on multiple platforms.</p> Other learning materials #</a> </h3> Using tracing to profile a Bevy project</a></li> Bevycation of Brackeys First Game in Godot Tutorial</a>: A Bevy version of Brackeys’ “How to make a Video Game - Godot Beginner Tutorial”</a></li> </ul> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Rusty Playdate 0.5</a> #</a> </h3> The Playdate console</figcaption> </figure> Rusty Playdate</a> (GitHub</a>, Mastodon</a>) by @boozook</a> is a large set of crates and tools for the full cycle of creating games for the Playdate handheld console</a>.</p> A big part of the Rusty Playdate project is the cargo-playdate</code></a> tool that functions as a build system. It works as a cargo-plugin as well as a standalone, and does several things:</p> It manages the compilation of your program,</li> builds assets for the crate and its dependencies,</li> generates a manifest,</li> and assembles it all into a bundle that runs on the device or a simulator.</li> </ul> In this month cargo-playdate</code> v0.5 has been released</a> and received massive refactoring, bugfixes and new features:</p> support for cargo’s auto-targets</a>, i.e. targets such as bin</code> or example</code> that aren’t declared in the Cargo.toml</li> target-specific package-info</a> is inherited from the main package-info</li> package.metadata.playdate.options</code> is inherited from the workspace.metadata</code></li> incremental builds now work as expected</li> </ul> The register decoder in the pd-symbolize-crashlog</code></a> was also updated. It now properly decodes all available registers such as PSR</abbr>, CFSR</abbr>, and HSFR</abbr>.</p> Discussions: GitHub</a>, Matrix</a>.</em></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> egui_ratatui</a> #</a> </h3> egui_ratatui running in Bevy</figcaption> </figure> egui_ratatui</a> by gold-silver-copper</a> is an egui</a> widget that is also a ratatui</a> backend. It allows you to create Terminal User Interfaces (TUIs) inside egui. You can try out the web demo</a> to see it in action.</p> The current release is the product of months of iteration, and is now “stable”. It is Wasm compatible and engine agnostic: use it in Bevy, *Quad, eframe, pixels, etc.</p> egui_ratatui</code> is currently being used for the development of a game and educational software at a startup with no issues so far.</p> FMOD-oxide</a> #</a> </h3> FMOD-oxide brings safe rust bindings to the FMOD sound engine. This crate tries to be as rusty and low-cost as possible, without comprimising on any APIs. Certain APIs, such as loading banks from a pointer, are marked as unsafe, but are still available for use.</p> Bevy Lunex</a> #</a> </h3> Bevypunk: a recreation of Cyberpunk 2077's UI made with Lunex</figcaption> </figure> Lunex is a path based retained layout engine for Bevy entities, built around vanilla Bevy ECS. It gives you the ability to make your own custom UI using regular ECS like every other part of your app. Notably, this includes world-space 3D UI!</p> The above screenshot is from the Bevypunk UI Web Demo</a>, which includes a main menu and a character creation screen.</p> You can get started by reading the bevy_lunex book</a>.</p> haalka</a> #</a> </h3> </video> A Minecraft-like UI made with haalka</figcaption> </figure> হালকা: in bengali, haalka means “light” (e.g. not heavy) and can also be used to mean “easy”</em></p> Haalka is an ergonomic reactivity library powered by the FRP</a> signals of futures-signals</a>. It is a port of the web UI libraries MoonZoon</a> and Dominator</a> and offers the same signal semantics as a thin layer on top of bevy_ui.</p> While haalka is primarily targeted at UI and provides high level UI abstractions as such, its core abstraction can be used to manage signals-powered reactivity for any entity, not just bevy_ui nodes.</p> bevy_light_2d</a> #</a> </h3> A candle shining 2D light</figcaption> </figure> bevy_light_2d is a new general purpose 2D lighting for the Bevy game engine. Designed to be simple to use, yet expressive enough to fit a variety of needs. Features include:</p> Component driven design</li> Configurable point lights</li> Camera-specific ambient light</li> Single-camera rendering</li> </ul> bevy_hanabi</a> 0.11 #</a> </h3> Trails in Hanabi</figcaption> </figure> Hanabi is a GPU particle system plugin for the Bevy game engine. The most notable new feature in bevy_hanabi 0.11</a> is support for trails and ribbons.</p> berdicles</a> #</a> </h3> A fountain of particles</figcaption> </figure> berdicles is an expressive CPU particle system for the Bevy engine. Features include:</p> Instancing based CPU particles.</li> Expressive non-physics based particle traits.</li> Familiar setup with Bevy’s native Material and Mesh.</li> Particles as emitters.</li> Mesh based particle trails.</li> Particle events that spawn other particles.</li> Billboard particles.</li> </ul> Other Library Updates and Releases #</a> </h3> glam 0.28</a>: glam</code> is a foundational crate when it comes to math in general in Rust. For example, its types are directly visible in the Vec</code> types Bevy consumes and re-exports, like Vec3</code>. v0.28 brings AArch64 NEON SIMD support as well as a couple smaller breaking changes.</li> gdext-coroutines</a>: Run Rust coroutines in Godot 4.2+ (through GDExtension), inspired on Unity’s Coroutines design.</li> FunDSP 0.18</a>: FunDSP is an audio DSP (digital signal processing</a>) library for audio processing and synthesis. This release is a rewrite that adds no_std and SIMD support.</li> </ul> Interviews #</a> </h2> Metalmancy @ OpenSauce</a> #</a> </h3> Arcade cabinet close up</figcaption> </figure> Metalmancy</a> are creating custom and configurable arcade machines. Their flagship game Thetawave</a> is coded in Rust.</p> Hyelim of Framework</a> interviewed Carlo and Joanna on their games and arcade machines at OpenSauce</a>.</p> Tiny Glade Developers Discuss Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers & Cozy Games</a> #</a> </h3> An idyllic scenery made in Tidy Glade</figcaption> </figure> To celebrate the release of Tiny Glade’s demo version</a>, Pounce Light’s Anastasia Opara and Tomasz Stachowiak have joined 80 Level in an interview</a> to discuss the game’s history, proceduralism, Bevy, Rust, self-publishing, and the “cozy games” genre.</p> Blog Posts #</a> </h2> Dioxus Labs + “High-level Rust”</a> #</a> </h3> This post</a> by the founder of Dioxus Labs</a> is a direct response to the recently published “Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years”</a> by LogLogGames. If you’ve missed the original post, it has made its rounds as a well-written critique of Rust’s gamedev ecosystem and shortcomings inherent to the language itself.</p> Dioxus Labs + “High-level Rust”</a> is a detailed response to the original post, outlining concrete steps to improve the situation and signaling the author’s readiness to fund the development of features they see as necessary for the ecosystem to thrive.</p> Discussions: lobste.rs</a>, /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a></em></p> Virtual Geometry in Bevy 0.14 #</a> </h3> The Stanford bunny split into meshlets</figcaption> </figure> Ever wondered how Unreal 5’s Nanite</a> works under the hood? Jasmine, who reimplemented the virtual geometry technology for Bevy’s upcoming 0.14 release, wrote a post</a> explaining the concepts and the nitty-gritty details of the implementation. The post is very technical in nature, so if you’ve never heard of this technology before, they recommend you first watch Brian Karis’ SIGGRAPH 2021 lecture A Deep Dive into Nanite Virtualized Geometry</a> (slides</a>).</p> Jobs #</a> </h2> Ubisoft Montreal is searching for an online Rust programmer</a> for an unannounced project.</p> Engine Newsletters #</a> </h2> This Week In Bevy Tiny Glade, VJ performances, and 2d lighting</a></li> Bevy 0.14-rc.2, Powerglove, and Soup!</a></li> Meshlets, Stable Interpolation, and Generalized ECS Reactivity with Observers!</a></li> Water, Global Illumination, and UI toolkits</a></li> </ul> </li> This Week In Quads blocking_event_loop</code> on ios opengl/metal, Docker article, and libxkbcommon on NixOS</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Future News #</a> </h2> Editing this newsletter wouldn’t be possible without your contributions</a>. Thanks to everyone who helped us this month!</p> If you want something mentioned in the next newsletter, send us a pull request</a>.</p> You can also get an early look at pending issues for the next newsletter</a>.</p> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Also, subscribe to our socials if you want to receive fresh news!</p> X/Twitter: @rust_gamedev</a></li> Mastodon: @rust_gamedev</a></li> Reddit: /r/rust_gamedev</a></li> </ul> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Lemmy</a>, Mastodon</a>, X/Twitter</a>, Hacker News</a>, Discord</a>.</p>

This Month in Rust GameDev #51 - May 2024 Unknown — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 51st issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Misc. Links</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Survey Results #</a> </h3> Last month, we asked you to fill out a survey to help us improve the rebooted newsletter. Thanks to 52 of you, we’ve got some data</a> now! We analyzed the results in this blog post</a>. The biggest takeaways are:</p> People are generally excited about the newsletter</li> The current frequency of the newsletter is good</li> Readers do not want anything in the newsletter generated by AI</li> Contributing to the newsletter could be easier. If you’ve got ideas on how to make this happen, please let us know</a>!</li> </ul> You can visit the blog post</a> to see the full results and some nice plots. We will discuss how to act on this feedback next month and keep you updated on the changes we make.</p> Thanks to everyone who participated!</p> Email Subscription #</a> </h3> Last month, we announced that we would add an email subscription option to the newsletter. Unfortunately, we did not manage to implement this in time for this issue. He will work on this feature</a> for the next month, and we hope to have it ready for you then.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Way of Rhea: a puzzle game. Available on Steam.</figcaption> </figure> Way of Rhea</a> released on May 20th as part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase</a>!</p> </a></p> Way of Rhea is a color-based puzzle game with difficult puzzles, but forgiving mechanics developed by Mason Remaley</a> in a custom Rust engine.</p> You can support development by purchasing Way of Rhea on Steam</a>, or signing up for the mailing list</a> to hear about future games.</p> Untitled Pixel Wizard Game</a> #</a> </h3> </a> A deadly foe meets its end.</figcaption> </figure> Untitled Pixel Wizard Game</a> is a local-multiplayer Noita</a>-like platformer about killing baddies using spells powered by pixel physics.</p> Over the last few months, the falling sand simulation learned to play (somewhat) nicely with Rapier rigid bodies; see Bridging Physics Worlds</a> and subsequent updates.</p> This month:</p> Tilemapping via LDTK</a>: levels got just a tiny bit prettier.</li> Level Progression</a>: players learn to die, and levels link together.</li> Target Practice</a>: the first “enemy” was added to the game.</li> </ul> mirr/orb</a> #</a> </h3> A typical level and its UI</figcaption> </figure> mirr/orb</a> by syn9</a> is a puzzle game about bouncing lasers off mirrors to activate orbs.</p> The game was created in 9 days using syn9’s Rust mini game framework mgfw</a> and released on May 27th.</p> This release contains 110 levels which pull from 870 available puzzle layouts.</p> CyberGate Playground</a> #</a> </h3> Shooting a Hammer against a Floating Wall and Destroying part of it</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate Playground is a multiplayer browser game where players claim territory by painting the environment in their color, with the goal of overpowering opponents.</p> The past few months’ updates include:</p> Flying with butterfly-like mechanics</li> Fusion Upgrade:</a> Combine hammers, balls, and dice to multiply their powers</li> Hammer destruction made more challenging and interesting, with upgrades enabling deeper wall penetration</li> Improved strength and weight system, and calculate their impact on character movement and abilities</li> Added an ‘Owned Upgrades’ menu using yakui</code> crate, giving a neat overview of all acquired upgrades</li> Many other UI / gameplay improvements based on player feedback</li> </ul> Rust’s ownership and strongly typed features played a crucial role in allowing the gameplay code to scale to more complex and detailed mechanics while retaining correct, clean, and bug-free code.</p> CyberGate Playground is a passion project. If you’re interested in the game’s progress, join the Discord server</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Macroquad Newsletter #</a> </h3> “Basic” 3d rendering (gltf helmet)</figcaption> </figure> @Fedor</a>, creator of *Quad</a>, a game engine written in Rust, is starting a “This week in Quads”</a> newsletter.</p> This month overall polish, developer experience, performance optimization, and basic 3d visualization have been worked on.</p> Fyrox 0.34</a> #</a> </h3> The improved Fyrox editor UI</figcaption> </figure> Fyrox</a> got a huge update this month. For those who don’t know, Fyrox is a game engine written in Rust that is especially notable for sporting a Unity-like editor.</p> This release</a> includes code hot reloading, project exporter, assets preview generation, UI prefabs, GLTF support, static and dynamic batching, keyboard navigation, animation support for UI, editor style and usability improvements, and many more.</p> Bevy 0.14 WIP #</a> </h3> One of the upcoming features in Bevy 0.14 is easier texture repetition for GLTF objects</figcaption> </figure> The 0.14 release of Bevy</a> nears completion, but the team is still working on detailed release notes and the migration guide. If you want to help, you can grab one of the open documentation issues</a>.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Xkcd Machine #</a> </h3> A small part of the XKCD Machine</figcaption> </figure> Chromakode released a detailed blog post</a> about their implementation of xkcd “Machine”</a>.</p> Machine is written in React/Typescript, and uses Rapier</a>: a physics engine written in Rust.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Rusty Playdate</a> #</a> </h3> The Playdate console</figcaption> </figure> Rusty Playdate</a> (GitHub</a>, Mastodon</a>) by @boozook</a> is the large set of crates with bindings, cargo-plugin, and toolset for the full cycle of creating games for the Playdate handheld console</a>. This is a fairly new console reminiscent of a GameBoy with a crank handle geared towards indie games.</p> The current release sports the following notable improvements:</p> Partial Lua scripting support</li> Support for devices connected to macOS via USB hub</li> Stabilize packaging on Windows enough to add automatic tests</li> Stabilization for various parts of the API</li> </ul> Discussions: GitHub</a>, Matrix</a>.</em></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Bevy rustunit meetup #3 #</a> </h3> Bevy meetup YouTube extract, showing its 3 participants.</figcaption> </figure> Rustunit</a> has hosted its 3rd unofficial online Bevy Engine</a> meetup on April 19th with the following topics:</p> Intro / Code of Conduct</li> Julian - Animating 3D Characters with Bevy</li> Niklas - Learnings from a Bevy game template</li> </ul> Check out the recording</a> and join the meetup group</a> to get notified of future events.</p> Bevy rustunit meetup #4 #</a> </h3> Bevy meetup YouTube extract, showing its 4 participants.</figcaption> </figure> Rustunit</a> has hosted its 4th unofficial online Bevy Engine</a> meetup on May 24th with the following topics:</p> Francois - Catching Rendering Regressions on all Platforms</li> Lorenz - Hooking into the Bevy Rendering Pipeline</li> Jos - Recreating Townscaper using Rust & Bevy</li> </ul> Check out the recording</a> and join the meetup group</a> to get notified of future events.</p> RustNL #</a> </h3> RustNL</a> happened May 7. & 8. in Delft, Netherlands.</p> While the conference was not specific to game development, organizers contacted rust game development communities to showcase games developed in Rust between talks, which you can watch on YouTube</a>.</p> Special mention to the following talks, relevant to game development:</p> Let’s Build High-Performance Rust UI</a> by Kevin Boos</li> A Research Project on Rust User Interface Architecture</a> by Ralph Levien about Xilem</a></li> (Th)Rust for Space: Initial momentum</a> by Michaël Melchiore, who gave a shout-out to Bevy Engine</a>.</li> </ul> Misc. Links #</a> </h2> New libraries #</a> </h3> egui_ratatui</a>: A ratatui backend that is also an egui widget. Deploy on the web with WASM or ship natively with Bevy, macroquad, or eframe</li> bevy_ratatui_render</a>: A Bevy plugin for rendering your game to the terminal using ratatui</li> bevy_light_2d</a>: General purpose 2D lighting for the Bevy game engine</li> </ul> Library Updates #</a> </h3> Kira 0.9</a>: Library for expressive game audio</li> Quinn 0.11.2</a>: Async-friendly QUIC implementation in Rust</li> rolt and jolt-sys 0.3.1</a>: Rust bindings to Jolt Physics</li> Hanabi 0.11</a>: A GPU particle system plugin for the Bevy game engine</li> </ul> Blog Posts #</a> </h3> Architectural Ruminations</a>: reflections on using Rust for game development, prompted by LogLog Games’s Leaving Rust game dev after 3 years</a></li> </ul> Videos #</a> </h3> The Secret Behind Photorealistic And Stylized Graphics</a>: Explaining the rendering techniques behind photorealistic and stylized graphics</li> GDC: Tunes of the Kingdom</a>: Evolving physics and sounds for ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to our socials if you want to receive fresh news!</p> X/Twitter: @rust_gamedev</a></li> Mastodon: @rust_gamedev</a></li> Reddit: /r/rust_gamedev</a></li> </ul> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Lemmy</a>, Mastodon</a>, X / Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> Newsletter Survey Results Unknown — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Since we are rebooting the newsletter</a>, we wanted to know more about our readers. 52 of you filled out the survey last month. Thank you very much!</p> The biggest takeaways are:</p> People are generally excited about the newsletter</li> The current frequency of the newsletter is good</li> Readers do not want anything in the newsletter generated by AI</li> Contributing to the newsletter could be easier. If you’ve got ideas on how to make this happen, please let us know</a>!</li> </ul> We will now go through the results in the same order as the questions were asked. The full analysis and data is open-sourced on GitHub</a>.</p> Excitement #</a> </h2> </p> On average, readers are excited about the newsletter. The mean excitement level is 3.6 out of 5, the median is 4. Our 95% confidence interval is [3.32, 3.91] using a standard error of 0.15 (sd = 1.05, n = 52).</p> These are fairly nice results. Anecdotally, we got a lot of messages about issues with the newsletter and how to improve it, so we are happy to see that the excitement is still high. Still, the data shows that we have room for improvement.</p> Content Quantity #</a> </h2> </p> When asked about how to change the amount of content per newsletter, the majority of readers (58%) voted to leave the amount as-is or don’t care. On the other hand, this means nearly half of the readers would change something about the content quantity. 17% voted for “less content; keep only the most important news” and 25% for “more content; add sections for minor news”. These two options are luckily not mutually exclusive. One option we could implement is to have a new section for “minor news” where we don’t go into detail, and a section for “miscellaneous links” where we only list some links without any commentary.</p> Newsletter Frequency #</a> </h2> </p> 73% of readers are either happy with the current frequency or don’t care. A minority of 21% would like the newsletter to become quarterly. Arguments we’ve heard for this are that a lower frequency would allow editors to improve the quality that goes into each newsletter. Counterarguments include that a lower frequency would make the newsletter less timely. Things like calls for playtesters or job offers would be less useful if they were only sent out every three months.</p> AI #</a> </h2> </p> This question was a catalyst for a lot of discussion on Discord</a>.</p> If we interpret the answers as a scale of 1-5, where 1 is “not okay at all” and 5 is “I love it”, the mean answer was 2.25, the median 2. Notably, the mode is tied at 1 and 2. The 95% confidence interval is [1.89, 2.61] using a standard error of 0.18 (sd = 1.30, n = 52). People are generally against using an LLM to generate summaries. 79.2% of readers would prefer not to use AI.</p> Viewed from another angle: while a majority of readers (65%) are at least okay with AI-generated summaries, a significant minority (35%) are not okay at all with this proposal. These include very active members of the community and contributors who have announced that they would no longer want their content to be included in the newsletter if AI was used.</p> The reasons people gave for not wanting AI-generated summaries were varied. Among these were:</p> Solidarity with the large number of creatives who recently lost their jobs due to AI-generated content, inside and outside the game development industry.</li> Concerns about the quality of AI-generated summaries.</li> Skepticism about AI-generated summaries saving time if they still need to be edited by hand.</li> </ul> Tone #</a> </h2> </p> A significant majority of readers (86.5%) are happy with the current tone of the newsletter, with a minority of 11.5% wanting a less formal tone. While votes for the latter did not reach a majority, the written feedback we got included quite a few requests for more “personality” in the newsletter.</p> Contributions #</a> </h2> </p> The majority of readers (61.5%) have not yet contributed to the newsletter and 26.9% have contributed 2-5 times. Only 3.8% contributed exactly once, while the rest (7.7%) are heavy contributors, helping us out more than five times.</p> While it might seem weird that more people contributed 2-5 times than exactly once, keep in mind that the former is the sum of people who contributed twice, thrice, four times, and five times. The reason we binned these together is that we are interested in the following categories:</p> Pure readers</li> People who contributed once and then stopped</li> People who contributed a few times</li> People who are regular contributors</li> </ul> We are happy to see that people who contributed once seem to continue contributing in the future.</p> Ease #</a> </h2> </p> The mean ease of contributing is 3.0, and the median is 3. The 95% confidence interval is [2.5, 3.6] using a standard error of 0.26 (sd = 1.26, n = 23).</p> Readers generally feel neutral about the ease of contributing to the newsletter.</p> We can do better here, but we are not sure yet how. We’d love to hear your ideas on GitHub</a> or on Discord</a> (ping @janhohenheim).</p> Keeping up with the newsletter #</a> </h2> </p> This was a multiple-choice question. The most popular source of information about the newsletter is RSS (27.5%). If we add the choices for the official Rust GameDev Discord server</a> (21.7%) and other Discord servers (11.6%), Discord in general becomes the leading source of information (33.3%), taking up nearly exactly a third of all votes.</p> We can see the shift from X / Twitter to Mastodon reported by many OSS communities in our readers as well. Lemmy is not looking popular as an alternative to Reddit yet, with no reader reporting it as a source of information.</p> The “Email” option in the survey is meant for people who have set up some kind of email alerts manually.</p> Per written feedback, a lot of people want to see proper email subscriptions implemented. While this was a goal for this month, we have not managed to implement it yet. We will try to get this done</a> for the next newsletter.</p> What is going well #</a> </h2> </p> This was a free-text question. The above is a word cloud of the answers with some obvious words like “game” or “newsletter” removed. Note that the inclusion of the word “AI” is misleading, as it was only mentioned in answers that read similar to “I like that we don’t use AI, please don’t use LLMs”.</p> Going through the feedback by hand, common things readers enjoy about the newsletter are:</p> A good mix of content</li> Very open to contributions</li> Small-scale games are featured, not just success stories or technical articles</li> </ul> What needs to be improved #</a> </h2> </p> Another free-text question. The feedback here is fairly diverse. The most common complaints we already mentioned in previous sections are:</p> Add an email subscription</li> Improve the ease of contributing</li> </ul> Additionally, many people feel like the “Games” section reads more like an advertisement than an article aimed at other game developers.</p> Among the more unique suggestions were:</p> Conduct interviews</li> Have a stronger sense of personality in the writing</li> Make the newsletter more consistent in timing and quantity</li> Have more editors to not overburden the current ones</li> Have some more clarity of purpose</li> </ul> Comments #</a> </h2> </p> This last free-text question was meant for any additional comments readers might have. The word cloud above is dominated by one sentence: “Thank you for your work”. Thank you very very much for your kind words! We are working on this newsletter in our free time because we love the community and Rust game development, so reading this means a lot to us.</p> Correlations #</a> </h2> We were interested in how the responses to some questions correlated with how much people had already contributed to the newsletter. Long story short: it seems like there is no significant correlation between how much people contributed and how they answered the other questions.</p> Let’s look at the correlations in turn now. Note that all the following plots are jittered to make the data more readable.</p> Excitement By Contributions #</a> </h3> </p> We hypothesized that people who contributed more to the newsletter would be more excited about it. We found no evidence for this (the p-value of a Jonckheere-Terpstra test for increasing trend is 0.986). Based on the plot above, we then hypothesized that the opposite might be true, namely that frequent contributors are less excited about the newsletter. This actually might be the case (p-value is 0.021), but do not take this as a strong result. It is a posthoc hypothesis and the resulting p-value is not very low considering the number of tests we run in this analysis. For these reasons, we do not consider this result to be significant.</p> Feelings About AI By Contributions #</a> </h3> </p> We hypothesized that there would be a correlation between how much people contributed to the newsletter and how they felt about AI-generated summaries. We found no evidence for this (the p-value of a Jonckheere-Terpstra test for a two-sided alternative is 0.57).</p> Ease of Contributing By Contributions #</a> </h3> </p> We hypothesized that there would be a correlation between how much people contributed to the newsletter and how easily they found it to contribute.</p> We found no evidence for this (the p-value of a Jonckheere-Terpstra test for a two-sided alternative is 0.25).</p> Conclusion #</a> </h2> All in all, we are happy with the results of the survey. It seems like our readers are generally happy with the newsletter, and have good ideas on how to improve it. We will discuss how to implement these ideas in the future and keep you updated on our progress.</p> If you are interested in helping us out, we are always looking for new editors and contributors. Just leave us a message on Discord</a> or GitHub</a>.</p> Again, thank you very much for your feedback. Rebooting the newsletter was a big ordeal for us, and we are happy to see such an active interest in the community. We hope that we can continue to provide you with a newsletter you enjoy.</p> Until next time!</p> ~ The Rust GameDev Newsletter Team, and Jan Hohenheim in particular</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #50 - April 2024 Unknown — Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 50th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Please fill out this survey</a> before skipping this section! More info below!</em></p> Hey everyone, it’s been a while! As you’ve certainly noticed, the newsletter has been on hiatus for a while. The reason was mostly maintainer burnout, which is also why the newsletter of August 2023 was not published until a few days ago</a>.</p> We’re back now though! A couple of community members, Jan Hohenheim (@janhohenheim</a>) and Thierry Berger (@Vrixyz</a>), have led the revival of the newsletter. This includes making changes requested by the community, and improving sustainability for the long term.</p> You can read more about the changes being made in this blog post</a>.</p> Community Survey #</a> </h3> This restructuring is also a good time to improve the content of the newsletter. We’ve got some community feedback on the Rust GameDev Discord</a> already and would like to hear more from you. It would be great if you could fill out this survey</a> to let us know how we can improve the newsletter going forward. The survey closes on the 28th of May</strong>. We will be evaluating the survey</a> results in an upcoming blog post, so stay tuned for that.</p> That’s all for now. Have fun reading!</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> just got a release date: it will be coming to Steam on May 20th, 2024</strong>!</p> Way of Rhea (Steam</a>) is a color-based puzzle game with difficult puzzles, but forgiving mechanics being developed by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine.</p> You can support development by wishlisting Way of Rhea on Steam</a>, or signing up for the mailing list</a>.</p> Recently, a closed beta</a> began. All characters now have voices, and various speedrunning features</a> were added. Older CPUs are now supported</a>. Secrets were made harder, and an in-game achievement UI</a> was created.</p> For the full changelog, see the release notes</a>.</p> sm64jsarchive</a> #</a> </h3> </p> SM64JSARCHIVE</a> is an actively maintained fork of sm64js</a>: a decompilation project of Super Mario 64 to JavaScript. Additional sidenote: The MMO servers are not always running for sm64jsarchive.</p> The backend server, which is written in Rust, is now live at https://sm64jsarchive.com</a></p> A successful stress test for the MMO feature was run on April 10th.</p> Open Combat</a> #</a> </h3> Official demo available soon</figcaption> </figure> Open Combat (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) is a real-time tactical game which takes place during World War II.</p> The basic game logic and HUD are now complete, and the high-definition map for the demo is finished.</p> Some things are missing, like high-definition assets for soldiers or minimal AI for opponents. But the demo is playable</a> and the team would love to hear your feedback!</p> Times of Progress</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Times of Progress (Steam</a>, Twitter/X</a>, Mastodon</a>) is an upcoming city builder game set during the industrial revolution.</p> In April, they added lots of UI widgets and improved performance by refactoring the orders system.</p> The demo is not available yet but interested players can sign up for the upcoming closed beta by joining the newsletter</a>.</p> Monk Tower #</a> </h3> </p> Monk Tower (itch.io</a>, Google Play</a>, Github</a>) is a tiny coffee-break roguelike game, intended for short runs (ca. 15mins).</p> The gameplay is quite distilled and revolves mostly around resource management. The player has limited inventory capacity and the weapons get damaged after each use. There are 20 randomly generated levels to beat.</p> It is available on desktop (Windows / Linux), Android, and Web (mobile friendly). The game’s source code also comes with a custom WGPU-based 2D framework.</p> Discussions: (/r/roguelikes</a>)</em></p> You are Merlin #</a> </h3> </p> You are Merlin (Web Game</a>, GitHub - Rust/CLI</a>, GitHub - WASM</a>) by @hseager</a> is a text adventure game that compiles to both CLI and WebAssembly.</p> This initial version features a main quest, side quests, items, and a boss fight. Players can choose their favourite visual theme such as Zelda, Warcraft, and Fallout. The web version also supports mobile devices.</p> Although fairly simple, this first version provides a good foundation for building more features in later updates.</p> Discussions: (/r/rust_gamedev</a>)</em></p> Jumpy</a> #</a> </h3> Jumpy: Machine gun and Periscope</figcaption> </figure> Jumpy</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by Spicy Lobster</a> is a pixel-style, tactical 2D shooter with a fishy theme.</p> This month the base functionalities of round scoring and map transitions have been implemented. New weapons such as the Blunderbuss, Periscope, and Machine Gun are ready for fish-on-fish combat.</p> Jumpy is now featuring corpse physics and a “ragdoll” button to send your Fish flopping about</a>.</p> On the treasure map for the near future is improving UX and new player experience, polish and improvements on match scoring / round transitions, and more awesome weapons.</p> Discussions: GitHub</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Bottomless-Pit 0.3 #</a> </h3> </p> Bottomless-Pit is a 2d game engine written with WGPU that has been around for a year, which can be found on crates.io</a> and GitHub</a>. Very recently a 2d camera was added as well as WASM and web support. Current development is being focused on stability and QoL changes like texture sampling options and improved input. You can check out several engine examples on the web</a>. Since the engine is in its infancy, its developer calls for developers to use it and give the engine some feedback.</p> Current features are:</p> Custom Shader Support</li> Basic rendering</li> Text rendering</li> Input and window event handling</li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Building games for Android with Rust #</a> </h3> @maciekglowka</a> has recently shared some thoughts on their blog</a> about building Rust games for Android. Rather than a step-by-step guide, it is a collection of issues one can possibly encounter when targeting Android.</p> Topics mentioned:</p> ‘Window’ creation (via winit)</li> Android app’s lifecycle vs. the WGPU surface creation</li> User data storage</li> System UI hiding via jni and Android API</li> Building AAB files to meet Google Play requirements</li> </ul> Bevy: A case study in ergonomic Rust #</a> </h3> Chris Biscardi</a> was at RustNation UK recently and gave talk on Bevy’s Rusty ergonomics titled Bevy: A case study in ergonomic Rust</a>. In their own words:</p> There are at least two, if not three, talks worth of material around how Bevy progressively discloses complexity across multiple “stacks” of APIs; and the work done so far is very impressive in terms of how it all fits together, especially as a large-and-growing OSS project.</p> </blockquote> Reactivity in Bevy: From the Bottom Up #</a> </h3> Talin</a> wrote a three-part series on “Reactivity in Bevy: From the Bottom Up”</a>, which describes the workings of bevy_reactor</code>, an experimental, work-in-progress framework for doing reactive programming within Bevy.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> Jolt Bindings #</a> </h3> Lucian Greathouse</a> has published their Jolt</a> bindings for Rust. Jolt is a C++ physics engine you might know from its use in Horizon: Forbidden West. Lucian has previously worked on JoltC</a>, a C API for Jolt, which this project uses in the background.</p> The bindings work can be found on the just-rust GitHub repo</a> GitHub repository and come in two flavors:</p> joltc-sys</code>: Unsafe bindings to the C API</li> rolt</code>: Ergonomic and safe Rust API</li> </ul> Hexx 0.17 #</a> </h3> Hexx, the popular crate for hexagonal tools, has released version 0.17</a>. This release has a strong focus on performance:</p> Large performance improvement on various computations like rings and wedges</li> Add support for optimized storage for hexagonal and rhombus-shaped maps</li> Added support for rectiline path</li> </ul> And utility:</p> Added a 13th example showcasing all natively supported shapes</li> Removed confusing items</li> </ul> Lightyear 0.13</a> #</a> </h3> lightyear_website</a> is a comprehensive networking library for bevy to make multiplayer games. It comes with multiple types of transports (WebTransport, WebSocket, UDP, etc.) and supports replication techniques like client-side prediction, server interpolation, interest management, and more! Check out the examples</a>!</p> The latest release, 0.13</a>, brings two big new features:</p> Steam support</strong>: you can now use the Steamworks SDK as your transport layer, which lets you use the Valve network! Note that lightyear supports running multiple transports in parallel, so it’s possible to have cross-play between Steam and non-Steam users.</li> Listen-server mode</strong>: it is now possible to run a server and a client in the same process/bevy app. This can be useful to avoid the costs of a dedicated server, or to have a similar codebase between singleplayer and multiplayer.</li> </ul> Example (with 300ms of latency)</a></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Alice I. Cecile of the Bevy Foundation would like to collect community feedback on game development in Rust. Please fill out her survey</a>!</li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> LogLog games has published a very well-written blog post</a> about their reasons to leave Rust gamedev. It talks about shortcomings in Rust as a language in general and as a game development tool in particular. Some insights into the limitations of ECS are also provided. Some interesting community discussions have been sparked by this post:</p> Hacker News</a></li> /r/gamedev</a></li> /r/rust</a></li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, rust@lemmy.ml</a>, Hacker News</a>, Mastodon</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> Newsletter Changes Unknown — Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Please fill out this survey</a> before skipping this section! More info below!</em></p> Hey everyone, it’s been a while! As you’ve certainly noticed, the newsletter has been on hiatus for some months. The reason was mostly maintainer burnout, which is also why the newsletter of August 2023 was not published until a few days ago</a>.</p> We’re back now though! A couple of community members, Jan Hohenheim (@janhohenheim</a>) and Thierry Berger (@Vrixyz</a>), have led the revival of the newsletter. This includes making changes requested by the community, and improving sustainability for the long term.</p> Schedule Changes #</a> </h3> Thierry Berger (@Vrixyz</a>), has come up with a new monthly schedule</a> that we will try out:</p> 3rd of the month: Newsletter starts. A call for submissions is made on social media and community Discord servers interested in receiving it. At the same time, last month’s newsletter is published.</li> 3rd to 28th of the month: submissions are collected and the newsletter is written.</li> 28th of the month: Submissions are closed. New submissions go into the next month’s newsletter.</li> 3rd of the next month: The newsletter is published. Any submissions not edited in time will be moved to the next month or removed entirely.</li> </ul> This more strict schedule should help with the issue of late entries and reduce the pressure of editing by having a dedicated time for it with no incoming submissions. The goal is to be more consistent and reliable in our publishing schedule.</p> Community Survey #</a> </h3> This restructuring is also a good time to improve the content of the newsletter. We’ve got some community feedback on the Rust GameDev Discord</a> already and would like to hear more from you. It would be great if you could fill out this survey</a> to let us know how we can improve the newsletter going forward. The survey closes on the 28th of May 2024</strong>. We will be evaluating the survey</a> results in an upcoming blog post, so stay tuned for that.</p> Future Steps #</a> </h3> Based on feedback we’ve already gotten, the steps for next months are:</p> Add an email subscription option to the newsletter</li> Setup a system for how to edit entries that are not ready before the newsletter ships. We are currently looking into either hiring a part-time editor, using generative AI to add a few sentences where needed, or simply removing these entries.</li> </ul> That’s all for now. Have fun reading!</p> Rust Gamedev Meetup 33 Unknown — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 </p> The 33rd Rust Gamedev Meetup took place on December 9th. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on YouTube</a>. The meetup took place on the Rust Gamedev YouTube</a> and Twitch</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Talks #</a> </h2> Blue Engine</a> | @ElhamAryanpur</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Updates about community work for the Blue Engine, as well as future engine features coming up.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> Blue Engine GitHub repository</a></li> Blue Engine Discord server</a></li> </ul> Galaxion Trade Wars</a> | @Syn-Nine</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Space Trading Game made in Rust based on the Trade Wars 2002 BBS game.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> Galaxion Trade Wars GitHub repository</a></li> Syn-Nine Twitter</a></li> Syn-Nine Website</a></li> </ul> Bones Engine</a> | @zicklag</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> A ‘meta-engine’ framework made to facilitate the development of moddable, multiplayer 2D games.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> @zicklag</a></li> Bone Engine GitHub repository</a></li> Jumpy GitHub repository</a></li> Jumpy’s Migration to the Bones Framework</a></li> Introducing Lua Scripting in Jumpy</a></li> </ul> This Month in Rust GameDev #49 - August 2023 Unknown — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 49th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> It’s been a while, huh? This newsletter is coming to you with a delay because the project cost too much maintainer burden and was put on hold for a while. Since then, we have had some restructuring and are back now, starting this month! The exact details will be part of April’s newsletter, scheduled for release on May 3rd (just 5 days from now!) See you all then!</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Graviton - The Great Sand Simulator</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graviton - The Great Sand Simulator</a> (Discord</a>, Youtube</a>) by @hakolao</a> is a falling sand simulator in which you can define your own interactive sand rules.</p> Continuing the developer’s exploration into GPU sand simulation the app has been recently taken to another level with a complete rewrite. Now, with some training</a>, you can program your own rules for the sand. Many example sands are provided from acid and blood to the classic Game of Life.</p> Recent updates include:</p> Customizable sand with programmable rules.</li> Shape & Mirror Draw Modes</a>.</li> New UI, graphics and render modes.</li> Gif and Image export.</li> Image import.</li> </ul> You can support the development by purchasing or wishlisting on Steam</a>.</p> Tunnet</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Tunnet (Steam</a>, itch.io</a>) is an upcoming short puzzle/exploration game about digging tunnels and building computer networks.</p> In August, a new version of the demo build has been released</a>. Here are the most notable updates:</p> The game is now better optimized to run smoothly on the Steam Deck.</li> Some of the textures have been revamped and are now slightly more detailed.</li> The animations of the character portraits have been improved.</li> Several minor quality-of-life improvements like the ability to sprint have been made.</li> A basic egui-based crash reporter will now be displayed when the game process ends unexpectedly.</li> </ul> Oort</a> #</a> </h3> A fleet of ships</figcaption> </figure> Oort</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by @rlane</a> is a programming game where you write Rust code to control spaceships in combat against other players. Your code needs to manage the thrusters, guns, missiles, comms, and radar of each ship in your fleet. There’s a series of tutorials where you can solve key problems one by one, such as leading moving targets or missile guidance. The game runs in your browser via WebAssembly.</p> Oort has started running weekly tournaments and the AIs have gotten more and more sophisticated each time. Check out this recent tournament writeup</a> where the top players discuss their strategies.</p> Discussions: r/rust</a></em></p> Tiny Glade</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Tiny Glade</a> (Twitter</a>) is a small relaxing game about doodling castles.</p> This month, Tiny Glade was featured in the Future Games Show August Showcase</a> with an exclusive new trailer.</p> The trailer and a number of accompanying screenshots</a> demonstrate recent changes in the game, and especially show off the new global illumination and dynamic time passage</a>.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A group of friends</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In August, Veloren saw a network library update, new locations in the character selection screen, the implementation of a new portal graphic, and numerous translation updates. Moreover, improvements were made to the airship fixes, loot balancing, and group chat issues. There have also been upgrades to the dependency, a README update, and tweaks to the buff death message.</p> Ongoing projects currently in the works include the addition of Phoenix abilities, NPC arenas, frost Giga attacks, compasses, and a banking storage system. Other upcoming updates include an enhancement to the windmills, CI scripts, saving window size, the selection of a single-player world, the addition of lava material, and improvements to the weather network protocol. Work is also ongoing on ship movement, pet commands, Terracotta ruins, dwarven quarry, coastal towns, clifftown rework, and axe skills. They are also planning to implement physics interactions that increase your height when gliding, including the introduction of thermal and ridgelines.</p> August’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #216</a>.</p> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> Two client windows controlling the same pawn simultaneously.</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>), CyberSoul is developing an ambitious multiplayer project, utilizing procedural generation and AI to offer a dynamic universe.</p> Tech Progress:</p> Complete game framework overhaul.</li> Addressed engine limitations.</li> Upgraded game tools and utilities.</li> Introduced Cosmos APIs for universe management.</li> Redesigned privacy mechanisms.</li> New character authentication system.</li> Persistent player data.</li> Player Accounts: Login, Register, Verify, Guests.</li> </ul> Also, this month’s gameplay changes include characters remaining active despite a client’s closure and saved player inventory, achievements, and settings.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> goku</a> #</a> </h3> goku</a> (Discord</a>) by @ladroid</a> is a new 2D Rust game engine backed by SDL2. It’s currently compatible with Windows and WASM and features multi-language (Spa, Fra, Ger, Jpn) docs</a>.</p> Quick Peek:</p> Sprite sheets loading and animation support.</li> Basic particle effects.</li> Point, spot, and ambient lights.</li> UI layer with ready widgets like buttons, checkboxes, and sliders.</li> Audio support backed by SDL2 Mixer.</li> Gamepad input support.</li> Tile system and JSON format for describing scenes.</li> Built-in support for parallax backgrounds.</li> Simple timing and frame management utils.</li> Behavior tree AIs.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Failing to build P2P Multiplayer Pong with Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @chrisbiscardi</a> published a video</a> covering P2P multiplayer games with rollback networking and physics. This video dives into what makes it difficult and what parts work out of the box before identifying better potential paths to take in the future.</p> Discussions: Mastodon</a></em></p> Mobile Development with Bevy #</a> </h3> @Nikl</a> published two blog posts on the topic of mobile development using Bevy. The first post</a> concentrates on getting builds ready for the Apple and Google App stores. It outlines how to use the tool x-build</a> to create Android App bundles and some required changes to get iOS builds accepted by the App store.</p> A second post</a> documents how to set up and configure a GitHub workflow to automate releases of a Bevy application to the Google Play Store.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Space editor</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Space editor</a> is an editor designed for Bevy engine that simplifies level and object template creation. Here are its key features:</p> Intuitive UI is built on top of bevy-inspector-egui and egui-gizmo to easy objects manipulate.</li> It supports the bevy_xpbd physics library, making customizing collider positions faster than ever.</li> Run your levels directly from the editor. This enables quick and efficient development iteration.</li> Save your levels and object templates in the standard Bevy scene format and spawn in game with just one line of code.</li> Many custom structures that allow you to customize saved scenes equally conveniently, both via gui and directly editing the saved text file.</li> </ul> The Github project</a> is free for use and open to contributions from everyone, be it with suggestions, bugs or PRs.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> Dexterous Developer</a> #</a> </h3> Dexterous Developer</a> by @lee-orr</a> is an experimental hot-reload system for the Bevy</a> game engine. Features:</p> Define the reloadable areas of your game explicitly - which can include systems, components, and resources (with some limitations).</li> Reset resources to a default or pre-determined value upon reload.</li> Serialize/deserialize your reloadable resources & components, allowing you to evolve their schemas so long as they are compatible with the de-serializer.</li> Mark entities to get removed on hot reload.</li> Run systems after hot-reload.</li> Create functions to set up & tear down upon either entering/exiting a state or on hot reload.</li> Only includes any hot reload capacity in your build when you explicitly enable it - such as by using the CLI launcher.</li> Cross-platform/cross-device hot reload - run a “hot reload server” on a dev environment, and execute the application elsewhere.</li> </ul> The library is quite new and currently known issues include: mobile/WASM support and the need to pre-define events & states.</p> nanogltf</a> #</a> </h3> nanogltf+miniquad glTF viewer</figcaption> </figure> nanogltf</a> by @not-fl3</a> is a minimalist nanoserde</a>-based glTF</a> parser library that can load most of the glTF’s sample models</a> and fairly complex Blender exported scenes.</p> Macroquad used to be notoriously bad at 3d. nanogltf is a part of a big macroquad overhaul with a goal to make it suitable for, at least, simple low-poly 3d games.</p> </blockquote> nanogltf comes with a a GL2+/Metal glTF miniquad-based viewer example</a>.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Tribes</a> got multiplayer support, new art and economics rework.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Rust Gamedev Meetup 32 Unknown — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 </p> The 32nd Rust Gamedev Meetup took place on November 11th. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on YouTube</a>. The meetup took place on the Rust Gamedev YouTube</a> and Twitch</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Talks #</a> </h2> Minewars</a> | @inodentry</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> An upcoming multiplayer minesweeper game. Video link</a></strong></p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> GitHub + Sponsors: @inodentry</a></li> Mastodon: @iyes@mastodon.gamedev.place</a></li> Discord: Minewars Discord server</a></li> Open source client: Minewars GitHub</a></li> Public documentation: Minewars Documentation</a></li> Open-source vs proprietary plans: Minewars FOSS Plans</a></li> </ul> Blade</a> | @Kvark</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Sharp and simple graphics library Video link</a></strong></p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> GitHub repo: Blade</a></li> </ul> Jarl</a> | @zaycev</a> | Video link</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> A fantasy colony simulator. Video link</a></strong></p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> GitHub: @zaycev</a></li> Website: Jarl Game</a></li> Twitter: @jarl_game</a></li> YouTube: Jarl-Game-com</a></li> Discord: Jarl Discord server</a></li> </ul> The Seeker</a> | @inodentry</a>, @c12hz</a> | Video link</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> A 2D platformer game. Video link</a></strong></p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> Discord: Seeker Discord server</a></li> GitHub: @TheSeekerGame</a></li> </ul> Rust Gamedev Meetup 31 Unknown — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 </p> The 31th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place on October 14th. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on YouTube</a>. The meetup will take place on the Rust Gamedev YouTube</a> and Twitch</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Talks #</a> </h2> Games, but no video: Embedded trinkets in Rust</a> | @Noxim</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An overview of making games with constrained hardware</p> </blockquote> Slides</a></li> Hardware</a></li> Firmware</a></li> Rustc</a></li> PAC + HAL</a></li> Blog post</a></li> </ul> Tunnet</a> | @puzzled_squid</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A short game where you design, build, and optimize a computer network in an underground complex</p> </blockquote> itch.io page</a></li> YouTube trailer</a></li> Website</a></li> </ul> </p> Rust Gamedev Meetup 30 Unknown — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 </p> The 30th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place on September 23rd. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on YouTube</a>. The meetup will take place on the Rust Gamedev YouTube</a> and Twitch</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Talks #</a> </h2> Blue Engine</a> | @ElhamAryanpur</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Updates about the Blue Engine project and its 0.5.0 release.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> Blue Engine GitHub repository</a></li> Blue Engine Discord server</a></li> </ul> Cybergate</a> | @cybersoulK</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An overview of Cybergate, a multiplayer game being developed for native and browser play.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> Cybergate Discord server</a></li> </ul> no_std: ?no_problem</a> | @kpreid</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An introduction to making your Rust crates no_std</code> compatible, and why you might want to do this.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p> YouTube Video</a></li> Slides</a></li> </ul> This Month in Rust GameDev #48 - July 2023 Unknown — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 48th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #29</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> The 29th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in July. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on YouTube</a>. The schedule:</p> Blade</a> by @kvark</a></li> Graphite</a> by @Keavon</a></li> Veloren</a> by @AngelOnFira</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Colony</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Colony</a> by @ryankopf</a> is a colony simulator game built with Bevy that is open source and is in a pre-alpha stage. Similar to other colony simulator games like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld, there are units that have their own traits and can be instructed to perform tasks like farming and chopping trees.</p> You can have your units build things, farm stuff, and explore, and the game is soon to be moving onto adding more content and UI, as core features are being completed.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Open Combat</a> #</a> </h3> Game HUD is now more complete</figcaption> </figure> Open Combat (Website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) is a real-time tactical game which takes place during the 2nd World War.</p> Some major changes this month:</p> HUD has been filled with a minimap and squad information.</li> Multiple issues about zoom and move on map have been fixed.</li> A high-definition map has been created.</li> </ul> Some fixes and improvements have to be done, but the devs are near to publishing the official demo of the game!</p> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> The browser uses webtransport (Left), the native uses quinn (Right)</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>), CyberSoul is developing an ambitious multiplayer project, utilizing procedural generation and AI to offer a dynamic universe.</p> The latest updates to CyberGate include:</p> Implemented a Webtransport Client and a universal quic server.</li> A custom game launcher that is reliable and efficient.</li> Universal mechanism to save, load, and upgrade the game world from disk.</li> Optimized multithreaded evolution algorithms for generating universes.</li> Created an accessible editor for fine-tuning component values.</li> </ul> Participate in Testing and Engage with CyberSoul: on Discord</a>.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle game with hard puzzles but forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. You can support development by checking out the free demo and wishlisting on Steam</a> or signing up for the mailing list</a>!</p> Recent updates:</p> Way of Rhea now natively supports Linux, and Steam Deck! Mason released a writeup on the port here</a>.</li> Way of Rhea was part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase</a>.</li> Crash handling was improved, and the build process was simplified (necessary for post-release support). A fix was landed to backtrace-rs</a> as part of the improved crash handling.</li> Time controls were released as part of the updated demo.</li> </ul> tiny-snake.rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> tiny-snake.rs</a> by @Rodrigodd</a> is a terminal snake game, with a minimal binary size.</p> The entire game is implemented in a single file of pure Rust code, with zero dependencies. All interactions with the system are done through raw syscalls (so it only runs on Linux, sorry) and the program is completely panic-free (panic handling increases the binary size by almost 4KiB).</p> The game can be compiled using a single rustc</code> command, and the resulting binary is only 2760 bytes.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> 8bit Duels</a> #</a> </h3> </p> 8bit Duels</a> (Discord</a>) is a turn-based strategy game made by @ThousandthStar</a>. It has been in development for the past year, and the release is right around the corner! A new blog post along with a release Youtube video is coming soon on this channel</a>.</p> This month’s update includes a completely remade user interface. The devlog</a> covers the change from the bevy_ui</a> crate to belly</a>, which provides a nice HTML-like syntax for building the UI. The last devlog post will address the re-implemented UI and the new troop: the Crow!</p> The Crow, as seen in the screenshot above, is a hooded bird assassin with two daggers. It can attack twice per turn, dealing 2 damage each time. The Crow is the last of the five 8bit Duels characters.</p> Ant Colony Simulation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Ant Colony Simulation</a> depicts an ant colony where the ants have a simple task: to find food and bring it back to the colony. To achieve this goal, they use signals called pheromones. These pheromone signals guide the ants to the food source and back to their colony.</p> @BonesaiDev</a> released a couple of videos about the project:</p> An overall explanation</a> of how it works.</li> A timelapse</a> of ant colony at 5x speed.</li> 2D Bloom showcase timelapse</a> with 1k ants.</li> </ul> The project is written using Bevy. You can find the source code on GitHub</a>.</p> Follow @BonesaiDev on Twitter</a> or on YouTube</a> to receive future updates about this and their other AI simulation projects.</p> Cargo Space</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Cargo Space</a> (Discord</a>) by @johanhelsing</a> is a co-op 2d space game where you build a ship and fly it through space looking for new parts, fighting pirates and the environment.</p> This months development was all about making endless procedurally generated parallaxing space backgrounds, choosing an appropriate rng crate, and making the implementation seedable and cross-platform deterministic.</p> Johan’s devlog entry</a> explains all this in detail, as well as how distant parallax can be an immersive replacement for ui and minimaps.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> The 0.15 release party map</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In July, Veloren released version 0.15! You can read about the release in the 0.15 blog post</a>, and watch the release party trailer</a>. Here are some of the changes in this release:</p> The first world boss, the ‘frost giga’: seek him out if you dare!</li> A new dungeon: Adlet caves.</li> Airships can now be used by players.</li> Enemy loot is now shared between players.</li> A reputation system: if you commit crimes, NPCs will remember it!</li> Improved AI: NPCs will talk to players and each other about events in the world.</li> Much richer world simulation: NPCs will migrate and pass on rumours.</li> You can now choose your character’s starting town.</li> A durability and repair system.</li> Improved accessibility, performance, bug fixes, and much, much more!</li> </ul> Work over July includes TCP receive buffer increase, spawn tab completion, loot changes, translation updates, dwarven quarry ⛏️ (still inactive in game), coastal town, desert city fixes, CI optimization, and shorter item count texts. Work is going on to add a web-based translation tool for Veloren.</p> July’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #213</a>, #214</a>.</p> Idu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Idu</a> (Discord</a>) is a strategic sandbox game about growing plants that wish to reclaim nature, developed by Elina Shakhnovich</a> and Johann Tael</a> featuring a bespoke Vulkan-based engine in Rust.</p> This month a new demo was released</a>:</p> New water mechanics: instantly fill large pools and build channels to transport water.</li> A climbing plant.</li> A new particle system for special effects.</li> Swimming and improved climbing out of water.</li> Configurable keybindings.</li> </ul> MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80</a> (Discord</a>, mailing list</a>) by Second Half Games</a> is an upcoming third-person action-engineering space game.</p> This month the third update was released, you can watch</a> or read it</a>. Highlights:</p> New engineering system allows inspecting objects around the player, modifying your equipment using workbenches, and adding wires between sockets located on different pieces of equipment.</li> Improved physics simulation that now features heat radiation and incandescence.</li> </ul> Space Kitty</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Space Kitty</a> by @ghashy</a> is a platformer about a Kitty floating in space in search of crackers.</p> Somewhere in the distant space there are lots of tasty crackers floating around. In search of this highly valuable resource there are two competing parties - the DOGS and the KITTY. One can never say when the contest had begun, but it’s clear that to this day there is a game for the title of the Great Cracker Collector. Every time the cracker is taken the lucky one emits a signal to the base about his achievement. The KITTY - highly responsible and intelligent creature - always sends the exact amount of collected treasures, while the DOGS rely on their feelings. Some of them truly believe that they got multiple crackers at a time, some just can’t count, and about honesty of the others one can only guess…</p> </blockquote> The source code of the game can be found on GitHub</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Flesh</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Flesh</a> by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation, an organic/fleshy theme and a unique story. It is implemented using Tetra</a>.</p> After almost three years of development, it’s finally out on Steam</a>!</p> Dive into a surreal journey as you devour a ship and battle peculiar creatures in this 2D side-scrolling bullet hell shmup. Unleash your skills, dodge relentless barrages, and uncover hidden mysteries in a hand-drawn world of flesh and gore.</p> </blockquote> The demo version was also updated, so consider trying the project out yourself.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> HackeRPG</a> #</a> </h3> </p> HackeRPG</a> is a WIP action game where you play as a developer who needs to fight viruses and bugs with coding in real-time. The game’s features include controlling your character using coding and expanding your toolset by programming your own functions, variables and daemons.</p> Recent updates</a> include:</p> The first playable prototype is now avalable on itch.io.</li> Sound effects.</li> Input autocomplete.</li> New enemies.</li> </ul> Here’s a YouTube video</a> that showcases the current gameplay.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy v0.11</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open-source</a> forever!</p> Bevy 0.11 brought many incredible new features. You can check out the full release blog post here</a>, but here are some highlights:</p> Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)</a></li> Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA)</a></li> Morph Targets</a></li> Robust Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (RCAS)</a></li> WebGPU Support</a></li> Improved Shader Imports</a></li> Parallax Mapping</a></li> Skyboxes</a></li> Schedule-First ECS APIs</a></li> Gizmos</a></li> ECS Audio APIs</a></li> UI Borders</a></li> Grid UI Layout</a></li> UI Performance Improvements</a></li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a>, Mastodon</a></em></p> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fyrox</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features.</p> This month Fyrox v0.31 was released</a>. Highlights include:</p> A huge bunch of editor improvements like the ability to create custom editor plugins, ability to open multiple scenes, saving/loading docking manager layout, and a separate panel for camera preview.</li> Inverter node for AI behaviour trees.</li> 9-slice image widget.</li> Lots of API docs</a> and the book</a> improvements, mostly related to UI stuff.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Mobile Development with Bevy #</a> </h3> @Nikl</a> spent some time developing a mobile game using Bevy and documented findings on his blog</a>. The first post</a> contains notes on general project setup and some Android specific solutions.</p> GitHub workflows were created for automatic builds. A guide on how to set up an iOS workflow</a> was released at the end of July.</p> Gentle Intro to GPUs for Backend Devs Pt1</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Vladimir Zaytsev</a> released the first part</a> of a series about introducing backend engineers to GPU programming:</p> In this series of articles, I would like to offer a gentle and popular introduction to GPU programming specifically tailored for engineers. Whether you’re new to GPU programming or simply want to expand your knowledge, we’ve got you covered. I’ll explain the fundamentals of GPU programming in a way that’s easy to grasp if you’re more accustomed to working with backend services.</p> </blockquote> The first part gives a high-level introduction into GPU compute landscape and walks a reader through a toy GPU program written with wgpu.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Rerun</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Rerun</a> (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>) is an open-source SDK for logging complex visual data paired with a visualizer for exploring that data over time. While its primary focus is on robotics and computer vision, it can be useful for all kinds of rapid prototyping & algorithm development.</p> v0.8.0</a> and subsequently v0.8.1</a> are out now!</p> A few of the biggest highlights:</p> Pinhole logging is now easier to use in many cases.</li> The visualizer can now show coordinate arrows for all affine transforms within the view.</li> Users that build their own Viewer applications can now add fully custom Space Views.</li> New optional flush_timeout specifies how long Rerun will wait if a TCP stream is disconnected during a flush.</li> The RecordingStream</code> now offers a stateful time API, similar to the Python APIs</li> Defaults to 8ms long microbatches instead of 50ms. This makes the default behavior more suitable for use-cases like real-time video feeds.</li> The web viewer now incremental loads .rrd files when streaming over HTTP. #2412</li> </ul> There’s a growing community on Discord</a> waiting for you to join in case you have any questions, comments or just want to follow the latest development. The GitHub project</a> is MIT/Apache licensed and open to contribute for everyone, be it with suggestions, bugs or PRs.</p> glTF IBL Sampler UI</a> #</a> </h3> </p> glTF IBL Sampler UI</a> by @pcwalton</a> is an artist-friendly egui frontend that wraps glTF IBL Sampler</a> to generate cubemap skyboxes from panoramas.</p> It provides an easy way to generate skyboxes for use in Bevy and other new game engines that use the modern KTX2 format as their native texture format. By default, the panorama is split up into base color, diffuse, and specular parts, with the mipmap levels corresponding to different roughness values of the material.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> bevy_xpbd</a> #</a> </h3> Newton’s cradle simulated using bevy_xpbd</figcaption> </figure> bevy_xpbd</a> by @Jondolf</a> is a 2D and 3D physics engine based on Extended Position Based Dynamics for the Bevy game engine. It uses Bevy’s Entity Component System (ECS) directly for the simulation data and logic, which makes the design and API feel better integrated into Bevy while avoiding the overhead associated with copying lots of data to a separate data structure like in many other physics engines such as bevy_rapier.</p> In mid-July, bevy_xpbd 0.2 was released, featuring:</p> Spatial queries (ray casting, shape casting, point projection, intersection tests);</li> Bevy 0.11 support;</li> Improved scheduling;</li> Velocity damping;</li> Gravity scale;</li> Locking translational and rotational axes;</li> </ul> and much more. You can find more details in the release post</a> and changelog</a>.</p> A lot of work was also done during the rest of July. The physics debug renderer was improved, collision stability issues were significantly reduced, external impulses were added, and Bevy’s own Transform</code>s can now be used directly for moving bodies. The narrow phase part of collision detection was also refactored into a separate plugin, which makes multithreading and several upcoming features much easier to implement while also improving modularity.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Sparsey</a> #</a> </h3> Sparsey</a> by @LechintanTudor</a> is a fast and flexible Entity Component System based on sparse sets.</p> The latest release, v0.11.0, improves the performance of adding and removing components from entities and adds new functions for running systems that only borrow data from one of World, Resources or SyncResources.</p> Hanabi</a> #</a> </h3> Hanabi effect entirely simulated on GPU thanks to the new Expression API of v0.7</figcaption> </figure> The Hanabi</a> library (GitHub</a>, docs.rs</a>) is a modern VFX library for the Bevy game engine</a>. It focuses on scale to produce stunning visual effects (VFX) in real time, offloading most of the work to the GPU (compute shaders), with minimal CPU intervention. The design is inspired by modern particle systems found in other industry-leading game engines.</p> This month, Hanabi</a> saw its biggest release so far. Version 0.7 of Hanabi not only brings support for Bevy 0.11, but also adds a whole new Expression API to provide a new level of customizing for VFX authors. With expressions, developers can combine simple building blocks like simulation parameters (time</code>, delta_time</code>), effect properties (user-defined variables controlled from CPU), and math operators (add</code>, mul</code>, cos</code>, …), to directly modify each attribute of a particle (position, velocity, …) and form complex behaviors with complete control. The expression API complements and extends the existing Modifier</code>-based workflow to achieve even more complex effects.</p> This release also marks a major stepping stone toward the ability to build a visual editor (node graph) to build and tweak visual effects in real time.</p> Other changes include the ability to set a screen-space size for particles, and a new KillSphereModifier</code> to confine particles to the inside or the outside of a sphere. See the CHANGELOG</a> for all details.</p> Iced</a> #</a> </h3> Visualisation of damaged regions during the incremental rendering</figcaption> </figure> Iced</a> is a Rust GUI library focused on simplicity and type safety.</p> Iced v0.10</a> is a huge release that brings a lot of updates. Some highlights:</p> Huge improvements to the text handling strategy thanks to the adoption of cosmic-text</a>.</li> A new CPU-only software renderer based on tiny-skia</a>.</li> Runtime renderer fallback.</li> Configurable LineHeight support for text widgets.</li> Nested overlays.</li> Backend-specific primitives.</li> Offscreen rendering & screenshots.</li> Gradients for backgrounds.</li> ComboBox widget.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Robo Instructus</a> was released 4 year ago - Alex Butler shared an article</a> about game’s updates, stats, and user feedback from the last year.</li> snaked</a> by @kuviman</a> is a reversed snake game where you play as food.</li> @Syn9Dev</a> shared a couple of updates about their retro JRPG: battle inventory</a> and cave bugs enemies</a>.</li> Sulis</a> v1.0 was released this month</a>.</li> @martin-t resumed developemnt of RecWars</a>.</li> Vladimir Zaytsev posted a video</a> of his WIP colony sim showcasing the early progress on construction mechanics.</li> mochia.net</a> is a virtual pet site inspired by Neopets, with a backend written in Rust.</li> @dobkeratops shared an update on their WIP shooter game</a> featuring lighting tweaks and vehicle turrets.</li> Maginet</a> added an undo button and preparing for Steam release.</li> PatchGames started working on a new city building game</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: godot-rs now supports Godot 4.1</a>.</li> ggez v0.9</a> mostly brings slight API tweaks and bugfixes. The devs also shared their plans for ggez v10: 3d support, async asset loading, and coroutines.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: GitGhillie shared an article</a> about using Blender as a level editor for Bevy.</li> PhaestusFox released more Bevy tutorials on YouTube</a>: mostly about Bevy v0.11, Bevy’s UI plugins, and Rapier integration.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: Internet Archive expands its Flash support using Ruffle.</a></li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: bevy_vello</a> is a Bevy plugin that provides rendering support for lottie</a> animations and SVGs on Bevy using Vello</a> and Velato</a>.</li> hexx v0.8</a> release adds a hexmod representation and resolution system.</li> cuicui_layout</a> is a dumb layout algorithm you can rely on, built for and with Bevy.</li> renet v0.0.13</a> slightly improves the API and brings a couple of bugfixes.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: “Data Oriented architectures other than ECS?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> bevy_mod_scripting is looking for maintainers</a>.</li> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Ambient’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #47 - June 2023 Unknown — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 47th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #27</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> The 28th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in June. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The schedule:</p> Blade by @kvark</a></li> Graphite by @Keavon</a></li> Digital Extinction by @Indy2222</a></li> Bevy Jam #3 Games by @AngelOnFira</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Flesh</a> #</a> </h3> Intro</figcaption> </figure> Flesh</a> by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation, an organic/fleshy theme and a unique story. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. The game’s development has finished and will be released soon. The last update before release includes:</p> Intro/Ending/End credits animation.</li> Add a variant version of Conway’s Game of Life as background.</li> Improve effect in the gameplay with distortion shaders.</li> Update the demo build with improved graphics and performance.</li> </ul> Space Frontiers</a> #</a> </h3> Render achieved with dynamic point lights.</figcaption> </figure> Space Frontiers</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>, Reddit</a>, Steam Group</a>) by Starwolves</a> is an online moddable sci-fi action RPG community game simulating space (and spaceships) in 3D.</p> By the end of last year, the client was made with Godot. Shortly after that the decision was made to replace the Godot project with a Bevy Engine</a> client.</p> Rust and Bevy are now used for both server and client. There are a lot of advantages such as sharing libraries and neat code replication, reducing code overhead. In fact, both the server and client are now developed in the same virtual workspace</a>.</p> The client includes a new camera perspective from top-down isometric to 1st person. A new 3D dynamic gridmap framework has been successfully implemented in ECS. The prototype includes an in-game map editing tool with the ability to export to file. Inspired by the videogame “System Shock”. There is a recently uploaded showcase video</a>.</p> The project is commercial, open-source</a> and has a proprietary license. There is a milestone for a license change to free open-source.</p> Starwolves.io Bulletin Board</a> was launched half a year ago. There are 25~ registrants left that can receive a permanent unique forum group/title.</p> Discussions: StarWolves.io Bulletin Board</a></em></p> Digital Extinction #</a> </h3> Building Placement in Digital Extinction</figcaption> </figure> Digital Extinction</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Reddit</a>) by @Indy2222</a> is a 3D real-time strategy game made with Bevy</a>.</p> The most notable updates are:</p> nightly versions are automatically built and published on de-game.org</a> and elsewhere,</li> significant progress has been made on multiplayer and networking,</li> animated arrows on terrain are displayed for selected factories, indicating the path from the units’ spawn points to their delivery locations,</li> semi-transparent square markers are drawn on the terrain around selected buildings,</li> health bars are briefly displayed above units and buildings when they take damage or their health changes,</li> the implementation and design of the “Energy” have started to take shape,</li> the head-up display (HUD) shows the total battery charge and the number of selected units and buildings,</li> the main theme song plays in a loop, the volume of the music can be configured,</li> the aspect ratio of the minimap matches that of the game map,</li> the option to invert camera zooming has been added to the configuration,</li> the documentation</a> has been converted to mdBook.</li> </ul> See gameplay</a> screen recordings on YouTube.</p> A more detailed July update is available here</a>.</p> Tribes #</a> </h3> </p> Tribes (working title) by @uvizhe</a> is a turn-based strategy game about tribes of hunters and gatherers. It’s being developed using Bevy.</p> The first devlog</a> introduces the game, outlines its current state and future plans, accompanied by some thoughts from the developer.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Mastodon</a></em></p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle game with hard puzzles but forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. You can support development by checking out the free demo and wishlisting on Steam</a> or signing up for the mailing list</a>!</p> Recent updates:</p> Puzzle design and layout complete!</li> Continued work on polish, working towards a closed beta</li> Work continued on native Linux & Steam Deck port</a>, the port is unfinished but playable</li> Increased staff throw velocity to make it easier to throw staves off ledges</li> Various performance improvements (separate spatial hash for interactive objects)</li> Way of Rhea will be part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase</a> August 3rd-7th!</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Veloren over the years</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In June, Veloren prepared for an upcoming release coming in July. Work included various fixes, charms, one-way walls, ip address anonymization in logs, the addition of the frost gigas boss in game, savanna hut updates, plant creatures, cyclops, and much more.</p> Ongoing work is happening on ship movement, pet commands, Terracotta ruins, dwarven quarry, coastal towns, clifftown rework, and axe skills. Work is happening to add physics interactions that increase your height as you’re gliding. This includes thermal and ridge lifts.</p> June’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #211</a>, #212</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> Macroquad examples rendered by Metal API</figcaption> </figure> Macroquad got ported to miniquad-0.4, supporting Metal on Mac and IOS.</p> On the surface all the macroquad API stayed exactly the same, but with use macroquad::miniquad::*</code> being such a breaking change - major version number was bumped. Major version bump made possible to fix a few long-lasting issues, check the full changelog</a> for all the changes.</p> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> In the last few weeks of gdext development, the GDExtension API</a> breaks in Godot’s recently released 4.1 version</a>. Migration is mostly done, several FFI bugs have been addressed on the way.</p> The godot-rust book now has a “Hello World” tutorial</a> + guides on compatibility and selecting Godot version.</p> Noteworthy features:</p> Vector swizzling</li> Signals with parameters</li> Rust-native APIs for Rect2, Aabb, and Plane</li> ToVariant/FromVariant derives</li> Godot native structures</li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy Rendering Demystified #</a> </h3> </p> @logicprojects</a> published a video</a> covering the details of Bevy’s rendering systems. Specifically, he covered the engine’s internal implementation of UI Rendering to show how data flows from the ECS world down to the final wgpu draw calls.</p> Procedural Trees in Ambient #</a> </h3> </p> @mebyz</a> authored a set of articles “building mmo-ready procedural trees using Ambient engine”. The three (1</a>, 2</a>, 3</a>) posts cover a week’s worth of explorations into simple pseudo-random procedural ecosystem generation (trees, mushrooms, etc) system/strategy for Ambient.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Rerun</a> #</a> </h3> Rerun</a> (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>) is an open-source SDK for logging complex visual data paired with a visualizer for exploring that data over time. While its primary focus is on robotics and computer vision, it can be useful for all kinds of rapid prototyping & algorithm development.</p> v0.7.0</a> is out now, but it turned out a little bit smaller:</p> A few of the biggest highlights:</p> Much more powerful transformation logging any affine transforms works now!</li> supports many more formats and shows them in the viewer as-is</li> </ul> </li> Better color mapping range detection for images and tensors</li> Add support for motion JPEG via the new jpeg_quality parameter to log_image</li> Many small improvements to samples & documentation</li> </ul> There’s a growing community on Discord</a> waiting for you to join in case you have any questions, comments or just want to follow the latest development. The GitHub project</a> is MIT/Apache licensed and open to contribute for everyone, be it with suggestions, bugs or PRs.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> posh</a> #</a> </h3> </p> posh</code></a> is a crate that seamlessly integrates a graphics library with an embedded functional shading language. It is a proof of concept that aims to demonstrate that graphics programming can be both type-safe and ergonomic.</p> With posh</code>, shaders are written in plain Rust (with some caveats). Procedural macros are only required for defining custom vertex and uniform types.</p> The core component of posh</code> is the Program<U, V, F></code> type, which acts as a bridge between the shading language and the graphics library. This type represents a compiled shader and serves as the entry point for draw calls. By explicitly carrying the types U</code> (uniform interface), V</code> (vertex shader interface), and F</code> (fragment shader interface), posh</code> enables static verification, ensuring that the data provided in draw calls matches the shader’s signature.</p> For simplicity, posh</code> currently targets OpenGL ES 3.0. Although it is an experimental project, its authors hope to inspire the community to further explore how static typing can elegantly bridge the gap between host code and shader code.</p> For more details, check out the examples</a> or the authors’ blog post</a>.</p> Boytacean</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Boytacean</a> by @joamag</a> is a web-based Game Boy Color emulator (and library) written in Rust.</p> Major features include:</p> Full Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulation.</li> Web (using WebAssembly) and SDL frontends.</li> Ultra-fast performance.</li> Accurate PPU emulation.</li> Game Boy Printer emulation.</li> and many others…</li> </ul> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Idu</a> is a game about growing simulated plants, recent updates include addition of a GPU particle system.</li> Nanovoid</a> is a 2D tactical space shooter game, most recent features have been added to the ship editor.</li> Cells</a> is a singleplayer game inspired by agar.io</a>.</li> MS80</a> is a game about scavenging parts and creating things with them to survive alien attacks. MS80 now does basic simulation of thermodynamics.</li> Maginet</a> updated their game interface and debuted the editor update!</li> Combine And Conquer</a> new release fixes issues with item rendering.</li> rust-drive-ai</a> is a self driving AI simulation game built in span of 30 days that uses the Bevy engine. In addition, under the hood the cars are controlled using neural networks and trained by a genetic algorithm.</li> The Station</a> is a brand new NASA-punk survival game.</li> Turtletime</a> is a multiplayer competitive turtle game built using the Bevy and Matchbox.</li> Tiny Glade</a> updated path detailing.</li> Fish Folk</a> is collection of arcade style multiplayer games where you dive deep in the ocean!</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: Game Dev Graphics</a> posted a series of 3D graphics tutorials in Rust from scratch.</li> Maciej Główka</a> brings updates for map generation to his Bevy roguelike tutorial</a>.</li> Learning Game Dev</a> brings a third edition to their tutorials with building a platformer with Bevy.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: Bitang</a> is a new framework for demoscene productions.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: miniquad</a> now supports GL2/Metal.</li> gecs</a> is a new compile-time generated ECS library.</li> nv-flip</a> library helps you visualize human-noticeable differences between rendered images.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #46 - May 2023 Unknown — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 46th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rusty Jam #3</a> #</a> </h3> Find Ferris</figcaption> </figure> Rusty Jam #3</a> ran from May 21st 2023 to May 29th 2023 and the theme was “Hidden in plain sight”. The jam had a few but high-quality and awesome games.</p> Here’re the winners:</p> 🥇 Find Ferris</a> by kuviman.</li> 🥈 Tug of Orb</a> by anders429.</li> 🥉 The Veiled Path</a> by Jebik.</li> </ul> We wish all the participants good luck in their future endeavors! The RustyJam will be back, so stay tuned on the Rusty Jam Discord</a> for future updates!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #27</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> The 27th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in May. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The schedule:</p> Rusty Jam 3 by @ElhamAryanpur</a></li> Blue Engine by @ElhamAryanpur</a></li> Rerun by @wumpf</a></li> Graphite by @Keavon</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Digital Extinction #</a> </h3> Building Placement in Digital Extinction</figcaption> </figure> Digital Extinction</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Reddit</a>) by @Indy2222</a> is a 3D real-time strategy game made with Bevy</a>.</p> The most notable updates are:</p> poles at unit manufacturing delivery locations for selected factories,</li> pausing unit manufacturing when the spawn location is occupied,</li> IME</a> support for text boxes,</li> a lot of progress on multiplayer networking,</li> logging</a> to file and other logging improvements.</li> </ul> Support for multiplayer is a technologically complex problem to solve and it is the last major missing feature before the proof-of-concept</a> version can be released. Therefore, a lot of effort currently goes in this direction.</p> The game is slowly gaining traction in the development community. Check out our new contributors here</a>.</p> See gameplay</a> screen recordings on YouTube.</p> More detailed monthly updates are available here (May)</a> and here (June)</a>.</p> Tunnet</a> #</a> </h3> Connecting the DJ set to the network</figcaption> </figure> Tunnet (Steam</a>, Itch.io</a>) is a short puzzle/exploration game where the player digs tunnels and connects computers together.</p> As a network engineer, the player will also have to respond to security incidents. In May, this game mechanic has been illustrated in a devlog</a> and a preview of the new basic water simulation</a> has been posted.</p> Fish Folk’s Kickstarter</a> #</a> </h3> </p> This month Fish Folk</a> (itch.io</a>, Discord</a>) has launched their Kickstarter campaign</a> that has already reached its funding goal</a>!</p> Even though the basic sum is collected, the campaign still continues to get more funds for the stretch goals:</p> The plan for how to allocate funds that exceed our €15k goal is very simple: For every additional €1,000 pledged to our campaign, we will prototype another fishy game archetype for our evergrowing bundle. Once our funding run concludes we will poll our backers on which game(s) you would like us to prioritize.</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Escape Room AI</a> #</a> </h3> AI trying to escape a room</figcaption> </figure> escape-ai</a> by @bones-ai</a> is a Rust-based implementation of a genetic algorithm and reinforcement learning simulation. Its purpose is to train an AI named Zoe to escape a room it’s enclosed in. The simulation is built using the Macroquad library.</p> The YouTube video</a> demonstrates 1000 AI bots learning how to escape five rooms of increasing difficulty.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80</a> (Discord</a>, mailing list</a>) by Second Half Games</a> is an upcoming third person action-engineering space game.</p> Second Half Games released the first update video</a> for the game. It includes an introduction to the studio, an overview of the game, and some of the recent progress towards the first public demo.</p> Tiny Glade</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Tiny Glade</a> (Twitter</a>) is a small relaxing game about doodling castles.</p> This month</a> was all about turning previous experiments into reality. The coloring and window prototypes are now proper features, have dedicated UI, and play well with other building tools.</p> The devs have also been toying with</a> real-time global illumination that could run on potato graphics cards.</p> Turtle Time</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Turtle Time by @mikeder</a> is a WIP p2p multiplayer turtle game being made using Bevy, ggrs</a>, and matchbox</a>.</p> This month the first devlog</a> was released:</p> Quickly starting a project using bevy_game_template</a>.</li> Converting single player systems to multiplayer ones.</li> Determinism, random spawns, and timers.</li> </ul> DAshmoRE</a> #</a> </h3> </p> DAshmoRE</a> is a fast-paced arcade mobile game written using Bevy.</p> Get ready for a fast-paced and challenging arcade game where the only way to move is by skillfully dashing past enemies. With a single tap, you must navigate through a maze of enemies that move at different speeds and patterns. Can you master the art of dashing and achieve the highest score? Test your skills and reflexes in this thrilling arcade game.</p> </blockquote> The game’s features include:</p> Single-tap controls and WASM build suited for playing on mobile phones.</li> Power-ups like player repellent forcefields and slow-motion abilities.</li> Integrated highscore system.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> NANOVOID</a> #</a> </h3> Missiles targeting individual parts on enemy ships</figcaption> </figure> NANOVOID</a> by LogLogGames</a> is a WIP 2D tactical space shooter that puts you in command of your own modular spaceship: engage in intense, physics-driven battles, strategize with ship customization, and outsmart your enemies.</p> This month the first devlog</a> was released and it mostly was dedicated to experiments with Lua scripting.</p> Other updates include:</p> A simple PID controller</a> for rotating the ship.</li> The SFX for thrusters is now filtered</a> based on the desired force.</li> On-hit SFX and explosions are starting to feel satisfying</a>.</li> Parts of the ship can now be individually inspected</a> with pinnable UI.</li> Missiles targeting individual parts on enemy ships with some more UI tweaks</a>.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Bevy Garage</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Bevy Garage</a> by @alexichepura</a> is a game-like car simulation playground built with Bevy, rapier, and dfdx neural network.</p> Alexi released two introductory videos about the project:</p> The main video</a> that walks through the project.</li> Deep Q-Learning car training for 1 hour</a>.</li> </ul> You can also try out the WASM version of the simulation here</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> stereokit-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> stereokit-rs</a> (Discord</a>) are bindings to StereoKit</a> - an easy-to-use Mixed Realty engine, designed for creating VR, AR, and XR experiences. While StereoKit is primarily intended to be used from C#, all core functionality is implemented in native code, and a C compatible header file is also available and was used to create Rust bindings.</p> StereoKit’s features include:</p> Wide platform support: HoloLens 2, Oculus Quest, Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus Desktop, SteamVR, Varjo, Monado (Linux), and eventually everywhere OpenXR is.</li> Mixed Reality inputs like hands and eyes are trivial to access.</li> Easy and powerful UI and interactions.</li> Lots of model and texture formats are supported out of the box.</li> Flexible shader/material system with built-in PBR.</li> Performance-by-default instanced render pipeline.</li> Flat screen MR simulator with input emulation for easy development.</li> Runtime asset loading and cross-platform file picking.</li> Physics.</li> </ul> You can use a cargo-generate template</a> for a quick start and the devs invite to join their Discord server</a> if you have any questions.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> hotline</a> #</a> </h3> </p> hotline</a> (Blog</a>, Twitter</a>, Twitch</a>) is a modern, high-performance, hot-reload graphics engine that aims to provide low-level access to modern graphics API features, while at the same time providing high-level ergonomic optimizations.</p> The recent updates</a> include:</p> Tests of graphics functionality and lots of new examples,</li> GPU Resources cleanup improvements,</li> explicit API fore resource heaps,</li> better bindless and bindful rendering models,</li> GPU-driven ECS experiments.</li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Building a Platformer with Bevy #1</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @affanshahid</a> published the first part of a new tutorial series</a> on building a simple 2D platformer using Bevy. The series is aimed at newcomers to the world of game development and explores common game development concepts.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Game Development In Rust: Making A Strategy Game</a> #</a> </h3> Game Development In Rust: Making A Strategy Game</figcaption> </figure> @srodrigo</a> published the first three parts of a strategy game in Bevy series</a>. The series is aimed at developers with some experience in Rust who want to dive into game development.</p> The first part</a> focuses on the basic concepts to create a battlefield for the battles to come.</li> The second part</a> adds the first unit type.</li> The third part</a> adds more unit types to create more compelling teams.</li> </ul> How to Migrate Your Bevy Projects with (Semi-)Automation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @HerringtonDarkholme</a> published an article</a> about how to make Bevy migration easier by using git, cargo and ast-grep</a>. The article uses the utility AI library big-brain</a> as an example to illustrate bumping the Bevy version from 0.9 to 0.10 and covers four big steps: making a clean git branch, updating the dependencies, running fix commands, and fixing failing tests. By using semi-automation tools, you can migrate your Bevy projects with less hassle and more confidence.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Spicy Launcher</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Spicy Launcher</a> by @orhun</a> is a cross-platform launcher for playing Spicy Lobster</a> games. Supports both command-line and Tauri</a>-based graphical interface.</p> Currently supported games: Fish Folk: Jumpy</a>, Fish Folk: Punchy</a>, and recently added Thetawave</a>.</p> Planned features include auto updating games and mods management.</p> Rerun</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Rerun</a> (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>) is an open-source SDK for logging complex visual data paired with a visualizer for exploring that data over time. While its primary focus is on robotics and computer vision, it can be useful for all kinds of rapid prototyping & algorithm development.</p> Rerun was shown at the Rust GameDev meetup, watch the recording here</a>.</p> v0.6.0</a> is out now! A few of the biggest highlights:</p> You can now show 3D objects in 2D views connected by Pinhole transforms.</li> You can quickly view images and meshes with rerun mesh.obj image.png</code>.</li> The correct to install the rerun binary is now cargo install rerun-cli</code>.</li> native_viewer is now an opt-in feature of the rerun library, leading to faster compilation times.</li> SDK log calls are now batched on the wire, saving CPU time and bandwidth.</li> Experimental WebGPU support</a>.</li> </ul> There’s a growing community on Discord</a> waiting for you to join in case you have any questions, comments or just want to follow the latest development. The GitHub project</a> is MIT/Apache licensed and open to contribute for everyone, be it with suggestions, bugs or PRs.</p> Smashline</a> #</a> </h3> Smashline</a> is plugin and a Rust crate aimed at enhancing Smash modding, more specifically focusing on script mods. Its main purpose is to enable the replacement of different types of scripts found in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, while also offering additional utilities for creating what is known as “code mods” within the modding community.</p> The Smashline wiki</a> provides comprehensive explanations of its core features.</p> Ruffle</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Ruffle</a> is an open-source Flash Player emulator written in Rust. It brings Flash Player back to life, running smoothly on all modern systems and web browsers.</p> This month’s updates</a> include:</p> Bunch of new fan-favorite AS3 (ActionScript 3)games are now playable.</li> Many graphics drawing methods have been fixed and implemented.</li> XML support has progressed.</li> AS2 (ActionScript 2) has seen progress as well: Additional XML methods have been implemented.</li> The Ruffle desktop app now has an interface.</li> Built-in save manager has been added.</li> FLV support in progress, Flash content with external video files will be supported soon.</li> </ul> Library Updates #</a> </h2> blit</a> #</a> </h3> </p> blit</a> is a GPL licensed library for quickly blitting 2D images on a pixel buffer. After a long stale period development has resumed quite a bit in the last couple of months.</p> The previous big release, v0.7.0</a>, saw a big improvement in performance and API ergonomics. It also introduced interactive WebAssembly examples which can be seen here</a>.</p> The latest big release, v0.8.0</a>, is a complete rewrite of the quite old and admittendly outdated API. A focus has been put on both ergonomics and performance. There’s now many ways of drawing a subsection, tiling, masking and creating repeating slices of an image on a pixel buffer.</p> seldom_state</a> #</a> </h3> seldom_state</a> is a Bevy plugin that adds a StateMachine</code> component that you can add to your entities. The state machine will change the entity’s components based on states, triggers, and transitions that you define. It’s useful for player controllers, animations, simple AI, etc.</p> This month, seldom_state</a> 0.6 was released:</p> Triggers don’t need to be registered!</li> MachineState and Trigger no longer require Reflect.</li> StateMachine’s trans_builder accepts the current state in the closure, so you have dataflow between states!</li> You may add and remove state components manually.</li> More versatile on_enter and on_exit events.</li> Trigger combinators not</code>, and</code>, and or</code>.</li> Transitions have priority in the order they are added.</li> You can use EventReader, Local, etc in your triggers!</li> Added an EventTrigger<E></code> that triggers on an event.</li> StateMachine’s set_trans_logging sets whether to log state transitions</li> And more</a>!</li> </ul> Thanks to Sera</a> for coauthoring this update!</p> Kira</a> #</a> </h3> Kira</a> (GitHub</a>) by @tesselode</a> is a backend-agnostic library to create expressive audio for games.</p> Kira v0.8 adds support for spatial audio, global modulation sources for easier and more powerful parameter tweening, compressor and EQ effects, and more powerful playback and loop region settings.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Maginet will soon get a level editor</a> with in-editor play support.</li> @NullableEngineer released a vlog</a> about implementing the first iteration of the network server for their WIP MMO.</li> Idu got a new water system</a> that is a lot faster to and easier to render.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: godot-rust got a new website</a> with latest API docs and direct links to learning resources and community platforms.</li> Bevy will get WebGPU support</a> in the next - v0.11 - release.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: @PhaestusFox</a> has posted Bevy-related tutorial videos: Herbal-Alchemy 1.4 Update</a> and “How to make a view cube in Bevy”</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: grid</a> is a simple library that provides an easy to use and fast 2D grid data structure.</li> hexx</a> v0.6 brings a bunch of new algorithms for hexagonal maps and overall API improvements.</li> faer</a> 0.9 brings the non hermitian eigenvalue decomposition for real and complex matrices and also comes with the release of qd</a>, a library for extended precision floating point arithmetic with faer compatibility.</li> quinn</a> v0.10 introduces MTU discovery, updates to the latest version of rustls, improves platform support, and introduces a variety of new features, performance improvements, and bugfixes</li> funutd</a> is a 3D procedural texture library running on the CPU that features different tiling modes, an endless supply of proc-generated self-describing volumetric textures, Palette generation with Okhsv and Okhsl color spaces, and an interactive texture explorer.</li> bevy_diagnostics_explorer</a> is a plugin allowing to visualize diagnostics (tracing spans) in VSCode.</li> pxo</a> is a library for working with Pixelorama</a> files.</li> frug</a> is a simple graphics library that was announced this month along with some docs</a>.</li> egui</a> v0.22 brings support for application icons on Windows and Mac, better dark/light mode detection, and error reporting on the web.</li> egui_tiles</a> is a tiling layout engine for egui with drag-and-drop and resizing.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust: “How does Bevy manage to be so loose with signatures?”</a></li> </ul> </li> /r/rust_gamedev: “Is bevy the best option for a Rust based game engine?”</a></li> “We’re not quite game yet”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> bevy_mod_scripting is looking for maintainers</a>.</li> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Ambient’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Mastodon</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #45 - April 2023 Unknown — Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 45th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 26th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in March. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Bevy Jam 3 Results</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Voting on the Bevy Jam 3</a> has finished! It was a week-long event, where the goal was to make a game in Bevy Engine</a>, the free and open-source game engine built in Rust. The theme was ‘Side Effects’.</p> 1: LinkSider</a> by kuviman, daivy, shadow-crusherz</li> 2: Neon Breach: Tower Defence</a> by louisNivrat</li> 3: Battle for Rattoria</a> by jabuwu</li> </ul> The jam had a solid turnout with 353 participants, 78 submissions, and 2,158 ratings! A lot of the submissions have a web build so it’s easy to try them out yourself.</p> The full results can be found on itch.io</a>.</p> Rusty Jam 3</a> #</a> </h3> Another Rusty Jam starts on May 21st!</p> It’s a great chance to try out some new Rusty tech, form a team of like-minded rustaceans, and feel what a full cycle of making a game in Rust feels like in miniature!</p> This jam focuses more on using Rust than anything else. That means you aren’t restricted on your design, music, or graphics, as long as you use Rust to make it!</p> The optional-to-use theme for the jam is going to be announced in the jam’s Discord</a> and pinned in the community section. While you’re waiting for the theme, you can start looking for a team in the looking-for-team Discord channel. If you want solo though, that’s fine too.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> hundreds of npcs smoothly interpolating</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>), an ambitious multiplayer project in development by CyberSoul, aims to invite players into a constantly evolving universe. Harnessing the power of procedural generation and artificial intelligence, this work-in-progress aspires to provide an engaging experience that emphasizes exploration and discovery across its diverse worlds.</p> The latest updates to CyberGate include:</p> Networking Interpolation version 2: increased reliability over frame rate changes, improved accuracy of object motion and detail by ~20%, and objects update 12-45 milliseconds faster.</li> Server compilation was drastically simplified (100x faster).</li> Improved browser server process, to have more consistent behavior.</li> Improved mouse lock on browsers.</li> Simplified code related to state synchronization.</li> Significant gameplay changes and bug fixes.</li> </ul> They are currently working on universe generation alghorithms for version 8.0. Participate by joining the Discord server</a>.</p> Jumpy</a> #</a> </h3> Online Matchmaking</figcaption> </figure> Jumpy</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by Spicy Lobster</a> is a pixel-style, tactical 2D shooter with a fishy theme.</p> In the last month, Jumpy released v0.7.0</a> with support for online and LAN network games! Networking has been a long time coming, with many architecture decisions being made specifically with networking in mind. While network performance may still need to be tweaked, and there are still some bugs to fix, the proof-of-concept was a success. You can start matches on your local network, or online, with no configuration necessary!</p> The Fish Folk game series has a pre-launch page up on Kickstarter</a>, expected to go public in mid-May.</p> Thetawave</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Thetawave is an open-source, physics based, space shooter game. This month, Thetawave 0.1.0 was released</a>. The main features of this update were:</p> local multiplayer,</li> a second character,</li> many sprite adjustments,</li> and many gameplay tweaks from in-person playtesting with the thetawave arcade cabinet</a>.</li> </ul> The easiest way to play the most up to date version of Thetawave on your machine is to download it through the Spicy Launcher</a>. Otherwise, you can play the game in your browser on the itch.io page</a>.</p> Feel free to reach out in the #thetawave channel in the Spicy Lobster discord server</a> if you are interested in contributing.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle game with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. You can support development by checking out the free demo and wishlisting on Steam</a> or signing up for the mailing list</a>!</p> Recent updates:</p> Time controls (pause, play, fastforward)</li> Staves switch in place so that crabs don’t inadvertently move them when cycling</li> Increased drag on various physics objects to prevent bouncing over targets</li> Increased staff throw velocity to make it easier to throw staves off ledges</li> Improved interactive hover visuals on staves</li> Fixed bug where you could take objects from the crab while he’s riding the elevator</li> Fixed edge cases around saving on load screens</li> Fixed edge cases with sleep system and pausing</li> More flexible save points in crab puzzles (save points can now conditionally trigger only when a crab is present)</li> More work on end game</li> </ul> Also, Way of Rhea was part of the Steam Puzzle Fest</a>!</p> l1t</a> #</a> </h3> </p> l1t</a> by @alex-laycalvert</a> is a WIP terminal game about shooting lasers and lighting statues to solve puzzles.</p> In each level, you have to configure mirrors, lasers, and other items to light up all the statues while avoiding any mishaps like shooting yourself with a laser beam.</p> There’s only 4 core levels right now but in addition to adding more the developer is working on a repository system where web servers can host level files and users can subscribe to them.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Maginet</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Maginet</a> by Evrim</a> is a fast-paced turn-based strategy game with local/versus-ai/online play on PC/mobile where two guilds of mages battle each other.</p> This month’s updates</a> include:</p> New mage and board sprites from @MrmoTarius</a>.</li> New main menu that brings the ability to switch between loadout modes.</li> Better AI heuristics for evaluating the board.</li> Better health UI.</li> </ul> The developers are looking for feedback from testers.</p> Idu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Idu</a> (Discord</a>) is a strategic sandbox game about growing plants that wish to reclaim nature, developed by Elina Shakhnovich</a> and Johann Tael</a> featuring a bespoke Vulkan-based engine in Rust.</p> This month a new demo was released</a>:</p> New inventory and interaction system.</li> Office file cabinets for keeping things tidy.</li> Converters convert signals from nearby flowers into colorful blocks.</li> </ul> Tiny Glade</a> #</a> </h3> Demo of the gothic windows system</figcaption> </figure> Tiny Glade</a> (Twitter</a>, Youtube</a>) is a small relaxing game about doodling castles.</p> This month’s updates</a> include:</p> More brick colors.</li> New gothic windows style.</li> Ability to merge windows together into a bigger one.</li> New arch algorithm that works better for rough terrain.</li> The project’s beta testing should start this summer and the release should happen somewhere in 2024.</li> </ul> Hydrofoil Generation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> (Steam</a>, Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that puts you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing that is available in Early Access on Steam.</p> This month’s updates</a> include:</p> A brand new location to test your hydrofoil skills: Bermuda</a>.</li> An improved protocol for line crossing detection is now implemented, which means that Hydrofoil Generation is now even more fair and accurate.</li> Also, the game won</a> two Silver awards for the PC Game: Racing and Simulation category.</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Ambient</a> #</a> </h3> A 10-second preview of what’s possible with Ambient 0.2</figcaption> </figure> Ambient 0.2</a> is now out after two months of development. Ambient is an open-source runtime for building high-performance multiplayer games and 3D applications powered by WebAssembly, Rust and WebGPU. Projects consist of assets and logic built around the currently Rust-only Ambient API, and these projects can be loaded by any compatible runtime running on any platform.</p> This release brings a few major features, including basic support for playing sounds, being able to run WASM on the client (in addition to the server), and automatic proxying of servers by the Ambient Proxy. This allows anyone with the URL to connect to a server, without having to worry about port forwarding.</p> Finally, Ambient UI can now be used from guest code. Combined with networking and ECS, this unlocks an exciting new capability: multiplayer UI! The blog post walks through the creation of a basic multiplayer beat sequencer using these features.</p> Check out the GitHub</a> to get started with building for/or on Ambient yourself, or chat with the developers and other explorers on the Discord</a>.</p> Discussion: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a></em></p> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Godot 4 binding for Rust, also known as gdext</a>, now features a reworked website</a>. The site acts as a hub to all the relevant resources and community platforms. It also hosts auto-generated API docs from cargo doc</code>, for latest snapshots and active pull requests.</p> On the library side, April has brought lots of improvements</a> regarding engine interaction, notably:</p> FFI bugfixes (#234</a>, #249</a>, #250</a>)</li> Class constants and notifications (#219</a>, #223</a>)</li> Callable</code> support (#231</a>)</li> Initial threading experiments (#212</a>)</li> </ul> For the near future, the plan is to iron out the new website and CI, as well as some QoL improvements such as better compile times.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy <3 GitHub Actions</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Piotr Siuszko</a> wrote a blog post</a> explaining how to automate building and publishing game written with Bevy to GitHub Pages using GitHub Actions.</p> Exploring Bevy’s Game Of Life Example</a> #</a> </h3> Game of Life Simulation</figcaption> </figure> Yendor</a> published a mini-tutorial series</a> exploring compute shaders in Bevy using their Game of Life example</a> and adding some new features to it: camera controller, wrapping simulation, and drawing on the simulation.</p> Test-Driven Development in Rust Game Development with Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Edgardo Carreras writes about his experience</a> with Test-Driven Development while developing a game engine in Rust using Bevy. TDD is an iterative software development approach that involves writing automated tests before writing the code. In the article, Edgardo explains the benefits of TDD and how it can help in game development. He also shares his testing process, including how he used Bevy’s ECS architecture to write tests for his game engine.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Bevy Roguelike Tutorial</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @maciekglowka</a> started a blog series on creating a roguelike game using Bevy Engine. There are currently seven parts, focusing mostly on setting up a basic game architecture. The topics discussed so far include: separating logic from graphics in the ECS; designing a turn-based game loop; command pattern for the unit actions.</p> The first part of the series can be found here</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/roguelikedev</a></em></p> PhaestusFox’s Bevy Videos</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @PhaestusFox</a> released a bunch of new Bevy tutorials on Youtube about all things Bevy. Level up your game dev skills with PhaestusFox’s tutorials and learn more from very basic how-to’s to more complex full tutorials like how to make a platformer in Bevy.</p> Katamari for the BevyJam3</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Ryosuke</a> recently participated in a Bevy game jam. Ryosuke’s goal was to create a game inspired by Katamari Damacy, an old PlayStation 2 game. In the game, a prince rollsup objects to make planet sized balls. Ryosuke shares their learning process</a> of the almost-finished Katamari clone running on Windows. They cover topics like the physics library and how they created the user interface using a tool egui. It is also suggested to have some basic knowledge of Bevy game engine before you dive into the article.</p> 3D MIDI Piano Using Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Ryosuke</a> has also recently published a tutorial</a> on how to create a 3D MIDI piano visualizer app using the Bevry game engine in Rust. They shared their learning experience, including reading MIDI input with Rust and integrating it with the game engine.</p> DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Theor</a> became interested in the data format of the classic game Doom and decided to write Rust code to extract its maps and convert them into vector graphics for laser cutting. Theor’s blog post</a> explores Doom specifics, geometry, writing SVG, rendering and triangulation.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Making a Strategy Game</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Sergio Rodrigo Royo</a> started a new series</a> about creating a 2D turn-based strategy game in Rust. In this tutorials one will learn how to’s such as: adding differents units, sound effects, providing multiplayer support, and designing a simple UI.</p> Rendering Football Data in 3D</a> #</a> </h3> </p> UnravelSports</a> recently presented their latest project</a>. The project is a proof-of-concept to show football data in 3D and the ultimate goal is to utilize this feature to animate body-pose data and potentially connect it to a VR in the future.</p> Check out a recent PySport talk</a> for more in-depth info.</p> AI learns to play flappy bird</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bones-ai</a> recently shared their project</a>, which is a neuro-evolution simulation of an AI playing popular game Flappy Bird.</p> In the youtube video</a> 1000 AI agents are released into the game environment of Flappy Bird with the goal of learning how to survive and stay alive for as long as possible.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Rustracer</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Rustracer, a PBR glTF 2.0</a> renderer based on Vulkan ray-tracing. It can render (almost) any glTF 2.0 scene by pure path tracing at an interactive speed. Compared with rasterization-based glTF renderers, Rustracer needs some (scene-dependent) time for sample accumulation in exchange for global illumination.</p> On top of that, the control panel provides a rich set of viewing options and debugging utilities.</p> It also can serve as a glTF viewer or a reference renderer.</p> The code base itself is a learning resource for Ash</a> (Vulkan bindings in Rust), hardware ray tracing and glTF processing in Rust.</p> Luminol</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Luminol</a> by @speak2erase</a> and @somedevfox</a> is a remake of the RPG Maker editor, based mostly off of RPG Maker XP</a> (aka RMXP), with the intent of creating a more modern, feature rich, and open source version of RMXP.</p> RGSS, RMXP’s runtime, has already been open sourced thanks to mkxp</a>. However, despite several attempts, no one has fully remade the editor. There are some tools</a> out there that cover some of its functionality, but none are user friendly, nor feature complete.</p> RGSS is actually quite enjoyable to use. The actual editor though - not so much: dated and often unintuitive UI, extensibility issues, binary format that is allergic to source control, and arbitrary limits that never existed in previous versions. Luminol was born out of sheer frustration from dealing with these issues - and hopes to fix them!</p> Luminol’s key differences:</p> Completely GPU accelerated (RMXP is software rendered).</li> Edit multiple maps at the same time.</li> Multiple data formats.</li> Edit encrypted archives (rgssad).</li> Open-source.</li> Better user experience overall.</li> </ul> Luminol is currently looking for contributors: there is a lot to be done</a>. If you’d like to help contribute, please reach out to @speak2erase</a>!</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> April’s sprint 25</a> developments:</p> Brushing up: The new Brush tool makes it possible to paint raster-based art.</li> Writing down: A refactor of the Text tool integrates typographic content in the node graph. Finally, all artwork types are node-based.</li> Showing true colors: Node graph compositing now uses linear, not gamma, color. Key new color adjustment nodes are added.</li> Laying the groundwork: Further engineering work prepares the node graph language for GPU execution. And development continues toward in-graph layer stack compositing.</li> </ul> As always, new contributors are cordially invited to get involved</a> and take on approachable issues</a> with help from the project’s friendly and supportive developer community on Discord.</p> Open Graphite</a> in your browser and start creating!</p> Image Maniac</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Image Maniac</a> is a cross-platform image viewer designed for game developers and other creative professionals. The project’s features include:</p> Infinite canvas for drag-n-dropping many images onto the main window, and view them all in a single, unified workspace.</li> Quick RGBA channel switching using number keys is usefil for game developers who work with textures and materials.</li> Broad format support including PNG, JPG, BMP, DDS, TGA, KTX2, and HDR.</li> Focus on performance even with large files and multiple image at once.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> Backpack</a> #</a> </h3> Minimalist schema for sharing items in different games</figcaption> </figure> Backpack</a> is an inventory system to share items between different games, for example:</p> Raise a crab in Crab Simulator,</li> Make it fight in Crab Shooter,</li> Cook it in Crab Cook…</li> Gain a crab skin in your favorite game!</li> </ul> Backpack</a> is in a pre-MVP state: a tech prototype is working.</p> The project is not affiliated or related to Blockchain/NFTs: it uses a PostgreSQL DB to store users, games and items. Authentication is done via email/password, third party authentication via OAuth will be a future goal. An Authenticated user can create apps and add item definitions to these. Other users can get an independent instance of that item and modify its data.</p> The next project milestone is 2 minimalist interconnected games released by the end of 2023.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Combine&Conquer v0.5.2</a> brings significant graphical improvements.</li> exocave - an FPS about exploring a subterranean world - got a grappling hook</a> to ease the movement through caverns and chasms.</li> Railroad Scheduler</a> is a game about planning routes and scheduling for a set of trains.</li> Stellar Cortex’s first devlog is out</a>: it talks about foundational systems that should allow space based commerce.</li> Logic RPG</a> got two vlogs: about CI and docs</a> and post processing, 3D conversions, and physics</a>.</li> Elttob released a couple vlogs</a> about their voxel game Stockholm.</li> Digital Extinction’s recent updates</a> include unit manufacturing, shadows, and multiplayer.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: ggez is looking for new maintainers</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates @PsichiX posted a tutorial</a> on building your own scripting solution with Intuicio.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: ironboy</a> by @nicolas-siplis is a high accuracy GameBoy emulator written in Rust and available in the browser via WASM.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: Strolle</a> is an experimental real-time renderer that supports global illumination.</li> blend v0.8</a> brings better support for Blender primitives and API improvements.</li> lox</a> is a library for creating, generating, processing, and analyzing polygon meshes.</li> bitcode</a> is a games-oriented bitwise encoder/decoder which attempts to shrink the serialized size without sacrificing speed.</li> virtual_joystick</a> provides virtual joystick UI widgets for Bevy projects.</li> faer v0.7</a> and v0.8 releases</a> bring better SIMD operations support for non native types and overall performance improvements.</li> egui_graphs</a> provides an interactive graph visualization widget powered by egui and petgraph.</li> Alkahest</a> is a schema-based serialization library that features infallible serialization, zero-overhead serialization of sequences, lazy deserialization and supports wide variety of formulas.</li> wgpu v0.16</a> brings a bunch of changes to sync with latest spec, improved APIs, and lots of bugfixes.</li> the png create</a> got an ultrafast compression mode - up to 4x faster decompression.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: “Well, we’re a little more game”</a></li> “Really frustrated”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Ambient’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Mastodon</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #44 - March 2023 Unknown — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 44th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 25th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in March. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> Blue Engine - @aryanpur_elham</a></li> Blade - @kvark</a></li> 8bit Duels - @ThousandthStar</a></li> Veloren - @velorenproject</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> 8bit Duels</a> #</a> </h3> An 8bit Duels match</figcaption> </figure> @ThousandthStar</a> is creating a simple multiplayer turn-based strategy using the Bevy Engine</a>. The latest devlog</a> brings features like ownership indicators, movement and attack animations, and a chat system.</p> The game is under development. The 8-bit Discord</a> is the best place to talk about the game.</p> 8bit Duels will be getting UI updates next, and the first version should release soon after that. Other troops are coming as well.</p> Discussions: 8-bit Discord</a></em></p> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> Particles emit from bullet hits and blackholes</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>), an ambitious multiplayer project in development by CyberSoul, aims to invite players into a constantly evolving universe. Harnessing the power of procedural generation and artificial intelligence, this work-in-progress aspires to provide an engaging experience that emphasizes exploration and discovery across its diverse worlds.</p> The latest updates to CyberGate include:</p> Skybox Animation and Transitions</li> Dynamic Point Lights</li> Particle System</li> Post-processing Screen Shake for Hit Feedback</li> Hit Particle Effects</li> Blackhole</li> </ul> They released the 7th major update in March, They are now working on universe generation alghoritms for the 8th. Participate by joining the Discord server</a>.</p> ZOMBIE DEMO GAME</a> #</a> </h3> </p> ZOMBIE DEMO GAME</a> is a small third-person zombie shooter by @LPGhatguy</a> and @evaera</a> that was released this month.</p> It features an astonishing 10 minutes of gameplay, a built-in level editor, and zombies! It was produced in order to practice shipping a game and uses a custom engine using wgpu, hecs, and lots of other great crates from the ecosystem.</p> ZOMBIE DEMO GAME is available for Windows and Linux on itch.io</a> today.</p> Discussion: Twitter</a></em></p> Shifting Chamber #</a> </h3> </p> Shifting Chamber (itch.io</a>, GitHub</a>) is a simple tactics game where the player, instead of moving the character, manipulates the map around it. The goal is to defeat the enemies by forcing them into hazardous positions - since they cannot be attacked directly.</p> The game is in an early prototype / proof of concept phase. It is written with the help of the Bevy engine. There is currently only a WASM build (freely available on the itch.io)</p> Jumpy</a> #</a> </h3> Live Map Editing!</figcaption> </figure> Jumpy</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by Spicy Lobster</a> is a pixel-style, tactical 2D shooter with a fishy theme.</p> In the last month, the first MVP release</a> of Jumpy was made. The release adds some major new features including a live map editor, critters, extended player animations, and basic AI. Soon afterward an update</a> was made with revised maps and some important bug fixes.</p> Along with the release is a new blog post, sharing thoughts on some of the lessons learned during development: Jumpy v0.6 Retrospective</a>.</p> The efforts are now focused on getting network play implemented, with a two player LAN proof-of-concept already working. The hope is to get the remaining network issues fixed and the online matchmaker connected before making another release as soon as it’s ready.</p> Tunnet</a> #</a> </h3> Example of a puzzle in Tunnet</figcaption> </figure> Tunnet (Steam</a>, Itch.io</a>) by @puzzled_squid</a> is a short puzzle/exploration game where you build a computer network in an underground complex.</p> This project is still WIP and the first devlog</a> has been posted this month. The post describes the main gameplay loop as well as some of the new environments recently added.</p> The game is developed using Bevy and is expected to be released late 2023.</p> Digital Extinction #</a> </h3> Building Placement in Digital Extinction</figcaption> </figure> Digital Extinction</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Reddit</a>) by @Indy2222</a> is a 3D real-time strategy game made with Bevy</a>.</p> The most notable updates are:</p> simple unit manufacturing was added,</li> game minimap was added,</li> game end detection was implemented,</li> shadows were enabled,</li> the health of all units & buildings was decreased,</li> the “Quit Game” button in the game menu leads to the main menu instead of the termination of the application,</li> close button was added to all menu screens,</li> maximum number of players was made configurable by each map,</li> screen edge size for camera movement was decreased,</li> malformed configuration does not lead to a crash but a toast with an error message is displayed.</li> Bevy</a> was upgraded to v0.10.</li> </ul> See gameplay</a> screen recordings on YouTube.</p> More detailed monthly updates are available here (March)</a> and here (April)</a>.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle game with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. You can support development by checking out the free demo and wishlisting on Steam</a>!</p> Recent updates:</p> Undo/redo is better tutorialized.</li> Existing onboarding hints were improved both functionally and visually.</li> New onboarding hints were added to ensure new players understand that teleporters are interactive.</li> Various performance improvements were made.</li> End-game puzzles were completed.</li> Work has begun on laying out the end-game art.</li> A release plan has been drafted.</li> Way of Rhea was shown at PAX West.</li> Way of Rhea will be part of the upcoming Steam Puzzle Fest</a>!</li> </ul> Boat Journey</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Carry your passengers safely to the ocean in Boat Journey.</figcaption> </figure> Boat Journey</a> (GitHub</a>) is a turn-based game where you drive a boat through a procedurally-generated landscape on a voyage along a river destined for the ocean. Accept passengers to have them help you on your journey. Fight monsters, collect junk, trade the junk for fuel, use the fuel to travel to the ocean.</p> Features:</p> Large procedurally-generated world</li> Turn the boat at 45-degree increments</li> Text-only graphics. You can play it in a terminal if you like!</li> Hand-drawn ansi-art character portraits</li> You can take on a ghost as a passenger and then become a ghost yourself.</li> </ul> Boat Journey was made for the 7 Day Roguelike 2023</a> game jam. The devlog is here</a>.</p> Screen Ball</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Screen Ball</a> (GitHub</a>, YouTube</a>) by @lewiszlw</a> is a game that lets you play ball on screen for a rest when you’re tired from work. Inspired by the video published by Bevy community member PaulH#7052.</p> Battle City</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Battle City</a> (GitHub</a>, YouTube</a>) by @lewiszlw</a> is a Bevy clone of the classical Battle City game - which brought a lot of happiness to the author’s childhood.</p> You can play it here</a>.</p> BattleBots Simulator</a> #</a> </h3> Lightweight “annoyance” robot variant</figcaption> </figure> BattleBots Simulator</a> (Twitter</a>) by @nilaysavant</a> is a “BattleBots” themed robot wars simulator developed using Bevy</a>.</p> The game is planned to have multiple combat arenas. Each player can compete using their selected robot. Players will be able to score and win by damaging and destroying opponent robots. Or by knocking opponents out of the arena.</p> There are 3 variants of the robots planned as follows:</p> Light Weight “Annoyance”: Low mass/HP, but will be unpredictable and fast. It will slowly kill by consistently annoying and damaging opponents.</li> Medium Weight “Sniper”: Medium weight robot that will be equipped with a high boost. This will allow it to knockout opponents or push them out of the arena.</li> Heavy Weight “TANK”: Highest mass/HP and momentum. Slow moving but hard to kill. Equipped with magnetic wedges that will help pin/push opponents out of the arena.</li> </ul> The game is currently a work in progress. For updates follow Nilay Savant</a> on Twitter.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Cargo Space #</a> </h3> </p> Cargo Space</a> (Discord</a>) by @johanhelsing</a> is a co-op 2d space game where you build a ship and fly it through space looking for new parts, fighting pirates and the environment.</p> This month’s development was all about lobbies, chat and integrating with Steam. This spawned a couple of new micro-crates.</p> bevy_crossbeam_event</a> lets you spawn Bevy events by sending to a crossbeam channel, which is convenient with callbacks that require move semantics, such as those in bevy-steamworks.</p> steam_dev_launcher</a> is a cross-platform binary crate all about dev-friendly ways to launch your game through Steam. That is: without losing logs, panic traces, and optionally using a custom binary or setting extra environment variables (launch from /target/debug/your_game</code>).</p> Read more about all this in this month’s devlog entry</a>.</p> Open Combat</a> #</a> </h3> Game now includes a HUD</figcaption> </figure> Open Combat (Website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) is a real-time tactical game which takes place during the 2nd World War.</p> Some major changes this month :</p> Add basic HUD logic for troops and game management</li> Add high definition assets management for zoom display</li> </ul> High-definition infantry sprites integration if planned for next month and we are searching for graphic designer help.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Campfire by the lights</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In March, culling of underground terrain was added, improving rendering speeds. There has been a large influx of player growth, which has been rallying the focus on server optimizations. Optimizations for buffs and auras were added, specifically around how much network bandwidth is being used. A visual guide of Veloren was created, which should help onboard new players to the game. It covers items such as basic controls, what to do when you start the game, basic crafting, and much more. More work has gone into the real-time simulation system improvements. It includes behaviour of where birds should fly to, and how species repopulation works.</p> March’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #207</a>.</p> Maginet</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Maginet</a> by Evrim</a> is a fast-paced turn-based strategy game with local/versus-ai/online play on PC/mobile where two guilds of mages battle each other.</p> This month’s updates include:</p> Mobile multiplayer</a>;</li> local AI-guilds</a>.</li> </ul> Tiny Glade</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Tiny Glade</a> (Twitter</a>, Youtube</a>) is a small relaxing game about doodling castles. This month’s updates include:</p> New shapes, including dedicated circle and rectangle shapes.</li> Alignment and snapping helpers for the freeform walls.</li> Improved robustness of “wall mess” handling algorithm.</li> </ul> Read more in their latest Steam blogpost</a>.</p> Anastasia also posted a cool thread</a> about their approach to marketing and promotion of the project.</p> Infinilands</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Infinilands</a> by @FluffyCreature</a> is a WIP pixel art sandbox survival game:</p> Infinilands is a pixel art sandbox survival game that lets you explore and modify a procedurally generated world full of unique plants, creatures and ruins. You can build houses and fight monsters with your friends in online/split-screen co-op. This game also supports dedicated server.</p> </blockquote> This month’s updates include:</p> Water logic</a>.</li> Auto-tiling for both normal</a> and block</a> placement modes.</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> hotline</a> #</a> </h3> hotline live coding client</figcaption> </figure> hotline</a> (Blog</a>, Twitter</a>) is a modern, high-performance, hot-reload graphics engine written in Rust. It aims to provide low-level access to modern graphics API features, while at the same time providing high-level ergonomic optimizations.</p> It uses Bevy’s ECS so the focus can remain primarily on the graphics architecture. Direct3D12 is the only supported platform, but the graphics API is abstracted to account for future ports to Vulkan and Metal. The project is in its early stages but already has a decent amount of features showcasing different render strategies, async command buffer generation, plugin based architecture, and hot-reload support for Rust code, HLSL shaders, and render configs. It supports ImGui with docking and multiple windows, video decoding, complex image loading (cubemaps, arrays, volumes), and more.</p> @polymonster</a> has been live streaming development on Twitch</a> with archives available on YouTube</a>. Recently they have been designing a bindless material system.</p> Bevy v0.10</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open-source</a> forever!</p> Bevy 0.10 brought many incredible new features. You can check out the full release blog post here</a>, but here are some highlights:</p> ECS Schedule v3</a></li> Cascaded Shadow Maps</a></li> Environment Map Lighting</a></li> Depth and Normal Prepass</a></li> Smooth Skeletal Animation Transitions</a></li> Improved Android Support</a></li> Revamped Bloom</a></li> Distance and Atmospheric Fog</a></li> StandardMaterial Blend Modes</a></li> More Tonemapping Choices</a></li> Color Grading</a></li> Parallel Pipelined Rendering</a></li> Windows as Entities</a></li> Renderer Optimizations</a></li> ECS Optimizations</a></li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Fyrox</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. This month’s highlights include:</p> Basic Android support</a> for GLES3.0+ devices - usable but the renderer lacks mobile-specific optimizations.</li> Lightmapper fixes</a>.</li> Blend shapes</a> allows to dynamically change 3D meshes (useful for facial animation, etc).</li> Fyrox now uses tinyaudio</a> as its sound output backend</a>.</li> </ul> Full devlogs: #17</a>, #18</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Developing an editor with egui #</a> </h3> </p> @TheGrimsey</a> published a three-part series of articles about developing a Spell Editor with egui.</p> “Databases & Editors (1/3)”</a> covers displaying egui windows & tables of entries.</li> “Editors (2/3): Editing entries”</a> elaborates on handling editing of entries & properties such as enums.</li> Finally, “Editors (3/3): Selection dialog & new entries”</a> talks about developing a selection dialog and creating new entries.</li> </ul> Writing NES assembly programs in a Rust DSL</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Video: Talk about writing NES assembly programs in Rust</figcaption> </figure> This is a talk about writing a program for the Nintendo Entertainment System that exposes all of its audio processor registers through an interface that lets the user flip bits using the controller and hear the result in real-time. The program is written in Rust using an Embedded Domain-Specific Language. The talk demonstrates the features of the language and how they can be used to help express NES assembly programs in Rust.</p> Some features of the EDSL:</p> defining and calling assembly functions by string labels</li> using Rust as a powerful macro language (e.g. generate code inside a for-loop)</li> using Rust’s type system to catch invalid combinations of instruction and addressing mode</li> </ul> The source code for the NES program described in the talk is here</a> and there is a demo of the tool on youtube</a>. The PDF of the slides from the talk are here</a>.</p> Using the Depth Prepass in Bevy 0.10</a> #</a> </h3> depth prepass powered intersections between a shield and wall/floor</figcaption> </figure> @chrisbiscardi</a> published a video</a> about using the Depth Prepass texture in Bevy 0.10. The depth prepass, along with the normal prepass, are new passes in Bevy 0.10 that allow you to access distance from the camera and normal direction for a particular pixel on the screen. The textures created by these passes can then be used to power effects in your own custom shaders.</p> Discussions: YouTube</a>, Mastodon</a></em></p> Applying 5 million pixel updates per second with Rust & wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @codetheweb</a> published an article</a> that explores the basics of wgpu by optimizing a program that replays /r/place</a>. By the end, CPU usage is around 18-25% while applying an average of 5m pixel updates per second at 10,000x playback speed.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> NPCs and Dialog in Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Matthew Bryant</a> released a video</a> focused on the design and implementation of a dialog system for NPCs in his RPG game</a>. This is the 4th in a weekly series about the high level ECS design of a full game using Bevy.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Tiger</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Tiger (GitHub</a>, itch.io</a> by @agersant</a> is a visual tool to author game spritesheets and their metadata.</p> Version 1.0 launched this month, which means Tiger is ready for production. It currently has the following features:</p> Easy-to-use timeline to author animation.</li> Supports perspectives for any 2D game (top-down, sidescroller, isometric, etc.).</li> Automatically hot-reloads source images when they are changed.</li> Packs animation frames into texture atlases.</li> Can add and tag hitboxes.</li> Flexible template system exports metadata in any text-based format.</li> Free and open-source with a permissive license.</li> </ul> Tarsila</a> #</a> </h3> Editor’s UI</figcaption> </figure> Tarsila is a pixel art and spritesheet editor written in Rust using egui and macroquad</a>, inspired by Aseprite</a>. The first public release (0.1.0) has been published on March 18th, with basic features</a>.</p> Since the publication not many new features have been added, mostly bugfixes and an overhaul of the input system, in preparation for configurable shortcuts (via a text file and later GUI).</p> In the roadmap</a> for 0.2.0 are things like color effects (change hue, saturation, etc.), ovals and circles, and more.</p> We welcome contributions</a>! Big thanks to contributors @quiet-bear and @crumblingstatue.</p> Rerun</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Rerun (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>, Website</a>) is an open-source SDK for logging complex visual data paired with a visualizer for exploring that data over time. While its primary focus is on robotics and computer vision, it can be useful for all kinds of rapid prototyping & algorithm development.</p> Three new versions got released since the last newsletter! 0.5.0</a> is now latest. A few of the biggest highlights:</p> The web-viewer is, while still experimental & unpolished, now stable. Try it out here!</a></li> Rerun can now be embedded in Jupyter notebooks</li> Depth textures can now directly be visualized with point clouds and have a variety of color map settings.</li> Selection/hover highlights use now outlines for better visibility and in order to avoid changing the visualization itself.</li> Picking is now done on the GPU, fixing many issues of the previous system</li> All color-mapping is now done on-the-fly on the GPU, faster & less memory use</li> Support for mesh vertex colors.</li> New example</a> of forever-streaming a web-camera image to Rerun.</li> Major improvements to the data store for better performance and memory usage</li> </ul> There’s a growing community on Discord</a> waiting for you to join in case you have any questions, comments or just want to follow the latest development. The GitHub project</a> is MIT/Apache licensed and open to contribute for everyone, be it with suggestions, bugs or PRs.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> Valley of Spires - Vector art made in Graphite</figcaption> </figure> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> March’s sprint 24</a> brings forth:</p> Vector nodes: A major refactor moves vector shape layers into the node graph. Now the shape</em>, transform</em>, fill</em>, and stroke</em> are all set via nodes in the graph. Text is the final remaining holdout and will be node-ified next, letting the node graph act as the universal layer type.</li> </ul> As always, new contributors are kindly invited to get involved</a> and take on approachable issues</a> with help from the project’s friendly and supportive developer community on Discord.</p> Open Graphite</a> in your browser and start creating! Share your designs with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> ruffle</a> #</a> </h2> Demo of the new text input boxes on a mobile device</figcaption> </figure> Ruffle</a> is an open-source Flash Player emulator, written in Rust. It aims to run natively on all modern operating systems and web browsers, leveraging Rust’s memory safety guarantees to avoid the security pitfalls that Flash became notorious for in its later years.</p> This month’s updates</a> include:</p> Significant improvements to AVM1 engine accuracy fix dozens upon dozens of ActionScript 2 games.</li> Work on the AVM2 (ActionScript 3) backend is also speeding up</a>, a bunch of AS3 games are now playable.</li> Better mobile devices support: text input boxes and iOS a context menu.</li> </ul> Check out the blog post</a> for more details.</p> Orlop</a> #</a> </h2> </p> Orlop by Tim Rach</a> is a media management tool for anyone who works with a large asset library on a daily basis.</p> Organise and browse your asset collection with built-in tagging, search and preview functionality. Automatic tagging requires no effort - just import your asset folder and go!</p> </blockquote> The beta version is available on itch.io</a> or through Testflight</a>.</p> Foxtrot</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Jan Hohenheim’s (@janhohenheim</a>) Foxtrot</a>, the all-in-one for the Bevy engine, has reached its 0.2 milestone</a>. Thanks to feedback, contributions and crates from the community, it has now reached a fairly stable state. While there used to be a major change every week before, the project will limit itself to updating only minor things during a Bevy version lifecycle and do major reworks only in time for new versions.</p> So, if anyone was eyeing it but was turned off by the frequent big changes or the lack of some features, now is the time! Version 0.2.0 includes the following cool new features compared to 0.1.0:</p> Wasm support, with a live demo here</a>. If the mouse lock doesn’t work, spam “Esc” a bunch of times 😉</li> Beautiful grass through warbler_grass</a></li> Buttery smooth cameras through bevy_dolly</a></li> Dynamic pathfinding through oxidized_navigation</a></li> Simplified error handling through bevy_mod_sysfail</a></li> Easy to write plugins through seldom_fn_plugin</a></li> Sprinting particles through bevy_hanabi</a></li> A demo scene with houses (CC0 if you want to reuse them)</li> A dialog that gets draws letter-by-letter and is nicer to look at</li> Better documentation</li> </ul> Thanks also to bevy_game_template</a>, without which Foxtrot would not be possible in the first place! And thanks to PhaestusFox, who made a video about the template</a></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> bevy_text_mode</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_text_mode</a> (GitHub</a>) by yopox</a> is a Bevy plugin that makes it possible to set the background and the foreground color of a texture atlas sprite (built-in Bevy sprites only have a tint property). This plugin is convenient when using 1-bit tilesets such as MRMOTEXT</a>.</p> The 0.1 release adds a TextModeTextureAtlasSprite</code> component with configurable background, foreground, x/y flip and opacity.</p> Discussion: Mastodon</a></em></p> Matchbox #</a> </h3> </p> Matchbox</a> is a library for easily establishing unreliable, unordered, peer-to-peer WebRTC data connections using rust WASM (and native). This enables cross-platform low-latency multiplayer games.</p> Previously, the socket opened a single udp-like data channel. In version 0.6, however, support for adding extra channels with configurable ordering and package retransmits was added. This enables direct p2p tcp-like connections as well.</p> Two new crates were added in this release. matchbox_signaling, lets you set up a custom signaling server, also supporting client-server topologies, enabling scenarios where one player acts as the host for the other players.</p> bevy_matchbox provides ergonomic usage with Bevy. Severely cutting down on the boiler-plate needed.</p> The tutorial series on how to make a p2p web game with Bevy, GGRS and Matchbox</a> was also updated to the latest versions of all three libraries.</p> Read more about all the new features in the 0.6 release post</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/bevy</a>, Mastodon</a></em></p> Bevy Rust-GPU</a> #</a> </h3> Hot-rebuilding a rust-gpu shader from a bevy app</figcaption> </figure> Bevy Rust-GPU</a> by @Shfty</a> is a suite of crates encoding a practical rust-gpu</a> workflow for bevy</a>.</p> The latest release brings new GPU interop traits, shader macro robustness, and compatibility with bevy</a> 0.10 and rust-gpu</a> 0.6. Further development continues apace, with major improvements to the SPIR-V interchange pipeline, shader compilation machinery, and support code already merged.</p> The project is still in development, and presently relies on custom forks of the associated crates. However, various PRs have been filed upstream to build out a robust interchange between them, with the hope of mainline compatibility - and a corresponding crates.io release - sometime in the future.</p> In particular, @eddyb</a> deserves special thanks for his work on the rust-gpu</a> side, which has enabled and informed many of the improvements tabled for the next release, and greatly accelerated the process of making Rust a viable shading language for users of Bevy and WGPU.</p> Discussion: /r/bevy</a></em></p> rust-gpu-sdf</a> #</a> </h3> An implicit surface defined compositionally, raymarched, and shaded entirely in Rust</figcaption> </figure> Announcing rust-gpu-sdf</a>, by @Shfty</a>; a no-std signed distance field library designed for use on both CPU and GPU.</p> Signed distance fields</a> are a powerful computational tool that allows a surface to be represented by a function from position to distance. This has intuitive applications</a> in various domains such as rendering, collision, meshing, and volume modeling, providing the means to represent analytically smooth geometry, dynamic morphing (as pictured), and various other effects that would traditionally require specialized tools to model.</p> rust-gpu-sdf</a> aims to enumerate this domain to the fullest extent allowed by Rust’s type system, lifting its traditionally monolithic implementation style into a set of intuitive composable operators, and leveraging a natural synergy with functional programming to provide powerful compositional tools.</p> Contrary to its working title, rust-gpu-sdf</a> is actually rust-gpu</a>-agnostic, so can be used anywhere Rust can; it’s presently named as such due to being built as the primary consumer of bevy-rust-gpu</a>, with a view to providing a performant and compositional way to compile SDFs into SPIR-V for rendering on the GPU.</p> It’s presently in a heavy-development prerelease state, so watch this space!</p> Pixelate Mesh</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Jan Hohenheim (@janhohenheim</a>) recently published a new crate called pixelate_mesh</a>. It is a Bevy plugin that provides a Pixelate component that one can add to any entity holding a mesh or a scene, which it will then pixelate without any post-processing. The idea is to recreate the effect seen in Prodeus</a>.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Combine&Conquer v0.5</a> brings multi cursor support, the ability to turn structures on/off, and a view that shows your factory’s production stats.</li> bevy-rust-wasm-experiments</a> is a small video game with Bevy that compiles both to desktop and WASM and showcases how you can get input from your smartphone’s accelerometer.</li> vustnexus</a> is a side-scroller about surviving and defeating the infect of the Vust Swarm!</li> The Beat Of Space</a> is a space-themed rhythm game built with macroquad</a>.</li> Pirate Annihilation posted the second YouTube devlog</a> about the switch from 2D to 3D, hexagonal map, and new camera.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: PhaestusFox posted more YouTube videos</a> about Bevy.</li> s0lly shared a video on creating transparent windows using Bevy</a>.</li> An article about creating a Snake game</a> for the browser with WASM and Rust.</li> @whoisryosuke released a tutorial</a> on getting started with egui in Rust.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: Tetra v0.8</a> brings a bunch of small API improvements and bugfixes. The engine is still in maintainence-only mode though.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: @Setzer22 shared a demo</a> of how smooth subdivision works in the Blackjack editor.</li> Epic Asset Manager</a> is an unofficial client to install Unreal Engine, download and manage purchased assets, projects, plugins and games from the Epic Games Store.</li> Asahi Linux (Linux distro for Apple Silicon Macs) uses Rust in their Vulkan drivers</a>.</li> forerunner</a> is a WIP storytelling platform for composing Souls-like Action-RPGs using the cloud infrastructure and Pixar’s USD as the core parts.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: winit-block-on</a> is an adaptor that allows one to easily block on futures using winit as a reactor.</li> tinyaudio</a> is a cross-platform, easy-to-use, low-level audio output library from the creator of the Fyrox engine.</li> faer v0.5</a> brings a new SVD module, which implements the singular value decomposition for real matrices</li> Bevy Hanabi v0.6</a> brings a new property-based architecture for more control at runtime and also an optimized GPU buffer with Attribute-based particle layout.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: “My unsorted and unsolicited thoughts on Rust for game development”</a></li> “Is WGPU actually a good idea yet?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Ambient’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Mastodon</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #43 - February 2023 Unknown — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 43rd issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 24th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in February. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> Micro Game Engine - @AngelOnFira</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Cootsmania #</a> </h3> </p> Cootsmania</a> (GitHub</a>) is a multiplayer racing game made for Ludwig Jam 2023</a> in 10 days by @kuviman</a> (programming), @rincs</a> (art), and @Brainoid</a> (music & sfx).</p> The game is about racing other players around Ludwig’s house towards the next Coots (Ludwig’s cat) location. Every round half of the players get eliminated and eventually a winner is decided.</p> See the trailer on YouTube</a>.</p> The game is written using a custom engine: Geng</a>.</p> Tunnet</a> #</a> </h3> Tunnels and computer networks</figcaption> </figure> Tunnet (Steam</a>, Itch.io</a>) by @puzzled_squid</a> is a small puzzle/exploration game where you play as a robot technician who has been tasked with building a computer network in an underground complex.</p> The project is implemented using the Bevy engine. It is currently under development and is expected to be released later this year. This month, the announcement trailer and the first few pages of the manual have been published on the project page</a>.</p> Open Combat</a> #</a> </h3> Game now includes live debug window</figcaption> </figure> Open Combat (Website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) is a real time tactical game which takes place during the 2nd World War.</p> Some major changes this month :</p> A live debug window has been introduced (using egui</a> and its ggegui</a> integration). It allows to live-modify and adjust the gameplay of the running game.</li> A big source code split has been done (see the merge request</a>) which separated the game logic and GUI. It allows running the game logic as a standalone server and working on different game parts more easily.</li> Integration of puffin</a> to inspect performances</li> </ul> The developers are also working on high-definition infantry sprites integration and on a high-definition map (and are searching for graphic designer help!).</p> Tiny Glade</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Tiny Glade</a> is a small relaxing game about doodling castles.</p> @anopara</a> and @h3r2tic</a> recently added terrain editing</a>. They then faced an important game design question: how would sheep handle it? Well, these cuddly little floofs are not mountain goats, so the developers gave them tiny umbrellas.</p> Read more in their latest Steam blogpost</a>.</p> Cargo Space</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Cargo Space</a> (Discord</a>) by @johanhelsing</a> is a co-op 2d space game where you build a ship and fly it through space looking for new parts, fighting pirates and the environment.</p> The game uses its own homemade XPBD-based physics engine implemented directly using Bevy</a> systems and types. This month the implementation was fleshed out adding important features such as collision layers, composite colliders, one-way platforms, and an efficient collision broadphase.</p> In other words, this means ship-to-ship collisions are finally happening. This was previously tricky, since ships are a combination of box colliders when colliding with each other and bevy_ecs_tilemap colliders (when colliding with the player).</p> One part of the broadphase implementation was split out into a new crate, bevy_sparse_grid_2d</a>. It provides a simple and convenient way to query for entities that share one or more grid cells based on their axis-aligned bounding box (AABB).</p> Read more about Cargo Space’s physics in the long and detailed blog post</a>.</p> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> Many creatures flying and casting shadows</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>) is an ambitious multiplayer project from CyberSoul, currently in development. With cutting-edge procedural generation and artificial intelligence, it promises to immerse players in a mysterious and enigmatic universe filled with strange creatures and hidden secrets.</p> The latest updates to CyberGate include:</p> A rebuilt renderer, providing improved graphics and performance.</li> Shadow map cascades with seamless transitions for smooth shadow rendering.</li> Soft shadows for more realistic shadow effects.</li> A fog effect to create atmospheric depth and immersion.</li> A sky box to add visual interest and realism to the game world.</li> Support for importing GLTF models, expanding the range of assets available.</li> </ul> Join the journey into the unknown and help shape the future of CyberGate! Join the Discord server</a> to participate in upcoming Phase 7.0!</p> Legend of Worlds</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Legend of Worlds</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a cross-platform, cross-play, 2D online sandbox multiplayer experience where you can join, play, create, and share player-created worlds.</p> The latest dev log</a> from Rou</a> covers an update to the open-source game engine created for this game.</p> Legend of Worlds uses Toxoid Engine. Toxoid is a cross-platform, polyglot, open-source WebAssembly game engine written in Rust. The architecture has been updated so that Toxoid games can now share memory directly between WASM components, and map access to the data values rather than deserializing a set of values every time, resulting in “massive performance gains”.</p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> (Steam</a>, Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that puts you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing.</p> Hydrofoil Generation released on February 16th 2023 on Steam Early Access after almost 3 years of development.</p> The game is written completely in Rust, using a custom engine based on DirectX 11, physics powered by Rapier-3D.</p> Stefano Casillo, programmer commented: “Rust delivered on every single promise. I never experienced such an uneventful launch and QA as the one we had for Hydrofoil Generation. The software stability has been impressive since the beginning of the project and confirmed the trend at release with very few problems all very easy to address”.</p> Hydrofoil Generation currently sits at a very positive review rate of 96% on the Steam page and is praised for its challenging gameplay, performance and realistic physics.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A cyclops attack</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In February, swing SFX were added to the new sword abilities. Blocks were added to spots that can spawn NPCs. Moderation badges were added, and fixes to the chat command were made. A student contributed to Veloren on their two-week internship about game design, you can read about that here</a>. Work is being done to add more functionality to sites, which are small models placed around the world.</p> February’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #205</a>, #206</a>.</p> triverse</a> #</a> </h3> </p> triverse</a> by @cragwind</a> is a WIP smart-pause RTS with custom unit creation on a triangle grid canvas. This month’s update</a> includes:</p> Training and challenge scenarios.</li> Grid lines when building.</li> Edge panning in fullscreen mode.</li> Radar proximity markers to indicate objects that are off the visible portion of the map.</li> </ul> Idu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Idu</a> (Discord</a>) is a strategic sandbox game about growing plants that wish to reclaim nature, developed by Elina Shakhnovich</a> and Johann Tael</a> featuring a bespoke Vulkan-based engine in Rust.</p> This month a new demo was released</a>:</p> A new world generation with new buildings, stairs, caves, paths, and beaches.</li> Simpler inventory management for materials.</li> New help text that explains the game mechanics better.</li> A configurable FOV and fullscreen toggle settings.</li> Wind now affects not only leaves but tree branches as well.</li> Significant GI performance improvements.</li> </ul> Necking</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Necking is a WIP competitive/cooperative 1-on-1 online game where players are giraffes and fight for male dominance in the giraffe way.</p> This month the devs have released the first devlog</a> that tells about:</p> The concept of the game and what inspired it.</li> Custom joint system and migration to Rapier physics lib.</li> Bevy controls design, including tongue controls.</li> The cuicui</a> UI framework.</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The release of Godot version 4.0</a> marks a significant milestone in the game development ecosystem. godot-rust aims to bring the open-source game engine to the Rust community.</p> For the Godot 4 (GDExtension) binding</a>, February was a very productive month, with a handful of new contributors and 16 merged pull requests</a>. An up-to-date feature overview is available in issue #24</a>. Last month’s changes include:</p> Support for arrays, packed arrays, and dictionaries</li> Support for some geometric types (vectors, quaternions, colors)</li> Bugfixes regarding ref-counts, use-after-free, memory leaks</li> </ul> On the Godot 3 (GDNative) side</a>, lots of quality-of-life improvements have found their way into the library:</p> Class self-registration based on inventory</code> crate</li> Flexible self types: fn instance(#[self] this: Instance<Self>)</code></li> Trait entry point: #[callbacks] impl GDNativeCallbacks for MyLibrary {...}</code></li> </ul> Both bullet lists are examples for how the GDNative and GDExtension bindings mutually benefit each other, reusing proven designs for user-friendly Rust APIs.</p> Blue Engine</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Blue Engine</a> by @ElhamAryanpur</a> is an easy to use, extendable, and portable graphics engine built to make it easier to render 2D or 3D graphics.</p> Although the month of Febuary was slow for the development of the engine, there have been significant efforts towards the addition of documentation</a> and the eventual release of the next version. In the meantime, the plugins have favored significant updates and development in the month, notably the egui</a> plugin.</p> Now the egui plugin</a> allow you to render objects of the engine direction inside an egui window. This feature was built in collaboration with @Noswad</a>.</p> This also introduced a new option in Objects: is_visible: bool</code> which hides an object from getting rendered if set to false (set to true</code> as default). This allows you to hide an object from getting rendered on the background of egui, and can then add it to be rendered inside an egui window instead. So far the system on the second design, suggestions are welcome to cement a better design. Refer to example</a>.</p> Ambient</a> #</a> </h3> </p> After over a year in development, version 0.1 of Ambient</a> (formerly known as Dims) was unveiled to the public. It is an open-source multiplayer 3D game runtime, compatible with any language that compiles to/runs on WebAssembly, and is designed to make it easy to build and deploy rich multiplayer worlds and experiences.</p> It is guided by several core principles, including seamless networking, data-oriented design, interoperability, and more. The core runtime is written in Rust and uses WGPU for graphics, Quinn for networking, and WebAssembly for user logic. This allows it to run on all major desktop platforms, with active work underway for the Web and other targets.</p> Check out the GitHub</a> (2600 stars!) to get started with building for/or on Ambient yourself, or chat with the developers and other explorers on the Discord</a>.</p> Discussion: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a></em></p> Geng</a> #</a> </h3> Geng</a> by @kuviman</a> is a game engine that is used by him & friends for mostly making small games for game jams.</p> The focus is to work on the web first (using WebGL1), but can also work easily on native platforms.</p> Font rendering is done using sdf textures, which are being created on GPU based on this article</a>. Some font improvements from February:</p> Better curve approximation (still can be done better like in the article).</li> Use euclidean distance instead of manhattan.</li> Added a method to create sdf texture for text. (previously font only had sdf texture atlas with every glyph).</li> </ul> Support was added for OpenGL blend equations - e.g. minmax blending, which is now used instead of depth buffer for sdf textures</p> Also, some improvements related to sound: API to query Sound</code> duration, starting sound playback from specific position, and changing the speed of SoundEffect</code>.</p> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> Blend space demo</figcaption> </figure> Fyrox</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. This month’s updates include:</p> Audio system’s refactoring</a> to make it much more flexible.</li> Root motion</a> animation technique helps prevent “floating” or “sliding” effects.</li> Blend space</a> allows blending many animations based on two numeric input parameters (mostly useful for blending locomotion animations based on speed and direction).</li> Editor restyling</a> brings cleaner and modern UI.</li> </ul> February’s full weekly devlogs: #13</a>, #14</a>, #15</a>, and #16</a>.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Write a First Person Game in 2KB with Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @grantshandy</a> published an article</a> about creating a simple first-person game in Rust with WASM-4</a>. It covers the basics of a ray casting algorithm and minifying Rust with WebAssembly. You can play the finished game here</a>.</p> Discussion: /r/rust</a></em></p> Voxel Meshing #</a> </h3> </p> Authors of Space Farer</a> - a WIP voxel-based survival/building game - published a couple of articles about voxel meshing:</p> “Voxel Meshing for the Rest of us”</a> is an introduction to voxel meshing techniques.</li> “How (Not) to Improve Voxel Meshing Performance”</a> tells about some zero-copy optimizations.</li> </ul> Making Galaga in Rust with Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @whoisryosuke</a> released the first part in a series</a> on how to build a Galaga clone using Bevy. It covers 2D sprites and meshes basics, setting up custom shaders for animated background, and adding sound.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Sprite and Pixel Art Editor #</a> </h3> </p> A sprite and pixel art editor made with egui and macroquad is being developed by @yds12 (GitHub</a>, Mastodon</a>). The project is already usable, but has not been made public yet. Current features are:</p> Drawing w/ brush, eraser, lines, rectangles, bucket (fill w/ color).</li> Color selector, editable palette, and eyedropper (pick a color from the canvas).</li> Resize or completely erase the canvas.</li> Move the camera, zoom in and out.</li> Selection (rectangular only for now), deleted, copied, and pasted; flip selection (horizontal or vertical).</li> Layers: create, remove, moved up/down, and control visibility and opacity.</li> Spritesheet: specify how many columns and rows your image has, and an animated preview will be displayed in a window w/ configurable scale.</li> Save/load projects (with all its settings), export and import PNG/JPG.</li> Status bar w/ info about canvas size, canvas position, color under mouse, etc.</li> </ul> The source is planned to be released in the next few weeks.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> New features from February’s sprint 23</a>:</p> Shaping up: Editing shapes is now easier thanks to point selection and manipulation improvements.</li> Deep dive: The user experience of nested layer selection is improved by introducing “Deepest” and “Shallowest” modes.</li> Scroll settings: Scroll up-and-down, or zoom in-and-out, at your preference using the new configuration for scroll wheel behavior.</li> Graph growth: Additional node graph engineering introduces graceful type checking and brings GPU-accelerated compositing closer to realization.</li> </ul> As always, new contributors are kindly invited to get involved</a> and take on approachable issues</a> with help from the project’s friendly and supportive developer community on Discord.</p> Open Graphite</a> in your browser and start creating! Share your designs with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> rerun.io</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click to see Rerun’s latest demo video</a></figcaption> </figure> Rerun</a> (Discord</a>) lets you log images, point clouds and other visual data as easy as you would log text. The data is streamed in real-time to the Rerun Viewer which you can run natively or in a browser.</p> The Rerun Viewer builds configurable visualizations based on the data you log and the relationships between it. It uses transform hierarchies to lay out scenes and connect related data. It lets you scroll back and forth in time, and toggle between showing your data along different timelines, e.g. log time and sensor time. It’s built to be fast so you can explore without waiting.</p> </blockquote> All built in Rust on top of egui</a> library, with an API for both Rust and Python.</p> This month, after a year of work, Rerun was open-sourced under MIT & Apache 2</a>!</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> hexx</a> #</a> </h3> </p> hexx</a> is a hexagonal tools library made by @ManevilleF</a>:</p> Manipulate hexagonal coordinates, draw rings, lines, wedges, etc.</li> Generate hexagonal grids, with conversion between your world and the hexagonal coordinates system.</li> Compute 3d meshes for your hexagons.</li> </ul> It’s engine-agnostic, but was made with bevy</a> integration in mind and provides 2D and 3D examples</a>.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> nanoshredder</a> #</a> </h3> macroquad’s shadertoy example with metal/glsl preview</figcaption> </figure> Nanoshredder</a> is an experimental fork of makepad’s shader-compiler</a>. It compiles rust-like DSL into GLSL, Metal and HLSL.</p> This month it got a little web demo</a>: macroquad’s shadertoy</a>, a live editor with generated Metal/GLSL preview.</p> blink-alloc</a> #</a> </h3> blink-alloc</a> is a brand new arena-allocator with bunch of improvements over existing solutions that is tested with Miri</a> and follows “Strict Provenance Rules”</a>.</p> Arena-allocators offer extremely fast allocations and deallocations. Allocation is just a few pointer arithmetic operations. And deallocation is nearly no-op. In exchange arena-allocator requires a point in time when all previous allocations are unused to reset state. Rust’s borrow-checker ensures the requirement for reset making it 100% safe to use.</p> TL;DR great for games, servers, cli tools, and more.</p> </blockquote> blink-alloc provides thread-local and multi-threaded allocators - BlinkAlloc</code> and SyncBlinkAlloc</code>. Single-threaded version performs many times faster than bumpalo</code></a>. The author couldn’t find another implementation to compare the multi-threaded version’s performance.</p> It also provided out-of-the-box to fetch BlinkAlloc</code> in task/thread and return it back when done, keeping multiple BlinkAlloc</code> instances warmed.</p> On top of raw allocations blink-alloc provides Blink</code> type that works as safe allocator adaptor. Blink</code> can allocate memory and initialize it with values provided by user. Users may provide values as-is, as closures, or as iterators. Blink</code>’s API is safe with few exceptions for niche use cases.</p> Those familiar with bumpalo</code> may think of Blink</code> as of bumpalo::Bump</code>. Though Blink</code></p> drops all placed values on reset, which makes it usable with any kind of types without resource leaks.</li> Accepts any iterator type, not just ExactSizeIterator</code> implementations.</li> Is configurable to use any BlinkAllocator</code> implementation, thus not tied to Global</code>.</li> </ul> Currently, Rust’s standard collection types may use custom allocators only one nightly and with allocator_api</code> feature enabled. blink-alloc uses allocator-api2</code> crate to work on both stable and nightly. Integration with other crates is simple and doesn’t require depending on blink-alloc, only on allocator-api2</code>.</p> pecs</a> #</a> </h3> Promise chaining example</figcaption> </figure> In the ECS environment, you can’t use the standard async/await approach, which can make implementing asynchronous logic painful.</p> pecs</a> is a plugin for the Bevy</a> engine that solves this problem. It allows you to execute the code asynchronously by chaining multiple promises as part of Bevy’s ecs</code></a> environment.</p> Each promise takes the state and result of the previous promise as arguments, as well as any Bevy ECS system parameter, and passes the modified state and new promise/result to the next promise. It’s easy to register custom promises that wait for user input, events, asset loading, and so on. You can also use pecs</a> to wait for any or all of multiple promises to complete before continuing with the rest of the code, as well as to loop asynchronously until a condition is met.</p> seldom_state</a> #</a> </h3> seldom_state</a> is a Bevy plugin that adds a StateMachine</code> component that you can add to your entities. The state machine will change the entity’s components based on states, triggers, and transitions that you define. It’s useful for player controllers, animations, simple AI, etc.</p> This month seldom_state</a> 0.4 has been released:</p> Transition builders (StateMachine::trans_builder</code>) which let you pass data from triggers to states.</li> The AnyState</code> state, which you can use wherever StateMachine</code> accepts state type parameters, which lets you create transitions from any state, etc</li> A leafwing_input</code> feature for leafwing-input-manager</code> integration, which enables 9 built-in triggers related to input. JustPressedTrigger</code>, for example.</li> OptionTrigger</code> and BoolTrigger</code> traits, which are simpler to implement than Trigger</code>.</li> </ul> warbler_grass</a> #</a> </h3> A bevy crate for grass rendering</figcaption> </figure> warbler_grass</a> is a new experimental Bevy</a> plugin. The goal is to provide an ergonomic, but performant way to easily render huge amounts of grass.</p> Some of the currently integrated features are dynamic directional wind and chunk loading.</p> The project is now also published on crates.io</a>.</p> taffy</a> #</a> </h3> taffy</a>, the pure Rust UI layout crate, now supports CSS grid! Build your inventory menus with ease, or make that sudoku game you’ve always dreamed of.</p> Taffy v0.3 also comes with more than a few performance improvements and bug fixes; for more details, check out our release notes</a>.</p> Cvars</a> #</a> </h3> Cvars and the Fyrox in-game console as used in RustCycles</figcaption> </figure> Cvars</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by @martin-t</a> are a simple way to store settings you want to change at runtime without restarting your game.</p> They offer a way to change struct fields based on their name. This means games can store their config in a plain old struct and use its statically typed fields with no overhead. Cvars</a> provide a derive macro to also allow changing each field dynamically at runtime from a TUI.</p> The cvars project includes in-game consoles for macroquad</a> and for Fyrox</a>.</p> In addition to reading and setting cvars, they support history and offer a help message for new users. More advanced features such as autocomplete are planned for the next release.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: @Tantan shared a vlog</a> about the space colonization procedual tree generation technique he’s using for his voxel game</a>.</li> Denis Lavrentev shared a couple of Primitive Engineering’s vlogs: about chunk management</a> and the crafting system</a>.</li> Hoive</a> is multiplayer Rust version of the Hive boardgame.</li> Tigris and Euphrates</a> is a Rust version of the same-titled boardgame written using macroquad.</li> Scalp Invaders</a> is game where you play as a colony of lice, launching themselves with great abandon through the scalp of a disgusted victim.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: alkahest-rs</a> released a couple of vlogs about UI rendering in general</a> and rendering children widgets inside panels</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: Faith Ekstrand published the first article</a> in a series about using Rust for Vulkan drivers.</li> “Learn WGPU” was updated to wgpu v0.15</a>.</li> PhaestusFox posted more episodes</a> of their “Platformer in Bevy” YouTube series.</li> The Unofficial Bevy Cheatbook by got two new chapters about “Cameras”</a> and “HDR, Tonemapping, Bloom”</a>.</li> Jan Metzger published an article</a> about dynamically limiting FPS in DirectX games from an external DLL.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: denog</a> is a gamedev-oriented fork of Deno with built-in window system integration.</li> cargo-nds</a> and libnds-rs</a> allow writing Rust games for Nintendo DS</a>, though both are WIP.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: dlss_wgpu</a> provides Deep Learning Super Sampling for wgpu.</li> oxidized_navigation v0.2</a> brings full support for walkable radius, areas, and area cost multipliers.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: “We’re not really game yet”</a></li> </ul> </li> /r/rust: “Does anyone here work in gamedev with Rust?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Ambient’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a>, Mastodon</a>, or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Mastodon</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #42 - January 2023 Unknown — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 42nd issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust Graphics Meetup #3 #</a> </h3> The Rust Graphics Meetup is an online gathering where Rustaceans share technical details of their work related to graphics and compute, not affiliated with any particular stack. The third edition happened on January 28th! These were the talks:</p> Hello, Blade! - Dzmitry Malyshau</a></li> Implementing an Extensible Renderer - Philip Degarmo</a></li> Rend3: High Performance, Cross Platform, GPU Driven Rendering in wgpu and WebGPU - Connor Fitzgerald</a></li> </ul> Learn more at the gfx meetup repo</a>. The individual videos haven’t been uploaded yet, but you can watch the full meetup here</a>. Thanks everyone for tuning in and helping to make this happen!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 23rd Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in January. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> Blade - @kvark</a></li> Digital Extinction- @Indy2222</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Digital Extinction #</a> </h3> Building Placement in Digital Extinction</figcaption> </figure> Digital Extinction</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Reddit</a>) by @Indy2222</a> is a 3D real-time strategy game made with Bevy</a>.</p> This month the game had two new first-time contributors, @0HyperCube</a> and @Polostor</a> (Péťa Tománek).</p> The most notable updates are:</p> several multiplayer related screens were added to the menu: sign-in / sign-up, game listing, and game creation,</li> building draft is now semi-transparent and colored green or red based on obstacles,</li> double clicking on a unit or building leads to the selection of all visible entities of the same type,</li> the mouse cursor is now confined to the game window,</li> the camera can be moved horizontally with arrow keys,</li> pop-up in-game menu was added, it is opened with Escape key,</li> work on game head-up display / panel (HUD) was initiated,</li> various errors are now briefly displayed as toasts in the UI,</li> support of map hashing was added and deterministic map paths are used,</li> several small fixes, and code quality improvements.</li> </ul> See gameplay</a> and menu</a> screen recordings on YouTube.</p> A more detailed update summary is available here</a>.</p> Cargo Space</a> #</a> </h3> Cross-platform p2p multiplayer in Cargo Space</figcaption> </figure> Cargo Space</a> (Discord</a>) by @johanhelsing</a> is a co-op 2d space game where you build a ship and fly it through space looking for new parts, fighting pirates and the environment.</p> This month, sprites were added for basic character poses, as well as basic sound effects, making the game come alive and feel more like a proper 2D platformer.</p> Support for bevy_ggrs</code></a>’ synctest sessions was implemented. This allows detecting de-syncs by constantly performing rollbacks and comparing world state checksums). This caught some very rare de-sync bugs.</p> The game also adopted Matchbox</a>’s newly added support for cross-platform p2p. This means sessions between players on web and native are now supported (video</a>).</p> All of this is discussed in detail in the third devlog entry</a>.</p> Johan also wrote an article</a> on how sound effects were implemented in a rollback-aware way, canceling mispredicted sounds, and handling “late” sounds. It describes a solution that could easily be adopted for any game made with bevy_ggrs</code></a>.</p> Idu</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot of a tree emerging from a cave in Idu</figcaption> </figure> Idu</a> (Discord</a>) Idu is a strategic sandbox game about growing plants that wish to reclaim nature, developed by Elina Shakhnovich</a> and Johann Tael</a> featuring a bespoke Vulkan-based engine in Rust.</p> After almost a whole year of relative silence, they have begun releasing new demos in January. The new demo version 8 comes with a new renderer supporting interactive, flowing water. Also, the simulated trees in Idu changed a lot, as they’re now able to flower, in addition to dropping leaves. The new demo features a lot of new plant textures, branching logic, and better rhizome and root simulation.</p> Player accessibility and the gameplay itself is better now as well, due to a completely new menu and a lot of new items, such as porous gabion blocks and ladders.</p> Read more and download the newest demo from Idu’s page on itch.io</a>.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A serene river with new reflections</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In January, Veloren released version 0.14! This update included trading with pets, musical instrument crafting, the Sea Chapel, and many more changes. You can read all about that update in the release post</a>.</p> Veloren’s Site2 system can now be hot-reloaded. Site2 allows you to describe procedures for how objects like houses, trees, or bridges should be generated. Hot-reloading allows you to change the Site2 code and watch the changes take effect in real-time. The official 2023 Veloren OST was also released, and can be watched on YouTube</a>.</p> January’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #204</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fyrox</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. In January it hit version 0.29 and got the following features:</p> Animation system rework</li> Animation editor</li> Animation blending state machine editor rework</li> Sprite sheet editor</li> Ability to change scene settings</li> Improved WebAssembly support</li> Customizable graph update pipeline</li> Node and property selector widgets</li> Message passing for scripts</li> Reflection refactoring to support interior mutability</li> Deterministic particle systems</li> Ability to animate material properties</li> Various bug fixes</li> </ul> You can read more about the changes in the feature highlights post</a>.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Introduction to the Entity Component System</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @indiedevcasts</a> published a new blog post</a>, exploring object-oriented and data-oriented designs before giving an introduction to the Entity Component System paradigm.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Foxtrot</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Foxtrot</a> was created by Jan Hohenheim (@janhohenheim</a>) as an all-in-one starting point for 3D projects made in Bevy. While he appreciated that other Bevy templates showed nicely how to wire up systems and setup a game loop, he was missing a showcase for commonly used features that are scattered around various libraries. So he created Foxtrot, where he collected the most basic features he could need for future projects or jams. The latest release</a> features:</p> loading a 3D level from GLTF files</li> automatically assigning physics colliders</li> a custom dialog system</li> saving and loading the game</li> a force-based third-person character controller</li> shaders</li> pathfinding</li> a flexible camera system with easings supporting various perspectives</li> a custom in-game editor window for live tweaks such as spawning new objects.</li> </ul> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> New features from January’s sprint 22</a>:</p> Picture this: Imported images are now part of the node graph. The new Image Frame</em> node converts bitmap data into a vector rectangle holding the image. This paves the way for other vector data like shapes and text to soon be converted into nodes and composited alongside images.</li> Instant iterations: Incremental graph compilation avoids recompiling the whole graph each time an edit is made or a value changes. This makes iteration faster and enables caching of intermediate computations for faster rendering.</li> </ul> And soon, the Alpha Milestone 2 release will launch with new node graph features, a revamped website, and a wider-reaching project announcement. Join the newsletter</a> and stay tuned.</p> Open Graphite</a> in your browser and start creating! Share your designs with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> big-brain</a> #</a> </h3> big-brain</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by @zkat</a> is a highly parallel Utility AI</a> library for the Bevy game engine.</p> big-brain</a> recently tagged v0.16.0</a>, bringing with it a couple of breaking changes and a few goodies.</p> Probably the biggest change in this release is the removal of the blanket ActionBuilder</code></a> and ScorerBuilder</code></a> implementations for Clone</code> types. This is a fairly significant breaking change, but one that is fairly easy to resolve: simply use the new #[derive(ActionBuilder)]</code> and #[derive(ScorerBuilder)]</code> macros to derive the necessary implementations for your Action and Scorer Components and you should be good to go.</p> Finally, since the recent merging of the bevy scheduler changes</a>, big-brain users should expect the next version of big-brain to bring with it some significant breaking changes to scheduling, so keep an eye out for that and be mindful of building a lot on top of the current BigBrainStage</code></a> (which is used by the default BigBrainPlugin</code>).</p> Discussions: Mastodon</a></em></p> RustySynth</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Video: an example of realtime MIDI synthesis with RustySynth on rust-sfml</figcaption> </figure> RustySynth</a> is a SoundFont MIDI synthesizer written in pure Rust. The purpose of this library is to provide MIDI music playback functionality for any Rust application without complicated dependencies. The code base is lightweight and can be used with any audio driver that supports streaming audio (e.g. rust-sfml</a>).</p> Features:</p> Tuned mainly for gamedev and has low CPU usage.</li> Support for standard MIDI files.</li> No dependencies other than the standard library.</li> Available under a permissive license (MIT).</li> </ul> tween</a> #</a> </h3> tween</code> is a library for manipulating values in stylish and beautiful ways. It has been almost entirely rewritten for v2.0.0</code>, now featuring a significantly improved API, fewer generics, and much, much faster performance.</p> Additionally, it has added support for Looping, Oscillating, and Extrapolating tweens. With all of this, making custom tweens is much easier. An example of making a Bezier tween is included.</p> scene-graph</a> #</a> </h3> scene-graph</code> is a library for creating graph structures similar to the one used in engines like Unity or Unreal. It is fast, performant, and easy to manipulate. It’s especially useful for user interfaces. Although only in v0.1.0</code>, feedback would be very appreciated.</p> torchbearer</a> #</a> </h3> An exemple of torchbearer in action, demonstrating both pathfinding and field of view</figcaption> </figure> torchbearer</a> by @redwarp</a> is a library that provides a set of tools to find your path in a grid-based dungeon. Specifically, it provides a quick implementation of pathfinding and field of view algorithm.</p> The 0.6.x version rewrites the field of view algorithm to cast vision rays in a Bresenham circle around the point of origin. This change from its original implementation</a> makes it faster as it removes the needs for error correction.</p> Matchbox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Matchbox</a> is a library for easily establishing unreliable, unordered, peer-to-peer WebRTC data connections using rust WASM. This enables low-latency multiplayer browser games.</p> Originally, it was written for web assembly, but a native implementation using WebRTC.rs</a> has been available since 0.4. However, a few minor incompatibilities between the two implementations meant connections between native and web were not possible.</p> In version 0.5, however, Alex Rozgo</a> fixed the last of these issues. And cross-play sessions are now finally fully supported.</p> In addition, johanhelsing</a> fixed a serious bug that used to cause disconnections on recent versions of Firefox.</p> The tutorial series on how to make a p2p web game with Bevy, GGRS and Matchbox</a> was also updated to the latest versions of all three libraries.</p> Discussions: Mastodon</a></em></p> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> Miniquad/macroquad examples rendered by Metal API</figcaption> </figure> miniquad</a> is a safe and cross-platform rendering library focused on portability and low-end platform support.</p> This month metal backend PR</a> finally landed on miniquad!</p> It is not yet ready for any production use, but it is available on crates.io as 0.4.0-alpha.</p> With this change, miniquad support webgl1, gl2, gles2/gles3, gl3+, metal on web, macOS, iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Hydrofoil</a> is getting closer to their February release date.</li> Tiny Glade now has terrain modification</a>.</li> Thetawave now has a functional boss enemy</a>.</li> 8bit Duels is just released their fifth devlog</a>.</li> Combine And Conquer just released version 0.4.0</a>.</li> Your Only Move is Hustle is now available on Steam.</li> TheGrimsey write a devblog “Magic Missiles & the Registries”</a>.</li> Flesh has a new redrawn background in the first area</a>, and has been tested to run on the Steam Deck</a>.</li> DGS</a> is a multiplayer game of Go, with spherical fields and VR support.</li> Triverse has a set of devlogs out</a>, with the most recent covering scenarios and playability</a>.</li> Fish Folk: Punchy has released version 0.3</a>.</li> Life Code has a new video</a> explaining how the diet selection tool works.</li> Digg is a new game being made with Bevy, and has a devlog</a> that walks through the first two weeks of development.</li> Revolver Time</a> is a game made in 1 week with Godot and Rust, and has a video</a> explaining how it was made.</li> Canal Mania</a> is a game created for the Historically Accurate Game Jam.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Other learning material updates: Native iOS Touch Events w/ Rust</a> is a tutorial on how to use Rust to create native iOS touch events.</li> Bevy Basics video series</a> is a series of videos that covers the basics of Bevy.</li> Platformer in Bevy video series</a> is a series of videos that covers how to make a platformer in Bevy.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Other engine updates: alkahest-rs</a> released put about a video about implementing texture batching</a>.</li> godot-rust</a> saw large improvements to the Godot 3 bindings.</li> petrichor64</a> is a retro-inspired small 3D fantasy engine.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Other tooling updates: Ten Minute Physics</a> is a reimplementation of Matthias Müller’s “Ten Minute Physics” demos in Rust with WASM + WebGL.</li> rgis</a> is a geospatial data viewer written in Rust.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Other tooling updates: wgpu v0.15, naga v0.11</a> were released.</li> raster_fonts</a>, a library for deserializing the resulting metadata, was announced.</li> nvtt</a> has been updated to use Nvidia Texture Tools 3.</li> oxidized_navigation</a> is a nav-mesh generation & pathfinding crate to use with Bevy.</li> VPlugin</a> is a Rust framework to develop and use plugins within your project, without worrying about the low-level details.</li> egui_glium</a> is looking for a new maintainer.</li> direct-storage</a> provides Rust bindings for DirectStorage.</li> bones</a> is a work-in-progress, opinionated game framework built on Bevy.</li> airsim-client</a> is a Rust client library for interacting with Microsoft Airsim.</li> Rapier</a> wrote a year in review for 2022, and took a look ahead to 2023.</li> bevy-magic-light-2d</a> is an experimental dynamic 2D global illumination system for Bevy, based on SDF ray-marching and screen space irradiance cache probes.</li> notan v0.9</a> was released.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: “Is it a good idea to start learning game development with rust?”</a></li> “Tech stack for a turn-based roguelike in Rust”</a></li> “Pain points using Rust for gamedev?”</a></li> “I want to make a game that’s compatible with Nintendo switch”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> Ambient</a> (Remote) Engine Programmer</li> Rendering Engineer</li> Open Source Community Engineer</li> </ul> </li> Embark Studios</a> (Stockholm/Hybrid Remote) Various roles</li> </ul> </li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Mastodon</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #41 - December 2022 Unknown — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 41st issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust Graphics Meetup 3 #</a> </h3> </p> The 3rd Rust Graphics Meetup will take place on the 28th of January 2023 at 16:00 GMT</a>. This meetup is a chance to show off what you’ve been working on in the graphics community, or see what other people have been doing!</p> If you’re interested in speaking, please add a comment to this issue</a>. You can also read about the previous graphics meetup</a>.</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 22nd Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in December. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> Fyrox Engine - @dmitrynstepanov</a></li> Rusty Vangers - @kvark</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to speak at the next meetup on January 14th, please respond to the monthly GitHub issue</a>.</p> @rust_gamedev Mastodon Feed</a> #</a> </h3> </p> As you may know, we have a @rust_gamedev Twitter account</a> for making announcements and collecting all the cool rust gamedev stuff there into one feed.</p> In the last couple of months a significant portion of rust game developers has either migrated from Twitter to Mastodon</a> or started cross-posting there, so we’ve decided</a> to create a similar “official” @rust_gamedev account on the mastodon.gamedev.place server</a>.</p> Please follow us there and post your own relevant updates on Fediverse</a> using either the #RustGameDev tag or #RustLang #GameDev combo.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Digital Extinction #</a> </h3> Laser trail in Digital Extinction</figcaption> </figure> Digital Extinction</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Reddit</a>) by @Indy2222</a> is a 3D real-time strategy game made with Bevy</a>.</p> This month’s update is somewhat smaller but there has been some important progress in multiplayer.</p> The most notable updates are:</p> game configuration is loaded from a file (docs</a>),</li> a simple game lobby server has been created (docs</a>),</li> a Bevy plugin with the lobby client has been implemented,</li> several minor community, infrastructure, and other improvements have been done.</li> </ul> A more detailed update summary is available here</a>.</p> Open Combat</a> #</a> </h3> Game now includes vehicle (T-26) and shelling FX</figcaption> </figure> Open Combat (Website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by bux</a> is a real time tactical game which takes place during the 2nd world war.</p> Since the last news about this game, the game engine has been rewritten to permit multiplayer. Most of the basic game engine features have been rewritten with the new engine (soldier moves, visibilities, map, etc.). Vehicle concept has been introduced to a T-26 tank. Basic fight features like gunfire and shelling have been introduced.</p> Tiny Glade</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @anopara</a>’s and @h3r2tic</a>’s tiny building game now finally has a name! It’s Tiny Glade</a>!</p> Tiny Glade is a small relaxing game about doodling castles. Explore gridless building chemistry, and watch the game carefully assemble every brick, pebble, and plank. There’s no management, combat, or wrong answers - just kick back and turn forgotten meadows into lovable dioramas. Wishlist on Steam</a>!</p> Temple Knight</a> #</a> </h3> Shooting automatons in Temple Knight</figcaption> </figure> Temple Knight (Itch.io</a>, Twitter</a>) by @nilaysavant</a> is a 3D FPS game developed using Bevy</a>. You play the role of a knight and protect the temple from raiding automatons.</p> What began as an experiment to learn game dev in Rust using Bevy</a>. Initially motivated by the visual appeal of a scene running in the browser via WASM</a>. It quickly started taking the shape of a game:</p> From adding Rapier</a> for basic physics</a> to developing mechanics for other entities.</li> Path finding for Automaton’s using control systems</a>.</li> Which was later switched to a deterministic A-start navmesh approach</a>.</li> Developed mechanics for the player controller including the first-person-camera.</li> Implemented weapon + projectiles systems.</li> Finally, custom shaders for projectiles</a> were added as a finishing touch.</li> </ul> An experiment that became the first game published by @nilaysavant</a>. Play Temple Knight</a> in your browser.</p> Cargo Space</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Cargo Space</a> (Discord</a>) by @johanhelsing</a> is a co-op 2d space game where you build a ship and fly it through space looking for new parts, fighting pirates and the environment.</p> Johan wrote an introductory post</a> about the design idea, and a tentative plan for its development.</p> The first step was to make an initial offline single-player prototype. This is covered in the first devlog</a> along with topics such as procedural generation, 2d platforming, bloom, and various community Bevy crates, such as bevy_ecs_tilemap</a>, bevy_ecs_ldtk</a> and bevy_particle_systems</a>.</p> The procedural generation needs for the game also resulted in a new crate being born. noisy_bevy</a> is a CPU and GPU noise plugin for Bevy.</p> After this, p2p rollback networking was added using bevy_ggrs</a> and Matchbox</a>. The second devlog</a> goes through this in detail, and in particular how integration between bevy_ggrs</a> and leafwing_input_manager</a> was implemented.</p> 8bit Duels</a> #</a> </h3> The newly added Kraken</figcaption> </figure> @ThousandthStar</a> is creating 8bit Duels (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>), an 8bit style turn-based multiplayer strategy game.</p> Last month, an artist joined ThousandthStar to create art for the game. A testing server has now been set up (more information is in the Discord</a> server).</p> Furthermore, these three new troops have been added to the game: Reaper, Kraken, and Spider. The game now also includes new abilities for the various troops to come.</p> The full devlog for this month can be found here</a>.</p> Flesh</a> #</a> </h3> more blood</figcaption> </figure> Flesh</a> by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and an organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> Change player bullet color and add trail particle.</li> Add SFX when special weapon ready.</li> Increase blood splash particles.</li> Postpone release date to Q1, 2023.</li> </ul> Pirate Annihilation #</a> </h3> Pirate annihilation game view, asset pack by Kenney</a></figcaption> </figure> Pirate Annihilation (GitHub</a>, Twitter</a>) by indiedevcasts</a> (@theredfish</a>) is a last-man-standing game where pirate ships battle against each other in stormy seas.</p> The very first devlog</a> is available on Youtube. It describes the implementation of a smooth damping effect to follow the player with the camera, jitter and stuttering issues, and the core game mechanics are now defined.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A fearsome wendigo encounter</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In December, work has been done to create a website to better assist moderation in the game. Several months of project finances were done, and all of the data is publically visible</a>. Work on Wyverns has continued, and lots of effort is being put into their wings. Some UI elements have changed location, both the bag and spellbook buttons were merged with other button bars.</p> Frost Gigas are another big item in the works. These creatures will be Veloren’s world boss. Gigas will hopefully be the first of a numerous elemental giants to roam the open world of Veloren and will need a large group of players to be able to take it down and collect it’s new uncraftable and legendary loot!</p> December’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #201</a>, #202</a>, #203</a>.</p> Thetawave</a> #</a> </h3> First boss enemy in Thetawave</figcaption> </figure> Thetawave is an open-source, roguelite, physics-based, space shooter game made with Bevy</a> and Rapier</a>.</p> This month, the first boss enemy was added to the game. Unlike other enemies, it is composed of a single “mob” entity and 7 “mob segment” entities. It also uses behavior sequences to regularly change its active set of behaviors. You can follow @carlosupina</a> on Twitter for regular updates about the game.</p> Jumpy</a> #</a> </h3> Jumpy Items: Swords, Crates, Grenades, & Mines</figcaption> </figure> Jumpy</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by Spicy Lobster</a> is a pixel-style, tactical 2D shooter with a fishy theme.</p> In the last month, work started on a new architecture for the core Jumpy game loop.</p> Determinism and snapshot/restore functionality has been a challenge for networking support in jumpy. To address this, Jumpy has started migrating the core game loop to a custom, micro Entity Component System that is deterministic and can be trivially snapshot and restored.</p> By being simple and planning to eventually support a pure C API, it’s also intended for the micro-ECS approach to make it vastly easier to create a performant modding interface to Jumpy in the future.</p> Work has almost been finished on the new Bones ECS and the surrounding Bones</a> framework, which is still built on Bevy for rendering and otherwise talking to the hardware. The hope is that Bones can become a framework for making other games similar in scope to Jumpy, without those games have to re-invent everything that was needed to get features like UI, networking, localization, asset loading, etc.</p> As soon as the ECS migration is finished, the plan is to get the final game juicing and polish done and to make a proper MVP release.</p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> (Steam</a>, Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that will put you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing.</p> The game is written completely in Rust, using a custom engine based on DirectX 11, physics powered by Rapier-3D.</p> Jaxx Vane Studio army of 2, Stefano Casillo and Chax Duero is pushing through the final steps to get the game ready for Steam Early Access release.</p> As final QA approaches the team is at work to add the last level of polish and more details as possible to every aspect of the game.</p> A new Tutorial System has been added to introduce people with different backgrounds to the game as gently as possible making the learning curve of this complex simulator less steep.</p> Stefano is also back on Twitch</a> streaming coding sessions live.</p> Hydrofoil Generation should be available on Steam in the first months of 2023.</p> Doomé</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Doomé</a> by Patryk Wychowaniec</a> and Jakub Trąd</a> is a GameOff’22 FPS game:</p> <…> the topic was cliché and our game is Doom meets Portal meets The Stanley Parable, with real-time raytraced graphics (that work plenty fast even on a CPU) and a 10-minute storyline!</p> </blockquote> The source code is available on GitHub</a>. The game is written with a custom rust-gpu</a>-based raytracer: strolle</a>. Watch a talk from a recent Rust Wrocław’s meeting</a> to learn more about the implementation details.</p> You can play the game online and/or get binaries at itch.io</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Combine&Conquer</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Combine&Conquer</a> (itch.io</a>, devlog</a>, Discord</a>) by Martin Buck</a> is a WIP relaxing multi-planetary 2D factory automation game. This month’s updates include:</p> Early Access release on Steam</a>.</li> A bunch of minor v0.3.* versions</a> with loads of bugfixes and small improvements in UX, rendering, etc.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> triverse</a> #</a> </h3> </p> triverse</a> by @cragwind</a> is a WIP smart-pause RTS with custom unit creation on a triangle grid canvas.</p> In a distant star system, AI collectives vie for power. Assemble and control a self-replicating fleet to harvest resources, salvage wreckage, and defend your territory. Using modular parts, design ships to counter threats while balancing mobility, defense, and firepower.</p> </blockquote> You can find the detailed guide to playing here</a> and play the web version on itch.io</a>.</p> This month’s updates</a> include:</p> Salvaging parts</a> from wreckage using workers for building your own units.</li> Torpedo launchers</a> for taking out large or stationary targets.</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fyrox</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. In December it got a lot of new functionality and improved existing:</p> Animation system rework is completed</li> Animation and ABSM editors are now fully usable</li> Reflection improvements</li> Copy Value as String</code> for Inspector</li> Ability to enable/disable scene nodes</li> Customizable graph update pipeline</li> UI Widgets improvements</li> Curve editor improvements</li> Lots of bug fixes</li> </ul> Runty8</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Runty8</a> is an experimental port of the Pico8</a> fantasy console that supports writing games in Rust.</p> Runty8 has recently added support for WebAssembly, which means that you can now run your games in the browser!</p> Feel free to follow their template</a> to start making your own games.</p> The project is in very early stages, and is currently looking for contributors. If you’re interested, feel free to read their contributing guide</a> or browse through the open issues</a>.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Rustacean Station: Presser with Gray Olson</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Rustacean Station</a> podcast interviewed Gray Olson</a>, the developer of Presser</a> - a library that aims to make it easier to safely work with byte buffers.</p> In this episode, Gray</a> talks about art and graphic designing work for Embark Studio, computer graphics and ray tracing, memory allocation in Rust’s virtual machine, and Embark’s vision of Rust gamedev.</p> GLTF Animations in wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @whoisryosuke</a> released a blog post</a> on how to parse GLTF files in Rust, render them using wgpu, and play animations imported from Blender.</p> Create a Clicker Game with Macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @Paper010</a> released a short two-part tutorial aimed at beginners who want to get started with game development with Rust and macroquad</a>:</p> The first part</a> covers the minimal version of a clicker game.</li> The second part</a> explains how to play sounds and change colors.</li> </ul> The final source code is available on GitHub</a>.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> Video: 3-minute timelapse of a vector art piece illustrated in Graphite</figcaption> </figure> </a></p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> December’s sprint 21</a> introduces:</p> Chain reaction: The Imaginate feature, an AI image generation workflow powered by Stable Diffusion</a>, becomes a node. Chain together a sequence of fine-tuned generation steps. And explore ideas by branching the graph into new creative directions.</li> Node nurturing: New features provide polish to the node graph. Nodes can be copy/pasted, hidden, previewed, and linked more easily.</li> Bugs, begone!: A major effort to improve editor usability fixes dozens of bugs and paper cuts. Boolean shape operations now crash less frequently, the UI no longer slows down badly over time, and undo history is finally fixed.</li> </ul> Stay tuned for the imminent Alpha Milestone 2 release and progress converting existing features into nodes.</p> Open the Graphite editor</a> in your browser to give it a try and share your creations with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> Inox2d</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Inox2d</a> (Discord</a>) by the Inox2d Workgroup is an experimental official Rust implementation of the Inochi2D</a> puppet animation technology. Inochi2d is notably used by the popular vtuber @AsahiLina</a>.</p> Currently, Inox2d is still not on par with the reference implementation</a>. Basic features like animations</a> and a proper camera API</a> have yet to be worked on.</p> Users who really want to use it should instead go with the reference implementation. If using Rust, through the official inochi2d-rs</a> bindings.</p> Currently, Inox2d contributors are working on a WGPU renderer backend</a>. They are also looking forward towards an official Bevy integration</a>!</p> bevy_rpg</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_rpg</a> (Discord channel</a>) by @fianathedevgirl</a> is a plugin allowing RPG or visual novel dialogs to be made with the Bevy game engine.</p> At the moment, it can be used for very basic dialogs. “Choose dialog” or text input dialog are still not implemented and the dialog controller buttons doesn’t work yet.</p> If you are interested in seeing how it should be used in production, checkout “Project Flara”</a>. It’s a prototype/demo game made by the same author showcasing a JRPG-ish indie game written in Rust. The author also made a basic example here</a>.</p> lpcg</a> #</a> </h3> A new library which generates character sprites</figcaption> </figure> lpcg (Crates.io</a>, GitHub</a>) by bux</a> is a library which generates character sprites, based on assets from the Liberated Pixel Cup</a>.</p> egui_dnd</a> #</a> </h3> A showcase</a> of egui_dnd</figcaption> </figure> egui_dnd</a> (github</a>, crates.io</a>) by @lucasmerlin</a> is a new drag and drop sorting crate for egui. While egui itself includes some drag and drop support, it’s not intuitive to use. This crate provides a simple abstraction over egui’s drag and drop features.</p> The first release contains initial support for vertical sorting. If there is interest, more features could be added.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> bevy_rapier_collider_gen</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_rapier_collider_gen</a> by @shnewto</a> is a library for generating bevy_rapier2d colliders for bevy apps, from images with transparency.</p> Features include out of box support for generating:</p> Convex polyline colliders</li> Polyline colliders</li> Convex hull colliders</li> Heightfield colliders</li> Other colliders or geometries by getting edge coordinates in “drawing order”</li> Multiple colliders from a single image</li> </ul> For more, in pictures, see the picture book retrospective “misadventures in collider generation”</a>.</p> Mun v0.4.0</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Mun</a> is a scripting language for gamedev focused on quick iteration times that is written in Rust.</p> The previous Mun release dates back over one and a half years. Since then - slowly but steadily - the Mun Community and Core Team have been working towards Mun v0.4.0 and it’s finally here!</p> Mun v0.4 does not only bring array support to Mun, but it also lays the groundwork for a plethora of language features that require indirect types and recursion. For a full list have a look at the changelog</a>, but the main improvements are:</p> Dynamically-sized arrays</li> Simplified function invocations from Rust</li> Simplified struct API for Rust</li> Apple M1 & experimental iOS support</li> Upgrade to LLVM 13</li> Support for runtime usage in entity component systems (ECS)</li> </ul> rust-gpu v0.4.0</a> #</a> </h3> Embark’s Creative Playground</a>, which uses rust-gpu and raytracing</figcaption> </figure> Rust-gpu</a> (Discord</a>) allows you to write your GPU shaders in the Rust language. It consists of a Rust compiler backend for generating SPIR-V shader modules and an API to address GPU resources.</p> Release v0.4.0 brings a lot of upgrades, bug fixes, maturity, and now also supports raytracing shaders! Furthermore, all dependent crates have been published to crates.io, so pointing to rust-gpu’s GitHub in your Cargo.toml is no longer required.</p> Eager to get started? Check out the Dev Guide</a>, or chat with the devs and the community on the public Discord server</a>.</p> assets_manager</a> #</a> </h3> assets_manager (GitHub</a>, crates.io</a>) is a library to easily load and cache assets. It comes with support for multiple file formats and out-of-the-box hot-reloading.</p> The last release includes internals performance improvements and more flexibility in the way to load assets.</p> Ggez bindings</a> were also updated to latest ggez version.</p> egui v0.20</a> #</a> </h3> </p> egui</a> is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI library in pure Rust.</p> This month egui v0.20</a> was released. Highlights:</p> Support for AccessKit</a> vastly improves the accessibility of eframe</a> apps on Windows and Mac.</li> Vastly improved tables (see above) for rerun.io</a>’s needs.</li> Improved wgpu renderer that now allows using egui-wgpu on the web, with a WebGL backend.</li> egui now expects integrations to do all color blending in gamma space.</li> Interactive widgets can now be on top of other interactive widgets. Great for putting floating widgets on top of 3D content, for instance.</li> ecolor</a> helper lib for all the color conversions needs.</li> Helper functions for animating panels that collapse/expand.</li> </ul> For full details see the changelog</a>.</p> google/forma</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> forma</a> by google is a (thoroughly) parallelized experimental Rust vector-graphics renderer with both a software (CPU) and hardware (GPU) back-end having the goals</a> of portability, performance, simplicity, and minimal size. Forma relies on Rust’s SIMD auto-vectorization/intrinsics and Rayon</a> to have good performance on the CPU, while using WebGPU</a> (wgpu</a>) to take advantage of the GPU.</p> A few implementation highlights that make the library stand out from commonly used vector renderers:</p> Curvature-aware flattening. All higher cubic Béziers are approximated by quadratic ones, then, in parallel, flattened to line segments according to their curvature. This technique</a> was developed by Raph Levien.</li> Cheap translations and rotations. Translations and rotations can be rendered without having to re-flatten the curves, all the while maintaining full quality.</li> Parallel pixel grid intersection. Line segments are transformed into pixel segments by intersecting them with the pixel grid. We developed a simple method that performs this computation in O(1) and which is run in parallel.</li> Efficient sorting. We ported crumsort</a> to Rust and parallelized it with Rayon, delivering improved performance over its pdqsort implementation for 64-bit random data. Scattering pixel segments with a sort was inspired from Allan MacKinnon’s work on Spinel</a>.</li> Update only the tiles that change (currently CPU-only). We implemented a fail-fast per-tile optimizer that tries to skip the painting step entirely. A similar approach could also be tested on the GPU.</li> </ul> </blockquote> While Forma is a general-purpose library it can be an interesting building block for vector-based games and engines (see the spaceship demo</a> from the above image).</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Ivy Sly renamed</a> their online turn-based fighting game (and superpowered fight scene simulator) Yomi Hustle to “Your Only Move Is HUSTLE” due to a trademark infringement; The game also got a Steam page</a> in preparation for the upcoming release in February.</li> Orlando Valverde published a new version Pushin’ Boxes</a> that features a level editor.</li> Dustin Carlino shared</a> a retrospective of 2022 and 2023 plans for the A/B Street project.</li> Paddlepunks got a new parry variation</a> to homura that “pauses” the ball for a bit before reflecting it back harder than the regular parry</li> @ollej released a web playable version</a> of the macroquad port of the Infinite Bunner game.</li> @kuviman released Flashdark</a> - a small first-person horror game where you see the dark world using your flashdark and solve puzzles while avoiding the ghost.</li> Fish Folk: Punchy v0.2 was released</a>: Big Bass Boss has a new bomb toss attack, hitstop on damage application has changed, the beginnings of support for multiple attacks per fighter and attack chains are implemented, and players can now wear special hats.</li> Red Life</a> is a small game about an astronaut who is trying to survive in the hostile environment of Mars.</li> @Tantan shared a vlog</a> about a bug he had encountered during adding multiplayer to his voxel game.</li> Life Code shared a vlog</a> about making a user interface using egui with AI assistance.</li> @enigmanark shared a bunch of updates</a> about the RetrosicII shmup game.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: square_wheel</a> is a pretty advanced FPS-oriented software renderer for modern CPUs.</li> Anthony Utt</a> released new vlogs about the Alkahest</a> engine progress: orthograthic cameras</a>, transforms, textures, and scenes</a>, and 2D render batching</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: Raph gave a talk</a> about the vision for high performance UI implemented in Rust, and status of the current Xilem effort to build it. Includes sections on the piet-gpu 2D rendering engine, integration with AccessKit, and some details of the reactive architecture.</li> PhaestusFox</a> has posted more episodes of their ‘Bevy Basics’ tutorial series.</li> Maciej Główka released a blog post</a> on nuances of loading game data from TOML or JSON assets into Bevy-based games.</li> Matthew Bryant released another Bevy Intro Tutorials</a> YouTube video: “Compute Shaders in Bevy”</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: uCrowds shared a video</a> of a Rusty crowd simulation engine compiled to WASM and running a simulation of 150.000 agents in real-time in a browser.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: devices</a> is a cross-platform library for retrieving information about connected devices, supports Linux and Windows.</li> quad-svg</a> is a small library for rendering .svg files to macroquad</a>’s Texture2D using resvg</a>.</li> @MatanLurey</a> released mythoji</a> - a minimal Rust crate that helps to identify and display fantasy appropriate emojis.</li> durian</a> is a general purpose client/server networking library that provides a “thin” abstraction layer on top of the QUIC protocol (using quinn</a>) to make writing netcode extremely simple, automatically taking care of connection/streams management, byte details, packet framing/fragmentation/reassembly, parallel sender/receivers, etc.</li> faer</a> is a collection of crates that implement a low-level API for linear algebra routines that is somewhat similar to BLAS/Lapack, but gives more control to users by allowing parallelism to be specified on a per-call basis.</li> bevy_adventure</a> is a framework for building adventure games in Bevy that features GLTF support, multuple scenes with dynamic objects, inventory, and automatic camera animation.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: “Can a 2D game be made with rust without a game engine?”</a></li> “DataFrames instead of ECS?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Mastodon</a>, Discord</a>.</p> Rust Graphics Meetup 3 Unknown — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 </p> The third Rust Graphics Meetup will take place on Jan 28th at 16:00 UTC+0</a>. This meetup is a chance to see what others have been working on in the Rust graphics community. You can see videos from the previous meetups here</a>.</p> The meetup will take place on the Rust Gamedev YouTube</a> and Twitch</a>.</p> Schedule #</a> </h2> Introduction 👋 | Dzmitry Malyshau</a> & Connor Fitzgerald</a> #</a> </h3> 16:00 - 16:05</strong></p> Hello, Blade! | Dzmitry Malyshau</a> #</a> </h3> 16:05 - 16:40</strong></p> Introducing a lean and mean graphics library ‘Blade’, for fun and no profit.</p> </blockquote> Implementing an Extensible Renderer | Philip Degarmo</a> #</a> </h3> 16:40 - 16:55</strong></p> Quick introduction to Rafx, and some ideas for making more extensible renderers.</p> </blockquote> Rend3: High Performance, Cross Platform, GPU Driven Rendering in wgpu and WebGPU | Connor Fitzgerald</a> #</a> </h3> 16:55 - 17:25</strong></p> An overview of the current state of rend3: new data and gpu driven rendering model, performance improvements, and a look into the future.</p> </blockquote> Conclusion #</a> </h3> 17:25 - 17:30</strong></p> This Month in Rust GameDev #40 - November 2022 Unknown — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 40th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 21st Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in November. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The meetups take place on the second Saturday of every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to speak at the next meetup, please respond to the monthly GitHub issue that will be created</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Jumpy</a> #</a> </h3> Jumpy Items: Swords, Crates, Grenades, & Mines</figcaption> </figure> Jumpy</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by Spicy Lobster</a> is a pixel-style, tactical 2D shooter with a fishy theme.</p> In the last month, Jumpy migrated from a client-server networking model to a P2P Rollback model using GGRS</a>. This was to address shortcomings with the server model that had been implemented, and to take advantage of the excellent user experience that rollback networking can offer.</p> The rollback model did come with the new requirement to run up to 8 simulation frames per 16ms screen refresh, though, and unfortunately the JavaScript bindings used to implement the game items were not performant enough to keep up. For now, scripting has been temporarily disabled.</p> This sparked a quick migration of the TypeScript files to Rust, and also a discussion</a> about future possibilities for using WASM to get better determinism and rollback performance, along with lower-overhead WASM scripts.</p> With promising ideas for future improvements, the rest of the month was spent focusing on getting the initial items completed, with Grenades, Swords, Crates, and Mines all landing recently.</p> With just one more item planned and minimal clean up work, an MVP release is just around the corner!</p> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> The abyss is the deepest, hardest level, filled with monsters of all sizes and strength</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>) by CyberSoul is an ambitious endeavor to create an immersive universe experience with the power of artificial intelligence and procedurally generated gameplay styles. Explore a world filled with strange creatures and thrilling adventures!</p> The latest updates include:</p> A new islands map featuring a safe zone and progressively more challenging levels.</li> Collectible Cubic Orbs that provide health, points, and bullets.</li> An intuitive interface for day cycle, inventory (bullets), and cooldowns.</li> Upgrade your stats as you level up.</li> And an Emergency Recall feature for when you’re stranded.</li> </ul> Be among the first to experience the wonders of AI-driven universe with CyberGate! Join the Discord server</a> to participate in the upcoming Phase 7.0!</p> Rusty Vangers #</a> </h3> </p> Rusty Vangers</a> (GitHub</a>, Itch-io</a>) is an experimental re-implementation of the Vangers</a> game, using GPUs and multi-threading in Rust.</p> The project has started with a strong focus on rendering, since efficient GPU implementation of a Voxel world as large as 2048x16384x256 (that’s about 8 giga-voxels!) turned into a tough challenge, even though the original game from 1998 easily does it on CPU.</p> Finally, after years of experiments, a method has been implemented that is fast and universal when it comes to viewing angles. It’s based on an acceleration structure in the form of a voxel octree. This work has landed at the start of November, and now it’s possible to ride through</a> the strange worlds while looking from behind the car, or even from inside it.</p> This method runs on all APIs (including OpenGL!), thanks to wgpu/naga portability. It’s suitably fast, regardless of perspective, even on an old macBook with an integrated GPU. It concludes the rendering story of the project, and the devs can shift focus on other areas.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Digital Extinction #</a> </h3> Laser trail in Digital Extinction</figcaption> </figure> Digital Extinction</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Reddit</a>) by @Indy2222</a> is a 3D real-time strategy game made with Bevy</a>.</p> Here is the summary of the changes since the last update. It consists of commit range ffd5987..494096b (2022-11-03-2022-11-27). There were 75 non-merge commits in total.</p> The most notable updates are:</p> trails after laser fires are briefly visible,</li> flying drones no longer slide on terrain but fly in height,</li> simple main menu and map selection were added,</li> a game design document was kicked off,</li> both Rust API, and other technical documentation are automatically published at docs.de-game.org</a>,</li> many community-related improvements have been made,</li> the game was migrated to the new Bevy v0.9,</li> there were some code quality and performance improvements,</li> de_tools crate was fixed.</li> </ul> A more detailed update summary is available here</a>.</p> Space Frontiers</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Space Frontiers</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>, Reddit</a>, Steam Group</a>) by Star Wolves</a> is an online sci-fi action community RPG game simulating space (and spaceships) in 3D.</p> The game has been in-development for over two years. The server and client were successfully prototyped with Godot several years ago. After that, the server, with all its features, was successfully ported to Bevy</a>. The client is now getting the same porting treatment!</p> The project is commercial, open-source</a> and has a proprietary license. There is a milestone for a license change to free open-source.</p> Space Frontiers seeks to deliver customized community gameplay experiences. Read more about plugins and content customization in the development journal</a>.</p> The official StarWolves.io forum and discussion board were launched a week ago. The first 50 registrants will receive a permanent unique forum group/title.</p> Timely Defuse</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Timely Defuse</a> (GitHub</a>) by @E_net4</a> is a mobile Web game using Bevy, submitted to GitHub Game Off 2022. In this game, explosives are coming out of nowhere and it’s the hero’s job to stop as many of them from exploding as possible.</p> Some remarks about the experience of creating Timely Defuse were shared on Dev.to</a>.</p> Spaceviata</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Spaceviata</a> (GitHub</a>) by @FrancoisMockers</a> is a strategy game made with Bevy</a>, submitted to GitHub Game Off 2022.</p> Starting with one star, your goal in this turn-by-turn game is to conquer the galaxy, fighting against AI players, and balancing exploration with colonization to avoid stretching your resources too thin.</p> Scummstreets</a> #</a> </h3> Scummstreets</a> is a new multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game is a fork/sequel to Antorum Isles</a>, so the game server is written in Rust, and the official client is made with Unity. It’s still in a pre-alpha state.</p> There was one dev log published this month:</p> 2: Character And Combat Work</a></li> </ul> 8bit Duels</a> #</a> </h3> UI preview</figcaption> </figure> @ThousandthStar</a> is creating an 8bit themed multiplayer game. It’s a turn-based strategy game and is currently under development. This month, the blog</a> got moved from dev.to</a> to ThousandthStar’s own blog on GitHub.</p> The game is soon getting a UI, and more packets need to be implemented before the game is ready to play. ThousandthStar is excited for the game to be playable, but it will probably take some time, since he is doing it as a side project when he has some time. The game is lacking troop spawns, a turn system, and some more troops! Any and all ideas posted to the r/rust_gamedev</a> thread are greatly appreciated.</p> If possible, ThousandthStar would like the art to be made up of voxel models instead of just pixel art, but he doesn’t know if he’ll reach that point yet.</p> Discussion: r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Reflections on the river</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> Doors were worked on, and now they open more consistently in a single direction. There is ongoing work to add train tracks to the world, as well as train stations in villages. A talk about Veloren was given at the Rust and Cpp Cardiff Meetup, which you can watch here</a>.</p> Work was done on minotaurs to improve their attacks. A new dungeon type, adlet, is being worked on. Bird animations are also having some work done. Houses are seeing an uplift with some tests being done. In December, Veloren will be hosting a Christmas event in the second half of the month.</p> November’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #197</a>, #198</a>, #199</a>.</p> Combine&Conquer</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Combine&Conquer</a> (Steam</a>) by Martin Buck</a> is a WIP multi-planetary automation game similar to Satisfactory or Factorio. This month’s updates</a> include:</p> Reworked belts/arms/assemblers,</li> modules improvements,</li> structure tiers additions,</li> color palettes,</li> UI and planet visuals improvements.</li> </ul> Also, check out a cool video</a> with the progress of the project over two years of development.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Pixel Engine</a> #</a> </h3> pixel_engine</a> by @Maix0</a> is a 2D game engine that started as a Rust-version of olcPixelGameEngine (written in C++). It was used as a learning project for Maix0, where he worked on it for over 3 years.</p> This engine has a very straightforward API and is mostly CPU based (the exception is Decals which are GPU-sprites) but it can achieve some things. Use it as a way to learn new algorithms or to make a simple game.</p> It uses wgpu</a> underneath so there is support for all desktop targets and WASM (even though there is a bug in the WASM builds where the keyboard layout is only QWERTY).</p> The most recent addition is the SpriteRef</a>, a way to create a view inside a sprite where it is possible to draw in it. You can have multiple non-overlapping views at the same time.</p> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fyrox</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. In November it got a lot of new functionality and improved existing:</p> Major animation system rework</li> New animation editor</li> Reworked animation blending state machine editor</li> Major improvements to the curve editor widget</li> Curve-based animation system</li> Smart placement mode for move gizmo</li> Node and property selectors</li> Better WebAssembly support - asynchronous scene loading and WASM project template</li> Various improvements for project template generator</li> Lots of bug fixes</li> </ul> Bevy v0.9</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> Bevy 0.9 brought many incredible new features. You can check out the full release blog post here</a>, but here are some highlights:</p> HDR Post Processing, Tonemapping, and Bloom</a></li> FXAA</a></li> Deband Dithering</a></li> Other Post Processing Improvements</a></li> New Scene Format</a></li> Code Driven Scene Construction</a></li> Improved Entity/Component APIs</a></li> Exclusive System Rework</a></li> Enum Reflection</a></li> Time Shader Globals</a></li> Plugin Settings</a></li> Bevy UI Z-Indices</a></li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot engine. Just this month, a Mastodon account</a> was opened to share development info.</p> November brings the long-awaited GDExtension binding, enabling access to Godot 4 features from Rust. Still in an early experimental phase, it is already possible to run smaller examples like Godot’s famous Dodge-the-Creeps tutorial game.</p> Compared to the GDNative binding, APIs are a bit simpler now:</p> One central Gd<T></code> pointer combining Ref</code>/Instance</code> and their type-states</li> Self-registering classes: #[derive(GodotClass)]</code> and you’re good-to-go</li> Less unsafe</code>, less unwrap()</code>, more runtime checks</li> </ul> The repository is available at godot-rust/gdextension</a>, while the current development status is tracked in #24</a>. The book</a> as well as documentation are still under construction.</p> defold-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @JustAPotota</a> is working on rusty bindings for the Defold</a> engine and has started a thread about this on Defold’s forum</a> where you can fond all more info and updates.</p> The project is split up into a few different parts:</p> defold-rs</a> - Rust bindings to dmSDK and test project for new bindings</li> defold-rs-extender</a> - Custom build server</li> defold-rs-template</a> - Rust port of the native extension template</li> </ul> It works the same way as regular C/C++ extensions: everything is done on the build server and you only need the standard Defold editor to build games. <…></p> These extensions are full Cargo projects. The main benefit being that you can use any of the Rust libraries on crates.io in your Defold game just by listing them in your Cargo.toml. Theoretically, you could even write a game with the Bevy game engine and embed it into a Defold project!</p> </blockquote> Note that the project is in an early stage: only bundling for Windows and Linux is currently supported, you must host your own build server and it provides no sandboxing or security against malicious extensions.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Render Pipelines in wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @whoisryosuke</a> wrote a blog post</a> on how to parse #GLTF files in Rust, render them using WebGPU, and play animations imported from Blender!</p> Rapier Physics Engine Showcase</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Matthew Bryant</a> released a video</a> with a broad overview of some of the core features and organization of the Rapier</a> physics engine’s Bevy plugin</a>.</p> Evaluating Health & Quality of Crates at Embark</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @repi</a> shared some internal guidelines</a> about how they look into and evaluate health & quality of Rust crates at Embark Studios</a>.</p> note: I wrote this for our internal documentation & guidelines at Embark so not all of it is likely relevant for other companies, but sharing here as others expressed interest in seeing it</p> these are not exact rules but things to consider, esp. for adding dependencies for long term use in large Rust project in production.</p> our project is ~500k LoC and uses ~700 crates, so some care and active gardening is in needed. which is why we (read: @ca1ne) also built cargo-deny</code> and cargo-about</code> early on and use it heavily.</p> </blockquote> @jntrnr</a> made a video overview of the guide</a>.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Boytacean</a> #</a> </h3> Boytacean (GitHub</a>, Working Emulator</a>) by @joamag</a> is a Game Boy emulator written in Rust with both Native (using SDL) and Web (using WebAssembly) frontends that has been created as a learning experiment to better understand both Rust capabilities and Game Boy hardware. The Web frontend is especially interesting making use of Web standards like Gamepad API</a> to provide a rich and joyful experience for both desktop and mobile devices. Performance wise the web version runs smoothly with little to no significant hardware requirements.</p> Even though Boytacean supports most Game Boy games and passes most well-known test ROMs there are still some features lacking like support for Game Boy Color and APU (sound) support.</p> You can check this Reddit post</a> for more information.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> November’s sprint 20</a> introduces:</p> Filling in the blanks: The Imaginate tool gains Inpaint/Outpaint, letting users replace content</a> in masked areas and even “uncrop”</a> entire images, powered by Stable Diffusion</a>.</li> Going native: Graphite is now available as a desktop app, thanks to Tauri. The app now has access to system resources like rustc and the GPU, which lets it compile and run node graph effects as SPIR-V compute shaders in Vulkan for hardware-accelerated rendering.</li> Connecting the dots: The node graph compositor now supports interactive editing</a>, so users can drag nodes and chain together effects. Nodes can be set in the Properties panel or exposed as inputs in the graph.</li> </ul> It’s easy to get involved with the project by developing new nodes. Join the project Discord</a> and ask how to begin.</p> Stay tuned for the imminent Alpha Milestone 2 release and progress converting existing features into nodes.</p> Open the Graphite editor</a> in your browser to give it a try and share your creations with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> bevy_atmosphere v0.5</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_atmosphere (crates.io</a>, docs.rs</a>, GitHub</a>) is now compatible with Bevy 0.9.</p> The focus of this update was decoupling the atmospheric model from the compute pipeline. What this means is that users can choose a different model or create their own using the Atmospheric</code> trait. This sets the groundwork for having a variety of models to choose from, each for a different type of game.</p> With the removal of the Atmosphere</code> resource, comes the addition of the AtmosphereModel</code> resource and the Nishita</code> and Gradient</code> models. Nishita</code> is the same model that was used in the previous version of bevy_atmosphere. Gradient</code> is a new model that provides a simple gradient of three colors, making it ideal for stylized games.</p> There is also the Atmosphere<T></code> and AtmosphereMut<T></code> system params, which can be used to work with a particular model without having to cast it from AtmosphereModel</code>.</p> If you want to read more about the technical changes, check out the developer’s blog post</a>!</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/bevy</a>, /r/rust</a></em></p> Bevy Sequential Actions</a> #</a> </h3> An entity with a queue of repeating actions.</figcaption> </figure> bevy-sequential-actions</code> (GitHub</a>, docs.rs</a>) is a simple helper library for the Bevy</a> game engine. It aims to execute a queue of various actions in a sequential manner.</p> An action is anything that implements the Action</code> trait, and can be added to any Entity</code> that contains the ActionsBundle</code>. In the image above, the following actions have been added:</p> commands </span> .</span>actions</span>(entity) </span> .</span>config</span>(AddConfig { </span> order: AddOrder::Back, </span> start: </span>true</span>, </span> repeat: Repeat::Forever, </span> }) </span> .</span>add</span>(WaitAction::new(</span>1.0</span>)) </span> .</span>add</span>(MoveAction::new(Vec3::X * </span>2.0</span>)) </span> .</span>add</span>(WaitAction::new(</span>1.0</span>)) </span> .</span>add</span>(MoveAction::new(Vec3::X * -</span>2.0</span>)); </span></code></pre> With version 0.6</code> comes the ability to add a collection of actions that run in parallel. This means that all actions will start and stop at the same time, as the whole collection is treated as “one action”. In other words, the action queue will only advance when all actions in the collection are finished.</p> commands </span> .</span>actions</span>(agent) </span> .</span>add_many</span>( </span> ExecutionMode::Parallel, </span> actions![ </span> action_a, </span> action_b, </span> action_c, </span> ] </span> ); </span></code></pre> Sparsey</a> v0.10 #</a> </h3> Sparsey</a> by @LechintanTudor</a> is an Entity Component System focused on flexibility, conciseness and providing features exclusive to its sparse set-based implementation.</p> The latest release takes advantage of the newly added Generic Associated Types to provide a uniform interface for running systems, functions and closures that borrow data from World and Resources, via the “run”, “run_locally” and “run_exclusive” functions.</p> Example:</p> let</span> heaviest = sparsey::run(&world, &resources, |</span>weights</span>: Comp<Weight>| { </span> (&weights) </span> .</span>iter</span>() </span> .</span>with_entity</span>() </span> .</span>max_by_key</span>(|(</span>_entity</span>, &</span>weight</span>)| weight) </span> .</span>map</span>(|(</span>entity</span>, </span>_weight</span>)| entity) </span>}); </span></code></pre> Bevy Quickmenu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_quickmenu (crates.io</a>, docs.rs</a>, GitHub</a>) allows quickly creating nested game menus that can be navigated with keyboard, gamepad or mouse.</p> Bevy Quickmenu builds on BevyUI and allows defining nested menu structures in a super simple way. Its also very extensible and customisable. If you game needs menus and you would like to support multiple input methods, give it a try.</p> For example, a simple vertical menu can be defined like this:</p> fn </span>root_menu</span>(</span>state</span>: &CustomState) -> Menu<Actions, Screens, CustomState> { </span> Menu::new( </span> "</span>root</span>", </span> vec![ </span> MenuItem::image(state.logo.</span>clone</span>()), </span> MenuItem::headline("</span>Menu</span>"), </span> MenuItem::action("</span>Start</span>", Actions::Close), </span> MenuItem::screen("</span>Sound</span>", Screens::Sound) </span> .</span>with_icon</span>(MenuIcon::Sound), </span> MenuItem::screen("</span>Controls</span>", Screens::Controls) </span> .</span>with_icon</span>(MenuIcon::Controls), </span> ], </span> ) </span>} </span></code></pre> For a more involved example, check out this definition of a settings screen with control device selection and a sound menu</a>. Version 0.1.5</code></a> was just released which simplifies generics and makes it easier to create dynamic menus.</p> Discussion: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Notan v0.8</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Notan</a> is a simple abstraction layer that provides cross-platform windowing, input, audio, graphics and other features, in an ergonomic manner without enforcing any structure or pattern and treating WebAssembly as a first-class citizen.</p> The version v0.8</a> is one of the biggest releases, adding several improvements in the drawing APIs and fixes and improvements in some other features like the clipboard support.</p> You can check the demos</a> online and read more about the changes on the changelog</a>.</p> Bevy Hikari</a> v0.3 #</a> </h3> Direct lighting, emissive lighting and indirect global illumination under 4x temporal upscaling.</figcaption> </figure> bevy-hikari</code> (crates.io</a>, docs.rs</a>, GitHub</a>), a path tracing renderer for Bevy</a>, is now compatible with the 0.9 version of the engine.</p> In recent updates, the renderer implements light BVH, which allows faster and more accurate multiple emissive sampling. It also features a spatial upscaler based on FSR 1.0 and a temporal upscaler based on SMAA Tu4x, making it more affordable for median end devices.</p> Bevy Vfx Bag</a> #</a> </h3> A composite effect applied to Bevy’s 3D shapes example.</figcaption> </figure> bevy-vfx-bag</code> (GitHub</a>, docs.rs</a>) is a visual effects library for the Bevy</a> game engine.</p> It had its initial 0.1.0 release aligned with Bevy’s recent 0.9.0 release. Each effect has a plugin and effects are applied in order:</p> // Shows an example of adding three post processing effects: </span>app </span> .</span>add_plugin</span>(BevyVfxBagPlugin) </span>// Always needed </span> .</span>add_plugin</span>(RaindropsPlugin) </span>// Shows rain on-screen </span> .</span>add_plugin</span>(ChromaticAberrationPlugin) </span>// Skews color channels </span> .</span>add_plugin</span>(LutPlugin) </span>// Allows using a look-up table to remap colors for </span> </span>// having a specific "feel" to your game </span> .</span>run</span>(); </span></code></pre> The camera which receives these effects is marked as such:</p> commands </span> .</span>spawn</span>(Camera3dBundle { ... }) </span> .</span>insert</span>(PostProcessingInput) </span>// Marks this camera for post processing usage </span></code></pre> Effect settings can be changed at runtime:</p> fn </span>update</span>(</span>time</span>: Res<Time>, </span>mut </span>ca</span>: ResMut<ChromaticAberration>) { </span> </span>// Make the red color channel skew in a sinusoidal fashion </span> ca.magnitude_r = time.</span>elapsed_seconds</span>().</span>sin</span>(); </span>} </span></code></pre> The GitHub repository has examples and videos for all effects.</p> A complete rework of the plugin is underway for version 0.2.0, where the main goal is to align with and use Bevy’s render graph features, including the new post processing double buffering feature which arrived in 0.9.0.</p> seldom_pixel</code></a> #</a> </h3> </p> seldom_pixel</code> (GitHub</a>, Video Demo</a>) by Seldom</a> is a Bevy plugin for limited color palette pixel art games, with features for filters, animations, typefaces, particle emitters, bevy_ecs_tilemap</code> integration, and much more.</p> In November, seldom_pixel</code> received its 0.1 and 0.1.1 releases for Bevy 0.8. Its main</code> branch supports Bevy 0.9, but depends on a particular bevy_ecs_tilemap</code> commit.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> kayak_ui</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Kayak UI</a> is a WIP declarative UI that features:</p> Easy to use declarative syntax using a custom proc macro.</li> Fast and accurate layouts using morphorm</a>.</li> Style system built to kind of mimic CSS styles.</li> Image and Nine patch rendering.</li> </ul> There’s also a book</a> that covers the basic concepts;</p> Iced</a> v0.5 #</a> </h3> System76’s COSMIC desktop software</figcaption> </figure> Iced</a> is an experimental cross-platform GUI library focused on simplicity and type-safety, inspired by Elm.</p> This month’s v0.5 release</a> features include:</p> Stabilization of stateless widgets: the old widget API has been completely replaced by stateless widgets. Alongside the new API, there are a bunch of new helper functions and macros for easily describing view logic (like row!</code> and column!</code>).</li> First-class theming: a complete overhaul of the styling primitives, introducing a Theme as a first-class concept of the library.</li> Widget operations: an abstraction that can be used to traverse (and operate on) the widget tree of an application in order to query or update some widget state.</li> Lazy widget that can call some view logic only when some data has changed.</li> The Canvas widget can draw linear gradients now.</li> Touch support for Canvas.</li> iced_glow now is capable of rendering both the Image and Svg widgets.</li> </ul> Finally, and deserving a special mention, System76 has decided to use iced</a> instead of GTK for Pop!_OS’ desktop environment! This is one of the most important adoption events since the inception of the library. The engineers at System76</a> are already contributing a bunch of great improvements to iced, as well as breaking ground in long-standing issues that could benefit the whole GUI ecosystem in Rust (like proper text rendering!).</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: A free open beta on Yomi Hustle</a> - an online turn-based fighting game and superpowered fight scene simulator by Ivy Sly</a> - has begun!</li> @johann</a> shared a couple of Idu screenshots with dynamic global illumination</a> and a video of stress-testing the framerate</a> with the whole map full of vegetation.</li> @crispy_dev posed a video</a> about making a roguelike from scratch in Rust.</li> @devildahu</a> posted two</a> gssa-2</a> about rewriting “Generic Space Shooter Advance”</a> GBA game in Rust.</li> @Kane_rogers</a> shared a video of the latest iteration of The Station</a> VR survival game being build with the Hotham</a> engine.</li> @Tantan shared video devlogs about improving combat feel</a> and working on a multiplayer networking architecture</a> of his voxel game.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: Anthony Utt</a> has recently converted the WIP Alkahest</a> engine from C++ to Rust and released a vlog</a> about it and its UI render specifically.</li> @markusmoenig</a> has published the first public pre-release build</a> of Eldiron</a> - a cross-platform RPG engine that draws heavily on the earlier Ultima games for inspiration.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: @Setzer22</a> shared a couple of posts with feature previews for the next Blackjack</a> release: copy&paste</a>, an examples folder with annotated graphs</a>, gizmos</a>, and face selection</a>.</li> @eurigilberto shared a video</a> of a cool little VR terrain generation app made using Rust and WebGL.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: Taffy UI v0.2</a> brings improved flexbox and significant performance improvements</li> kopi</a> by @hasenbanck</a> is a small abstraction to easily and safely embed an ECMAScript runtime inside a Rust based application.</li> dynec</a> by @SOF3</a> is a statically archetyped opinionated ECS-like framework.</li> guiedit</a> by @aleokdev</a> is a WIP library for easily adding a developer GUI to any graphical application.</li> bevy_tweening v0.6</a> features Bevy v0.9 support, new Duration-based elapsed API, better looping control with RepeatCount/RepeatStrategy, and fixed change detection</li> dungeon-generator</a> by @MoutonSanglant</a> is a naive dungeon generator for rogue-like games, mostly done for education purposes.</li> leafwing_input_playback</a> by @alice-i-cecile</a> is an input recording and playback library for the Bevy</a> game engine.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #130 “Status of the project “ECS Bench Suite”</a>.</li> #131 “Official Mastodon Account”</a>.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: “Which graphics crate do you use?”</a></li> “WASM For Core Game Loop & Mods”</a>)</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> DIMS</a> (Stockholm, Sweden) is building a Rust game engine and creation platform dedicated to creating large multiplayer open-world games and has a lot of open positions</a>, including Game Engine Programmer:</p> Come build a game engine and creation platform from scratch in Rust! It’s got everything: game-like collaborative building, networking by default, procedural worldbuilding, WebAssembly for scripting, WebGPU for graphics, and community-driven co-creation.</p> </blockquote> You can find all of the details in their job offer page</a>.</p> </li> Ultimate Games (London, UK) is looking for Mid-to-Senior level Rust Graphics engineer</a>.</p> </li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Mastodon</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #39 - October 2022 Unknown — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 39th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Game Development in Rust Discord</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The ‘Game Development in Rust’ Discord server</a> now has a #projects forum, where you can share updates on what you’ve been working on.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> miam #</a> </h3> </p> miam</a> (GitHub</a>) by yopox</a>, on100balec</a>, and hadri</a> is a cooking game made for the Ludum Dare 51. “miam” is the French interjection for “yum”.</p> The theme of the game jam was “Every 10 seconds”. Here instead of having 10 seconds to make a burger, the chef is really indecisive and comes to change the menu every 10 seconds.</p> The game was built using Bevy 0.8 with bevy_game_template</a> to save precious time when starting the game jam. bevy_tweening</a> was also really useful to polish the game.</p> The game was ranked 120th overall and 94th for audio out of 1240 jam entries.</p> Discussions: Submission page</a></em></p> Jumpy</a> #</a> </h3> Online Game Fish Selection Screen</figcaption> </figure> Jumpy</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by Spicy Lobster</a> is a pixel-style, tactical 2D shooter with a fishy theme.</p> In the last month, the devs started rewriting</a> Jumpy to use the Bevy</a> game engine. Massive progress has been made, establishing foundational features such as input mapping, UI, and localization, along with the addition of a few major features:</p> Network play, complete with a matchmaking server for joining public games online.</li> A scripting engine using TypeScript/JavaScript powered by bevy_mod_js_scripting</code></a>.</li> A revamped map editor that renders the actual game in the viewport. This lets you switch back and forth between editing and playing, and has the potential for multiplayer map editing in the future.</li> </ul> The physics have been ported from the old version of the game with the basic gameplay and the sword item nearly finished. The next tasks include porting some of the old items to the new scripting system and finishing off the map editor’s editing functionality.</p> Discussions: GitHub</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> The health bar that is closer updates more frequently</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>) by CyberSoul is an attempt to use artificial intelligence to build diverse universe experiences with strange creatures and procedural gameplay styles.</p> Recent updates:</p> Constructed powerful and extremely fast synchronization for states: Able to Extract and Merge partial changes of components and global states.</li> Restrict visibility, if the state is conditionally decided to be private.</li> Limit the frequency of these state updates based on object priority.</li> </ul> </li> Big improvement of the organization of the networking systems</li> Improved timers in 70 places, resulting in higher performance and flexibility</li> Better health bars</li> Several minor game content fixes</li> </ul> Join the Discord server</a> to participate in upcoming Phase 6.0!</p> Digital Extinction #</a> </h3> selection circles & health bars in Digital Extinction</figcaption> </figure> Digital Extinction</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Reddit</a>) by @Indy2222</a> is a 3D real-time strategy game made with Bevy</a>.</p> The game repository was opened a month ago under the GPLv3 license. Here is the summary of the changes since the opening of the repository. It consists of commit range f23d51e..ffd5987</code> (2022-10-09–2022-11-03). There were 50 non-merge commits in total, with the most notable improvements below:</p> Object & map bounds repulsion was added.</li> Terrain got a texture.</li> Select all (CTRL+A) and select all visible (CTRL+Shift+A) functionality was introduced.</li> Circle markers below selected objects are now displayed.</li> Drag selection was implemented.</li> Simple health bars were introduced.</li> </ul> A more detailed update summary is available here</a>.</p> Turn-based strategy game (ThousandthStar’s devlog)</a> #</a> </h3> </p> ThousandthStar</a> (GitHub</a>) is creating a simple turn-based strategy game using the Bevy game engine. It’s a small side project he’s been building in his spare time.</p> The game aims to be a cross between Chess and the game Clash Mini</a>. Players move their troops around the board and try to get them to their opponent’s side. The game is far from playable, but here is some of the progress that has been done:</p> Server and client troop information exchange through packets.</li> Threads to allow for multiple games to run at the same time.</li> Tile selection appears when troops are clicked.</li> </ul> More features are currently under development:</p> Troop movement.</li> Troop attacks.</li> </ul> The game uses an extremely simple 8x pixel art style. The palette is Paper Pixels</a> with some extra colors.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> vetovoima #</a> </h3> </p> vetovoima</a> by @MatiasKlemola</a> is an arcade game where you control gravity.</p> This month, the origin story of vetovoima was released on the Valuemotive blog</a>. In the story, an abstract idea turns into an arcade game, which eventually makes it to RustConf 2022!</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fyrox</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. In October it hit version 0.28 which added new functionality and improved existing:</p> Asset preview during instantiation (see the gif above).</li> Improved and deterministic script processing.</li> Scripts are now compatible with saved games.</li> Major text box widget improvements.</li> Prefab property inheritance via reflection.</li> Automatic node handle mapping via reflection.</li> Sprite sheet animation support.</li> Multi-borrow context to solve borrowing issues.</li> Editor now stores list of recently used files, scene settings, and more.</li> World Viewer now allows you to change a node type.</li> Major book</a> improvements.</li> See the full list of changes in the blog post</a>.</li> </ul> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> zemeroth</a> on the iOS simulator</figcaption> </figure> miniquad</a> is a pure Rust, cross-platform graphics library.</p> This month was about improving miniquad on mobile experience.</p> On iOS, miniquad got an article</a> on setting up the developer environment, getting provisioning files, etc.</p> TL;DR: even on old Macs/Xcode, mini/macroquad-based games can be built with</p> cargo build --target aarch64-apple-ios && ios_deploy </span></code></pre> No iOS-specific code required and no need to deal with Xcode projects.</p> For Android, miniquad got a writeup</a> on Java interop, AAB bundles and other Android specific internals.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> WGPU Wiki #</a> </h3> @wumpf</a> updated the wgpu wiki</a> to include an explanation of some of the fundamental wgpu/WebGPU concepts.</p> It includes info diagrams on how RenderPipeline</code> connects to other resources as well as an overview on the data structures involved in rendering a frame.</p> Learn Wgpu</a> Updated #</a> </h3> The Learn Wgpu tutorial has been updated to 0.14!</p> The API changes from 0.13 are pretty simple - check them out here</a></p> wgpu-openxr-example</a> #</a> </h3> </p> wgpu-openxr-example</code></a> is an example of how to wire up wgpu (Vulkan-only) to OpenXR by @philpax</a> (Dims</a>). It displays a triangle in the centre and a triangle per hand, and renders to both a window and your XR headset with both head and headset tracking.</p> It has multiple modes of operation, including disabling XR integration entirely at compile-time with a Cargo feature, to make it easy to understand each step in the process of integrating OpenXR.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Blackjack</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Blackjack</a> by @setzer22 is a procedural modeling application made in Rust, using rend3, wgpu, and egui. It follows the steps of applications like Houdini, or Blender’s geometry nodes project and provides a node-based environment to compose procedural recipes to create 3d models.</p> The past couple months have been busy for Blackjack, the work continues with a focus of filling in all the missing bits to enable usage in more indie gamedev workflows.</p> Some of the changes include:</p> New nodes for geometry editing, like: Resample curve</em>, Point cloud</em>, Polygon</em>, Line from points</em> or Edit geometry</em>.</li> A new type of mesh, the height map with its set of nodes.</li> A way to import OBJ meshes into procedural graphs.</li> Bug fixes in extrude and bevel nodes, making them more robust and handle more kinds of meshes.</li> A new DragValue widget offering more precise control when tweaking parameters.</li> Smoother camera controls and various editor UX improvements.</li> </ul> Blackjack has no release notes yet, but make sure to check out the recently merged PRs (1</a>, 2</a>, 3</a>) for a more in-depth summary of the changes and lots of animated gifs.</p> On the social side, a first blog post</a> in a series was published on Ko-fi showing a real gamedev use case using Blackjack and the Godot engine together to implement a racing game. Additionally, Blackjack now has a Twitter account</a>. Consider following both for more frequent updates!</p> Currently, development is focused on implementing the next major feature: Gizmos. There are some initial results</a>, and the full PR for it is expected to land sometime during November.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that will be based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> September and October’s sprint 19</a> focused on major new features and improvements to make Graphite more useful and usable.</p> Like magic: Stable Diffusion</a>, the open source AI image generator, is integrated into Graphite as the Imaginate tool. It provides an innovative non-destructive workflow to interactively co-create art with a skilled AI.</li> Right on the nodes: Graphite’s node graph engine is finally up and running, now integrated with a node-powered tool that desaturates the underlying artwork. A graph panel will be ready shortly. Just in time for Nodevember</a>!</li> With flying colors: The color picker menu gains hex/RGB/HSV controls. Gradients get unlimited color transitions. The Eyedropper tool is rewritten to sample pixels from the viewport. The editor UI gets a color scheme design refresh for improved clarity, plus helpful new input widgets.</li> </ul> Open the Graphite editor</a> in your browser to give it a try and share your creations with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> glutin</a> #</a> </h3> glutin</a> (GitHub</a>, docs.rs</a>) by @kchibisov</a> (rust-windowing</a>) is a crate that is well known for being an OpenGL platform initialization on top of winit.</p> With glutin 0.30</code>, this is no longer the case. The crate was rewritten from scratch and redesigned around raw-window-handle</a>, so you don’t need winit</a> anymore in this equation and it could be used with whatever windowing library you prefer, like smithay-client-toolkit</a> for pure Wayland clients.</p> Given everything is based on raw-window-handle the crate is more low-level now and also exposes the underlying platform API like EGL</code>, GLX</code>, and WGL</code> directly. There’s already an interest of using glutin to handle EGL</code> in projects like Smithay</a>.</p> Previously with glutin 0.29</code> everything was based around the single WindowedContext</code></a> - while this was convinient for some users and worked on desktop platforms, that fact was a major pain on Android where the window gets destroyed over time, but its context could be kept around, or when you fail to query configuration with supplied parameters leading to chain creating WindowedContext</code> and causing delays on startup. For example, you can create all the objects and then fail on setting vsync, forcing you to start over.</p> None of that is an issue with glutin 0.30.0</code>. The API is now structured around Display</code>, Context</code>, Surface</code>, and Config</code>, where every object is built from the Display</code> and has its own role which is close to what you usually can find in OpenGL native rendering platforms specifications, like EGL</code>.</p> Unfortunatelly, the new API isn’t as easy to bootstrap as it was with old glutin, especially when you want to use platforms like WGL</code> and GLX</code>. However, if you’re using winit there will be (or is already) a special crate glutin-winit</a> to handle platform-specific Display</code> creation for you.</p> To see the new API in action, look at the glutin examples</a>. They should work on desktop platforms and Android (you may even notice that there’s no special code for Android at all!).</p> One note to add, is that iOS is no longer</strong> supported, but only due to lack of maintainers for it. If you rely on iOS support in glutin, the devs encourage you to help contributing to it upstream, or you’d stuck with glutin 0.29</code> which won’t receive any updates anymore.</p> For further info, check out the winit matrix room</a> or #winit</a> at libera.chat.</p> presser</a> #</a> </h3> presser</a> (GitHub</a>, docs.rs</a>) by @fu5ha</a> (Embark Studios</a>) is a crate to help you copy things into raw buffers without invoking spooky action at a distance (undefined behavior).</p> Ever done something like this?</p> #[</span>derive</span>(Clone, Copy)] </span>#[</span>repr</span>(C)] </span>struct </span>MyDataStruct { </span> </span>a</span>: </span>u8</span>, </span> </span>b</span>: </span>u32</span>, </span>} </span> </span>let</span> my_data = MyDataStruct { a: </span>0</span>, b: </span>42 </span>}; </span> </span>// 🚨 MyDataStruct contains 3 padding bytes after `a`, which are </span>// uninit, therefore getting a slice that includes them is UB! </span>let</span> my_data_bytes: &[</span>u8</span>] = </span>transmute</span>(&my_data); </span> </span>// allocate an uninit buffer of some size </span>let</span> my_buffer: MyBufferType = some_api.</span>alloc_buffer_size</span>(</span>2048</span>); </span> </span>// 🚨 this is UB for the same reason, these bytes are uninit!* </span>let</span> buffer_as_bytes: &</span>mut </span>[</span>u8</span>] = </span> slice::from_raw_parts(my_buffer.</span>ptr</span>(), my_buffer.</span>size</span>()); </span> </span>// 🚨 this is UB because not only are both slices invalid, </span>// this is not ensuring proper alignment! </span>buffer_as_bytes.</span>copy_from_slice</span>(my_data_bytes); </span></code></pre> presser</a> can help.</p> // borrow our raw allocation as a presser::Slab, asserting we have </span>// unique access to it. see the docs for more. </span>let</span> slab = </span>unsafe </span>{ raw_allocation.</span>borrow_as_slab</span>(); } </span> </span>// now we may safely copy `my_data` into `my_buffer`, </span>// starting at a minimum offset of 0 into the buffer </span>let</span> copy_record = presser::copy_to_offset(&my_data, &</span>mut</span> slab, </span>0</span>)?; </span></code></pre> If you’re not convinced this is actually an issue, read more in the crate readme</a>. If you’re intrigued and want to know more, see the docs</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Hanabi</a> #</a> </h3> The Hanabi</a> library (GitHub</a>, docs.rs</a>) is a modern VFX library for the Bevy Game Engine</a>. It focuses on scale to produce stunning visual effects (VFX) in real time, offloading most of the work to the GPU (compute shaders), with minimal CPU intervention. The design is inspired by modern particle systems found in other industry-leading game engines.</p> This month, Hanabi</a> v0.4.0 was released, adding a 3D cone emitter and some more testing, followed by v0.4.1 providing several bug fixes and support for custom MSAA settings. Both versions target the latest Bevy 0.8 release.</p> The internal architecture was also updated to decouple particle spawning and update, allowing to update over 6 millions particles</a> in real time with close to zero CPU usage. This new architecture will be available in the upcoming v0.5.0 release as part of the upgrade to the imminent Bevy 0.9 release.</p> seldom_state</code></a> #</a> </h3> seldom_state</code> by Seldom</a> (GitHub</a>) is a component-based state machine plugin for Bevy. It’s useful for AI, player state, animation, and other entities that occupy varying states.</p> In October, seldom_state</code> recieved its 0.2 and 0.2.1 updates. 0.2 gave Done</code> and DoneTrigger</code> success and failure variants, and changed states to be bundles instead of components. 0.2.1 added insert_on_enter</code> and remove_on_exit</code> methods to the state machine, which let you automatically add and remove bundles upon state change.</p> Discussions: 0.2</a>, 0.2.1</a></em></p> MarpII #</a> </h3> MarpII (GitLab</a>, Twitter</a>, Mastodon</a>) by Siebencorgie</a> is a highlevel-ish helper for Vulkan using Ash</a>.</p> MarpII is the successor to Marp</a>, which was a Rust-y abstraction layer over low-level Vulkan bindings.</p> The new crate does not focus on wrapping Vulkan into one safe wrapper, but instead provides multiple levels of helpers that should make using it easier. This includes handling resource lifetimes and providing simplifications for common operations.</p> The main crate provides utilities for robust Vulkan context (instances, devices, etc.) and resource (images, buffers, descriptors etc.) creation. Lately, higher level helpers like a resource managing frame graph</a> and helpers for descriptor creation and command buffer recording joined the project.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Yomi Hustle</a> is an online turn-based TAS fighter, which is going into open beta on November 10th.</li> TheGrimsey</a> is writing a devlog of their experiences with Bevy.</li> Tiny Building Game</a> introduced a shader refactoring dev tool.</li> Embark</a> is looking for early players for their creative platform.</li> R:Vust</a> is a side-scrolling SHMUP.</li> Tomb Explorer</a> has a new devlog video.</li> Tantan</a> is working on a voxel game.</li> Punchy</a> released the first MVP of their scripting engine.</li> Bungo Drifter</a> is an infinite voxel city generator.</li> Vange-rs</a> added a new style of rendering.</li> RainyCloud</a> is an experimental game where you control a cloud.</li> Life Code</a> released another devlog for their ecosystem sim.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: GGEZ</a> published a new release candidate for v0.8.</li> Pyxel</a> has a new tutorial of how to use their web version.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: Rustacean Station</a> interviewed Forest Anderson about Veloren, a multiplayer voxel RPG.</li> Rukai</a> gave a talk about how they built a frame data website in Rust.</li> LittleB0xes</a> started a tutorial series for Macroquad.</li> Dan Olson from Treyarch</a> gave a talk on using Rust for game tooling.</li> Larry Du</a> made a web game using Bevy.</li> Ryosuke</a> wrote about rendering primitive geometry with WGPU.</li> PhaestusFox</a> has posted more episodes of their ‘Bevy Basics’ tutorial series.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: Modmapper</a> is an interactive map of every Skyrim mod on Nexus Mods.</li> LelsersLasers</a> is building 3D cellular automata with WGPU.</li> Vismut</a> released version 0.6 of their procedural texturing tool.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: psx-sdk-rs</a> is a basic Rust SDK for the PlayStation 1.</li> WGPU 0.14</a> was released.</li> gba</a> is a crate for Game Boy Advance development.</li> quinn</a> released version 0.9 of their pure-Rust QUIC implementation.</li> iyes_loopless 0.8</a> provides usability improvements for Bevy game loops.</li> leafwing_abilities</a> is a library for managing game character abilities.</li> dualquat</a> is a library for use in dual quaternion-based physics simulations.</li> seed_creator</a> creates random seeds for the WASM4 fantasy console.</li> bevy-hikari</a> implements global illumination for Bevy.</li> bevy_ecs_tilemap</a> added many new features.</li> bevy_mod_mesh_tools</a> provides helper code for working with meshes.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev: SDL2 vs Winit/Pixels/CPAL/etc. Is going “native” really worth it?</a></li> What’s the best 2D engine like pygame, but for Rust?</a></li> Best way to draw massive amount of individual pixels every frame</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #38 - September 2022 Unknown — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 38th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Bonus</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 20th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in September. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> building shelter and fighting a colony of red monsters</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>) by CyberSoul is an attempt to use artificial intelligence to build diverse universe experiences with strange creatures and procedural gameplay styles. Currently in Phase 5.2 (analogously version 0.5.2), they finalized a playable game with the tech they have developed up until now.</p> Recent updates:</p> In-house Transport layer with Reliability and Package aggregation, over WebRTC</li> Implemented Winit background process on all browsers</li> Introduced Grabbing and Building Mechanics</li> Created enemy AI that groups and flies in colonies. Includes a deadly night mode</li> Usernames and life points with Fontdue.rs</li> Menu and leaderboard using yakui.rs</li> Improved the Automation to push Server Updates</li> Improved wasm related performance, latency, and connection freezing bugs.</li> </ul> Join the Discord server</a> to participate in upcoming Phase 6.0!</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Graviton</a> #</a> </h3> Take a little break to relax and draw some sand art</figcaption> </figure> Graviton</a> by @hakolao</a> is a relaxing simulation game in which you draw colored sand and watch it interact with gravity.</p> The game is going to be released in early access on Steam</a> during this October.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Flesh #</a> </h3> 4th area</figcaption> </figure> Flesh</a> by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and an organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> Finishing up the last area of the game.</li> Making animation of the game’s intro/ending.</li> </ul> Thetawave #</a> </h3> First boss in progress</figcaption> </figure> Thetawave is a physics based, cosmic horror themed space shooter by @carlosupina</a>. In the past month, work has begun on the first boss enemy in the game, the Repeater</a>.</p> Thetawave has also joined the @spicylobsterfam</a> incubator. Feel free to reach out to the developer if you are interested in contributing!</p> Ultimechs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Ultimechs</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>, Facebook</a>, Reddit</a>, YouTube</a>) by Resolution Games</a> is a future sports game played with mechs. It is VR, multiplayer, and free to play.</p> Ultimechs is partially written in Rust. The Rust code is for the core of the game, including the game rules, networking, and physics (that use Rapier</a>). The rest of the game, including the graphics, audio, user input, and everything that happens outside the arena, is made in Unity</a>.</p> The game was released on the 15th of September on the Meta Quest 2</a> and SteamVR</a>.</p> There is a conference talk</a> and a blog post</a> about the choice of Rust and how they combined Rust with the studio’s standard tools Unity and C#. Another blog post</a> goes into more depth about calling Rust code from C# in Unity.</p> eo.rs</a> #</a> </h3> NPCs chatting in the game world</figcaption> </figure> eo-rs</a> by @sorokya</a> is a development library and game server for the MMORPG Endless Online</a>.</p> Recent updates:</p> Made NPCs appear and move around in the game world</li> Created a proxy tool to document interactions between the original client and server</li> Implemented player stat calculations</li> Made NPCs talk</li> </ul> Tiny Building Game #</a> </h3> </p> The untitled “Tiny Building Game” is a stress-free feel-good game focused on just building something pretty. It is being made by @anastasiaopara</a> and @h3r2tic</a>.</p> This month, the team welcomed Martin</a> (sound design) and Oda</a> (music) as well as adding various game elements, such as fences, gates, pillars and butterflies</a>. You can watch this short YouTube video</a> to catch a glimpse of how it’s all coming together.</p> Right now, the team is working towards the game announcement. Stay tuned by following the newsletter</a>!</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Riding into the sunset</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In September the official Veloren server saw a new all time high of more than 400 players logged in at the same time, with an average load of 200 players. This caused slow in-game responses and the development team quickly optimized to reduce the server load and introduced a new graphical server browser for balancing.</p> Due to the more diverse user base, a lot of languages received translation updates. The most common crash dialog was improved to suggest the workaround of trying a different graphics backend, while the large number of players still using DX11 block an upgrade to a more recent WGPU version.</p> Septembers’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #188</a>, #189</a>, #190</a>.</p> Subfuse</a> #</a> </h3> Escape the hotel</figcaption> </figure> Subfuse</a> is a short 1st person puzzle/escape game made for Bevy Jam #2</a> with an accompanying postmortem</a> that goes into some detail about the process of making the game.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> The new #[method]</code> syntax, which replaces existing #[export]</code> and allows omitting the base parameter.</figcaption> </figure> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot engine. In September, development was divided into three tasks:</p> Maintenance releases 0.10.1</a> and 0.10.2</a></li> Godot 3.5 support in v0.11 (#910</a>)</li> Ongoing GDExtension</a> efforts (#824</a>)</li> </ul> Besides support for Godot 3.5.1, a change that many users will notice is the new #[method]</code> + #[base]</code> syntax, replacing #[export]</code> as illustrated above.</p> The GDExtension/Rust binding has finally reached a state where a first experimental version is within reach in October. If you are fine with the bugs and missing features, you can give it a try very soon!</p> Gamercade</a> #</a> </h3> Gamercade Sprite Animations</figcaption> </figure> Gamercade</a> (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>) by @RobDavenport is a WASM-powered fantasy console focused on building multiplayer neo-retro games.</p> Gamercade has launched their first official release! Version 0.1.0</code> has all of the functions and features need to start building awesome single- and multi-player games: input, graphics, audo, networking, and more. The full release article</a> goes into higher detail about the feature set of Gamercade, and includes example images and animations.</p> Full controller support made it into the 0.1.0</code> release, including analog sticks, analog triggers, as well as emulation of those for those without a game pad. Additionally, they added a command line tool, called gccl</code> which streamlines many of the pain points in developing Gamercade games. A number of quality-of-life and bug fixes also made it into the release.</p> The team is already planning out their feature set for the next release, 0.2.0</code>, which is based around the theme of “two.” The next release will include more multiplayer features like two or more local players, two or more networked instances, stereo sound support, and much more.</p> Come hang out and chat on Discord</a>, where the developers interact with members and post updates daily. The project is open source</a> and looking for contributors, suggestions, as well as your awesome game creations.</p> Dims</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Dims</a> (Twitter</a>, Discord</a>, YouTube</a>) is a pre-alpha collaborative open-world creation platform. Users can hop in sessions and build a game together, allowing everyone to bring out their inner game-maker.</p> In September, the platform continued to make steady progress, with new features and bugfixes being made on a daily basis. The highlights are:</p> The team’s very first game of entirely scripted multiplayer Team Deathmatch 🎉</li> All player logic was moved to the Rust scripting layer, allowing for it to be changed on the fly</li> The implementation of animation retargeting, so you can use any animation with any model, as long as they share the same skeletal structure</li> Scripting now has greater access to the ECS, allowing it to move the sun 🌅</li> Initial work on an asset database and pipeline, so that you can import any asset and use it amongst your Dims projects</li> An all-new object manipulation/placement tool suite Objects can now be consistently stacked, moved as a group, placed within each other, and more!</li> </ul> </li> Many other infrastructural changes and improvements, including macOS and Linux builds</li> </ul> Want to try Dims out for yourself? Come join the Discord</a> to be notified of future public tests, see the latest features before everyone else, and to talk to the devs personally.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Making a turn-based multiplayer game in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @herluf-ba published a beginner friendly 3 part tutorial series</a> about making turn-based multiplayer games using rust. It covers what games can be considered “turn-based”, how to write a simple but neat game server using renet</a>, and finally how to tie it all together with a client app made with bevy</a>.</p> Chris Biscardi’s Monthly Roundup</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @chrisbiscardi</a> publishes a Rust video every day each month on YouTube</a>.</p> This month started off with a low-level WGPU series</a> that focuses on WGPU APIs as a primitive to understand Bevy’s renderer. Moving forward with that, he explored debugging shaders with RenderDoc</a>, porting shaders</a> from Blender to Bevy, generating custom meshes</a> and interesting types of noise</a>.</p> At a higher level, Chris covered a comparison between Bevy and Nannou</a> for creative coding endeavours and the top 10 games from Bevy Game Jam #2</a>. He also put (more than) 1 million particles</a> inside of a Bevy app, and continued working on a 2D platformer implementation</a>.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Feldversuch #</a> </h3> </p> Feldversuch by @siebencorgie</a> is an experimental extension to the class of wavetable synthesizers based on signed distance fields.</p> Feldversuch uses user defined fields not only to render the interface, but to generate sound based on them as well. The so-called sampling plane</em> (seen moving back and forth above) defines the wave shape that is played back.</p> Further experiments include rotation (instead of the sweep movement) as well as different interpretations of the wave shape. Have a look at the presentation video</a> and the blog post</a> for further details.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> bevy_oddio #</a> </h3> an example using bevy_oddio</figcaption> </figure> bevy_oddio</a> by @harudagondi</a> is an audio plugin for the Bevy</a> game engine that uses the oddio</a> library. It aims to allow first class support of non-static audio sources like procedurally generated audio. The library also aims to have a high amount of flexibility in controlling custom audio sources where typical audio sink methods would not suffice.</p> The previous month saw a new 0.2.0</a> release which irons out some bugs and added new ergonomic features to allow a better user experience. There is now added support for Mono</code> and Stereo</code> audio sources, support for more oddio</a> types, a new example for controlling volume, and much more. A lot of the APIs have been reworked to make it more flexible and some public items were deleted to reduce redundancy.</p> The above screen shows an example of controlling a custom made audio source (taken from here</a>) by calling the .control() method.</p> Particular</a> #</a> </h3> Showcase using the demo</a></figcaption> </figure> Particular</a> by @Canleskis</a> is a library allowing for simulations of N-body gravitational interaction of particles. It aims to be simple to integrate in existing game and physics engines, such as Bevy</a> or Rapier</a>. See the demo source code</a> for the example of an integration (less than 50 actual lines of code!). The demo</a> is available on the browser (Chromium-based recommended) with various scenes you can interact with.</p> Particular can be used with rayon</a> to leverage multithreading on the CPU (parallel</code> feature). Although the current algorithm performs well enough for most use cases, with a single frame taking around 5 ms with 5000 particles on an I9 9900K, future updates will introduce other implementations to allow for faster computation of the forces (example: Barnes-Hut</a>).</p> You can find more about Particular with this video</a> from @ChristopherBiscardi</a>, or this post</a> on Reddit.</p> Notan v0.7</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Notan</a> is a simple and portable layer designed to create your own apps on top of it without worrying about platform-specific code.</p> It provides a set of APIs and tools that can be used to create your project in an ergonomic manner without enforcing any structure or pattern, sharing the same codebase across multiple platforms.</p> The focus of version v0.7</a> was improvements and fixes, however the main improvement was how textures are created, allowing to create textures that depend on the backend. The main benefit of this new feature is that Notan can now load on browsers to the GPU HtmlImageElement</code> or it could load other types of browser’s images as well (like HtmlCanvasElement</code>).</p> Polyanya</a> #</a> </h3> Navigating through a mesh in the online demo</a></figcaption> </figure> Polyanya</a> by @FrancoisMockers</a> is a library implementing Polyanya</a>, a Compromise-free Pathfinding algorithm on a Navigation Mesh. It is currently the fastest known optimal online any angle path planning algorithm. Unlike A*, any angle path planning techniques are not bound to a grid and will find a taut path.</p> An integration with Bevy</a> is on-going, with a few examples</a> available in WASM. Next area of work will be around navigation mesh editing.</p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> #90: Rust on Consoles</a></li> </ul> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Disk-0 Madness</a> is a bullet hell game, written in Rust for the WASM-4 fantasy console.</li> Combine and Conquer</a> released version 0.1, moving into early access.</li> bevy-rapier-car-sim</a> is a 3D car simulation in Rust.</li> PongRust</a> is an ‘unbeatable’ Pong game.</li> My Roguelite</a> is a browser-based 3D roguelite.</li> Life Code</a> is an ecosystem simulation game.</li> Klod</a> released a retrospective post about their Katamari-inspired platformer.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: Rustacean Station</a> interviewed the developer of the Fyrox engine.</li> The Fyrox Book</a> added a new chapter on property inheritance.</li> Bevy’s scheduling overhaul RFC</a> was merged.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: LogRocket</a> posted about Bevy’s ECS API.</li> Wade Zimmerman</a> wrote about their native iOS game dev journey with Rust.</li> Rust and Tell</a> featured a talk on hot reloading.</li> Bevy Basics</a> continued their series of beginner Bevy tutorials.</li> Yishn</a> coded an Astroids clone with Bevy.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: big-brain</a> released version 0.14 of its Utility AI library, with fixes and lots more observability improvements.</li> egui_dock</a> adds docking support to egui.</li> Valence</a> is a framework for building Minecraft servers in Rust.</li> Luminance</a> is a type-safe graphics framework, which is currently undergoing a major rewrite.</li> Bevy ECSS</a> is a library for integrating a subset of CSS with Bevy’s ECS system.</li> dtm</a> is a fast encoder/decoder for the DTM image format.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev “Should I use an existing physics engine or implement it myself?”</a></li> “Ecs fundamentally at odds with borrow checker?”</a></li> “Best Engine for Choice-Driven, Semi-Free-Roam, 2D Gamedev”</a></li> “Turn-based game - architecture feedback/opinons”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Bonus #</a> </h2> </p> Ruffle</a> is an open-source Flash Player emulator, written in Rust. It aims to run natively on all modern operating systems and web browsers, leveraging Rust’s memory safety guarentees to avoid the security pitfalls that Flash became notorious for in its later years.</p> Many of today’s game developers got their start developing in Flash, and Ruffle aims to help preserve this part of internet (and gaming!) history for future generations to look back on.</p> For a look back at the history of Flash gaming, and the influence it has has on games today, check out Flash Game History</a>.</p> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #37 - August 2022 Unknown — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 37th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Bevy Jam #2</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Voting on Bevy Jam #2</a> just finished! It was a 10 day event, where the goal was to make a game in Bevy Engine</a>, the free and open-source game engine built in Rust. The theme was ‘Combine’.</p> The full results can be found on itch.io</a>. There were 404 participants, 85 submissions, and 2,674 ratings, making it the biggest Bevy Jam yet! (And maybe the biggest Rust game jam ever?)</p> Here are the top five games:</p> 🥇 First Place: USA Football League Scouting Combine XLV</a> #</a> </h4> </p> USA Football League Scouting Combine XLV</a> is a game where you take part in the historic unveiling of the “Combine Combine” event at this year’s USA Football League Scouting Combine!</p> USAFLSCXLV is singleplayer action game where you attempt to score as many touchdowns as you can while avoiding professional football players, navigating a corn maze and also avoiding a combine machine harvesting the maze.</p> The source for the game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> 🥈 Second Place: Loot Goblin</a> #</a> </h4> </p> Loot Goblin</a> is a game where you craft your way to victory in a unique adventurer’s backpack simulation!</p> We’re going dungeon crawling, but all the hard work is done for you by the valiant Sir Hoardalot, and you, as his resourcesful Loot Goblin are going to keep his backpack in order! Craft potions and weapons to strengthen the hero, and help kill the evil Ogre Necromancer.</p> The source code for the game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> 🥉 Third Place: Shanty Quest: Treble at Sea</a> #</a> </h4> </p> In Shanty Quest: Treble at Sea</a>, you combine the magical instruments and become the Pirate King!</p> The source code is available on GitHub</a>.</p> Fourth Place: Combobox</a> #</a> </h4> </p> Combobox</a> is a game where you navigate through space with a tiny robot combining boxes with unique features!</p> The source code is available on GitHub</a>.</p> Fifth Place: Mole Rancher</a> #</a> </h4> </p> Mole Rancher</a> is a game where you made it through university, got your PhD, and now you have been selected to work in an top secret experimental facility which promises a way to generate infinite energy through the combination of various strange particles.</p> Use power to generate curious molecules, check their properties in your logbook, monitor their progress through your trusty E-merge device, and try not to let the reactor overheat!</p> And don’t worry about those armed guards on the way in, as long as you meet your quota then you’ll have no problems…</p> The source for this game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 19th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in August. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> RustConf Arcade Cabinet - @carlosupina</a></li> Blue Engine - @aryanpur_elham</a></li> Veloren - @VelorenProject</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> All is Cubes - @switchborg</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Bombercrab Challenge Report</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Pablo Mansanet shared a report</a> about how the 2022 Tokyo Rust Game Hack went.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Catacomb 2-64k</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Catacomb 2-64k</a> is a (completed) experimental project in porting a moderately complex project, first from C to unsafe Rust, then to (fully) safe Rust.</p> The objective of the project has been to study the tooling, transformations and the overall process required perfom real-world, exact, ports; an article will follow in September on 64kramsystem’s blog</a>.</p> The port uses the Rust-SDL2 bindings</a>. More exact ports of id Software games are expected in the future, with the introduction of a refactoring tool based on the Language Server Protocol</a>/Rust Analyzer</a>.</p> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> The new browser version works exactly like the native version</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>) by CyberSoul is a new multiplayer project that aims at procedurally generating distinct universes and gameplay experiences. CyberGate is the name of the main world where universes can be created and accessed by quantum portals.</p> Recent updates:</p> Ported to browser (wgpu with webgl backend)</li> Unreliable network protocol achieved with WebRTC</li> Dynamically spawn and synchronize ECS components using macros</li> Massively improved the events system and actions system</li> Refactored over 50% of the project</li> Small features such as grabbing objects and dash forward</li> Fixed 3 major bugs that slowed down the server</li> </ul> Join the Discord server</a> to participate in upcoming Phase 5.0!</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Rusty Aquarium</a> #</a> </h3> Visualize data as a fish tank with Rusty Aquarium</figcaption> </figure> Rusty Aquarium</a> by @ollej</a> is a data visualization tool as a virtual fish tank written in Rust and Macroquad. Different data points control how many fishes are shown, how they move, how fast they swim, and which size they are. It can be used to monitor data in a visual way, while those uninitiated only see a serene fish tank.</p> Since Macroquad is cross-platform, Rusty Aquarium is available for Windows, Mac, Linux as well as for browsers using WebAssembly.</p> The aquarium can be controlled in various different ways:</p> System monitoring binary to show CPU usage, disk usage, and processes.</li> Integrate with Google Sheets to control fishes.</li> Back it with an URL that generates a JSON file.</li> </ul> This month, a blog post with the story behind Rusty Aquarium</a> was published on the Agical</a> blog. The code was restructured and the packaged files now contain binaries for input data generation.</p> Infinite Bunner</a> #</a> </h3> Port of the Infinite Bunner game to Rust and Macroquad</figcaption> </figure> Infinite Bunner</a> is a game from the book Code the Classics vol 1</a> that has been ported by @ollej</a> to Rust and Macroquad from Python and PyGame Zero. It is a modern version of the classic arcade game Frogger with improved graphics and sound.</p> The game has been sent in to the Rust Game Ports</a> project as an educational example. It shows how to make a 2D game in Macroquad with graphics and sound.</p> Code the Classics vol 1</a> is a book from Wireframe Magazine that tells the history of five classic video games. It also includes code listings of modern versions of the games written in Python with the PyGame Zero framework.</p> Tiny Building Game #</a> </h3> </p> The untitled “Tiny Building Game” is a stress-free feel-good game focused on just building something pretty. It is being made by @anastasiaopara</a> and @h3r2tic</a>, who has recently joined the project!</p> This month, there was a large visual update, which added trees and flowers</a>, as well as fences and gates</a>.</p> Right now, the team is actively working on setting up a Steam page. Stay tuned by following the newsletter</a>!</p> Math It</a> #</a> </h3> Promotional image of the Math It game</figcaption> </figure> Math It</a> was made with Bevy</a> for the Bevy Jam 2</a>.</p> The goal of the game is to get as close as possible to the target number and compete with others on a global leaderboard.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A barrier of lava</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In August, long-awaited work on a new internationalization system with Fluent was merged. The real-time simulation v2 system is now in a place, which has allowed for blacksmiths to now sell swords and armour with only a few additional lines of code. Work was done to implement a spectator mode in game, as well as fix a bug about respawning while having a status effect on you persisting, such as being on fire from swimming in lava.</p> August’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #183</a>, #184</a>, #185</a>, #186</a>, #187</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> miniquad</a> is a pure Rust, cross-platform graphics library.</p> This month was about polishing miniquad-android experience. To make it easier for regression testing, miniquad got the android playground</a>.</p> The playground demonstrates all known android shenanigans in one quad-based app.</p> It includes:</p> onscreen keyboard</li> java interop (with file dialog as an example)</li> dealing with big java services (with bluetooth as an example)</li> accessing permissions, both runtime and compile time</li> </ul> Runty8</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Runty8</a> is an experimental port of the Pico8</a> fantasy console that supports writing games in Rust.</p> Its current goals are to follow Pico8’s APIs as closely as possible, to allow easily porting existing games to Rust, as well as developing new games in a familiar development environment.</p> The project is in very early stages, and is currently looking for contributors. If you’re interested, feel free to read their contributing guide</a> or browse through the open issues</a>.</p> Gamercade</a> #</a> </h3> Preview of the Audio Editor in Action</figcaption> </figure> Gamercade</a> (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>) by @RobDavenport is a WASM-powered fantasy console focused on building multiplayer neo-retro games.</p> Gamercade is preparing for their first alpha release! This includes all the core features needed for a fantasy console and game library: input, graphics, and audio. It also has networked multiplayer, and an editor.</p> They implemented the in-game sound engine from scratch. They also improved the editor to allow creation of instruments and tracks. It synthesizes sounds at runtime, and produces something like an 80s synth, a 90s SoundBlaster, and a touch of SNES. Songs and Sfx are built using a tracker interface. This video</a> shows a small sample of what it is capable of.</p> “Wavetables” are great for classic sounds like 8-bit chiptunes or even more complicated sounds. “FM Synth” is a 4-op FM synthesizer. Masters of this technique can produce a huge variety of instruments, effects, and other otherwordly things. “Sampler” rounds out the rest of the system, providing pre-recorded sample playback. Samples can be pitched and played as the desired note.</p> Come hang out and chat on Discord</a>, where the developers interact with members and post updates daily. The project is open source</a> and looking for contributors, suggestions, as well as awesome game demos.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that will be based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> August’s sprint</a> focused on Bézier shape editing and layer transformation improvements.</p> Ahead of the curve: Bézier shapes gain support for curve extension and shape closing using the Pen tool and inserting points along curves with the Path tool.</li> Front and center: Layer origins may be set to control the center of rotation and scale using the Transform tool.</li> </ul> Meanwhile, design and architecture work on the Graphene node-based programming language has been well underway. Graphene is the data graph engine that will replace Graphite’s tree-based layer system in the next few sprints and evolve into a raster-and-vector render engine over time.</p> Open the Graphite editor</a> in your browser to give it a try and share your creations with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> hot-lib-reloader</a> #</a> </h3> </p> hot-lib-reloader</a> is a development tool that allows you to reload functions of a running Rust program. This allows to do “live programming” where you modify code and immediately see the effects in your running program. Gone are the days of edit-compile-restart loops (to some degree).</p> hot-lib-reloader works by reloading parts of your application that are defined as dynamic libraries. This approach works on Linux, MacOS, and Windows but has some constraints - see the documentation</a> for details. There are several examples</a>, showing how to create hot-reload setups with various frameworks and libraries, e.g. bevy, egui, and nannou</a>.</p> bevy_kira_audio</a> #</a> </h3> Configuring a sound when playing it</figcaption> </figure> bevy_kira_audio</a> by @nikl_me</a> is an alternative audio plugin for the Bevy</a> game engine. It uses Kira</a> as its audio library and aims to integrate well with Bevy’s ECS.</p> Last month saw the release of versions 0.11.0</a> and 0.12.0</a>. With the latest version, sound settings like volume, playback-rate, or panning can be adjusted directly when playing audio. The screenshot above shows the new API with multiple example settings. The plugin now also offers control over single sound instances via asset handles and will apply configurable tweens to most operations.</p> bevy_asset_loader</a> #</a> </h3> Configuration of a loading state</figcaption> </figure> bevy_asset_loader</a> by @nikl_me</a> is a plugin for Bevy</a> apps aiming to improve a common pattern for asset-loading. The boilerplate required to set up a loading-state is reduced to a minimum. The plugin is based on storing asset handles in resources, which makes it easy to use them in any system across your app.</p> The screenshot above shows how a loading state can be added to the Bevy app in the latest version of the plugin. The update also fixed issues with configuring the same loading state in different places of your code and enabled users to define their own dynamic assets.</p> Notan v0.6</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Notan</a> is a simple and portable layer designed to create your own apps on top of it without worrying about platform-specific code.</p> It provides a set of APIs and tools that can be used to create your project in an ergonomic manner without enforcing any structure or pattern, sharing the same codebase across multiple platforms.</p> The main focus for version v0.6</a> was improving how uniforms are set using the layout std140 for the user with a macro, among internal fixes and improvements.</p> Shipyard</a> #</a> </h3> Shipyard</a> is an Entity Component System focused on usability and speed.</p> This monthh, 0.6 was released with big improvements to workloads and tracking.</p> The new visualizer</a> is a first step towards visual inspection and interaction with the library. For now it can only show which components are used by which systems and vice-versa.</p> Learn more about this release in the release post</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a> /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Edict</a> #</a> </h3> Edict</a> by @zakarumych</a> is powerful Rust ECS crate that expands traditional ECS feature set. The new version 0.2 is getting ready for release</a>. This ECS is based on archetypes for fast cache-friendly iteration. And there are quite a few novel features:</p> Edict</a> allows to express relations between entities using Relation</code></a> trait. Relations are linked to a pair of entities - origin and target. This opens a wide range of opportunities to create entity graphs with custom logic.</li> Custom hooks for components and relations to trigger actions when component is dropped/replaced, or when relation target is dropped.</li> Optional Component</code></a> trait. Edict</a> allows using component types that do not implement Component</code></a> with some restrictions.</li> Change tracking with flexible queries for modified components suitable for complex use cases. E.g. incremental saves can fetch all components modified since previous save.</li> Type-agnostic component borrowing. Component type may define list of types that can be borrowed from it. Important use case is borrowing dyn Traits</code></a>.</li> Edict</a> supports parallel execution. Built-in scheduler uses systems that implement System</code></a> trait. Functions can be safely transformed into systems similarly to bevy_ecs</code></a>.</li> </ul> grid_pathfinding</a> #</a> </h3> grid_pathfinding</a> is a new pathfinding crate aimed at providing a fast, out-of-the-box system for pathfinding on various types of grids. While the current 0.1.1 release is not very configurable yet, the idea is to make the crate more malleable working towards a 0.2.0 release so that it will support a range of grids (4-connected, 8-connected, weighted, etc.) as well as heuristics. Specifically, grid_pathfinding</a> 0.1 assumes a uniform-cost 8-grid with a Chebyshev cost metric and heuristic. More long-term goals are support for multi-tile and multi-agent pathfinding variants.</p> The current implementation is based on Jump Point Search</a> with improved pruning rules</a>. On top of this, connected components</a> are used to avoid flood-filling behaviour if no path exists - see the documentation</a> and examples</a> for information on how to manage these components. Especially when simulating many agents in real-time, using components can make a big difference.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Caveth</a> is a game made with macroquad where you can shoot enemies with a cannon.</li> Im-Oab released a free Steam demo of the shump Flesh</a> and also added new enemy types</a>, boss animations</a>, and bullet shadows</a>.</li> Spherical Go</a> if the Go game’s implementation with a variety of spherical fields.</li> Combine and Conquer has a new devlog about 0.10 version</a> that brings vector graphics, “merger” and “splitter” structures, new tech-tree UI, overlay improvements, and new tiers for existing structures.</li> bevy-cheeseball</a> is a 3D marble game inspired by Monkey Ball and made with Bevy and Rapier.</li> Punchy v0.04</a> was released, featuring MVP for the first boss enemy, an entirely refactored fighter state model which was written up on the wiki</a>, updates to the enemy AI targeting, camera progression boundaries, updates to debug tools, a health recovery item, and updates to the way attacks are defined and loaded from resources.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: Console #118 - Interview with Connor of rend3</a></li> PhaestusFox added a bunch of new videos to their “Bevy Basics”</a> YouTube series.</li> @fronkongames shared a quick guide</a> to integrating Rust code into Unity.</li> @samkevich published a “Learn OpenGL with Rust” series</a>.</li> @jack1232 released a “Rust wgpu Graphics Programming Tutorial” YouTube series</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: Fyrox v0.27</a> features a new Fish Folly game example, compile-time reflection, plugin, and scripting improvements, and two new book chapters about particle systems</a> and terrain</a>.</li> Pyxel v0.18</a>’s main highlight is the experimental web support.</li> Bevy released a blog post</a> about the second birthday of the engine with a retrospective and future plans.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: @HackerFoo shared a video</a> of a WIP meta-editor to record contact movement to create interactive tutorials for Noumenal.</li> nbody-wasm-sim</a> is a WebGPU N-Body astrophysics simulation in Rust + WASM.</li> wgen</a> is a simple multi-threaded heightmap generator made with egui and three_d.</li> bevy-shell-template</a> is an opinionated, monolithic template for Bevy with cross-platform CI/CD, native + WASM launchers, and managed cross-platform deployment.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: bevy_streamdeck</a> is a Bevy plugin to interact with Stream Deck.</li> kira v0.7 release</a> brings a bunch of important bug fixes some of which require breaking changes.</li> egui v0.19</a> brings a lot of various small API improvements and optimizations.</li> Alex Dixon shared a blog post</a> about creating another linear algebra library - maths-rs</a>.</li> fundsp</a> is an audio digital signal processing library for audio processing and synthesis.</li> bevy_ecs_tilemap</a> is an ECS-friendly tilemap rendering crate for Bevy.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #36 - July 2022 Unknown — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 36th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 18th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in July. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> RustConf Arcade Cabinet - @carlosupina</a></li> Blackjack - @setzer22</a></li> Dotrix - @lowenware</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on August 13th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> Rust Game Ports Officialization #</a> </h3> </p> 64kramsystem</a>’s Rust Game Ports project</a> has been officially adopted by the Rust game development working group.</p> The project is intended to be a reference for Rust game development, helping developers, especially newcomers, to understand how to use Rust game libraries, and design Rust games in general.</p> Devs are invited to explore and contribute! There are ports for all the levels and interests 😄</p> Ferris 3D Got Released!</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @RayMarch</a> created a 3d model of Ferris the Rustacean</a> for the Rust community!</p> The model is now available for free here on github</a>!</p> It was released into the public domain</a> so you can use it however you like, even commercially!</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Tokyo Rust Game Hack Event</a>: Aug 12th #</a> </h3> </p> The team at tonari.no</a> is back with the second edition of the Tokyo Rust Game Hack event!</p> For this edition of the Game Hack event, we’re dragging you back through the mists of time, to the earlier days of arcade games. We’ve built a Bevy-powered, simple reimagining of classic Bomberman, with a modern twist. Players don’t participate by taking turns on an arcade stick. Instead, we will provide a crate that defines the character’s interaction with the world through a Player trait. By simply implementing that trait and compiling to a wasm target, you’ll be able to upload your character to the game, live. Adapt your strategy on the fly and bomb your way into the scoreboard!</p> </blockquote> The player template repository</a> is open sourced ahead of time so you can get a nice headstart.</p> If you decide to come please sign up on the event’s page</a>. You can participate physically or online, see the full announcement for the details.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle adventure with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. You can support development by checking out the free demo and wishlisting on Steam</a>!</p> Way of Rhea was selected to be part of PAX Rising online</a>! It was also shown off in the June Steam Game Festival</a>. Other recent updates:</p> Kotaku mentioned Way of Rhea in an article about fascinating upcoming indie games</a></li> Lost In Cult</a>, a gaming journal, announced preorders</a> for a new edition of Lock On containing a card game containing a card with a character from Way of Rhea featured</li> Mason posted a video interview covering why he became an indie dev</a>, among other things</li> Work has begun on puzzles for the final level of the game. This area combines the puzzle elements from all previous biomes for a final set of challenging puzzles.</li> A weather system with rain</a> and snow</a> was added to the game</li> More progress was made on the unreleased Linux platform layer</li> More wildlife was added to the game</li> Some logging and editor improvements were made</li> </ul> Flesh #</a> </h3> 3rd area</figcaption> </figure> Flesh</a> by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and an organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> The game has BGM.</li> Support global leaderboard.</li> Integrate steam SDK using steamworks</a> crate.</li> Add new enemy types for the 3rd area.</li> Add squeezing effect when the enemy gets hit.</li> </ul> CyberGate</a> #</a> </h3> The server and clients are able to smoothly handle over a thousand balls rained from above</figcaption> </figure> CyberGate (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>) by CyberSoul is a new multiplayer project that aims at procedurally generating distinct universes and gameplay experiences. CyberGate is the name of the main world where universes can be created and accessed by quantum portals.</p> Recent updates:</p> Bandwidth became 16 times smaller by implementing entity prioritization + other techniques.</li> Interpolation and Jitter prediction makes entities way smoother.</li> Automatic and Reliable Spawn and Despawn of entities.</li> Many other features and optimizations to do with rapier 3d physics, wgpu renderer, and quinn (quic) protocol.</li> </ul> Join the Discord server</a> to participate in tests.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Botnet</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Botnet</a> is an upcoming programming-based multiplayer game, where you write scripts (compiled to WebAssembly) to control robots. Coordinate your network of bots to gather resources, build new industry, and expand your control of the server!</p> This month was primarily spent on BotnetReplayViewer - a visual program to watch matches and inspect entity data.</p> Additionally, the antenna structure was added. Building an antenna gives you control over the bay (room) it’s in, letting you build additional structures, and increasing the total number of bots you can control. Bots can also use antennas to store resources.</p> Interested in contributing? Head over to the GitHub discussion page</a> and suggest some ideas!</p> Re-Rolling!</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Re-Rolling!</a> by @mystalice</a> is a top-down 2D survival shooter where you fight off a horde of rats using weapons you randomly rolled.</p> The game was created for GMTK Jam 2022</a> in 48 hours and was heavily inspired by 20 Minutes Till Dawn</a>.</p> Re-Rolling! was made with Bevy using heron for physics, bevy_egui for in-game UI, and a handful of other helpful crates and plugins. You can browse the source on GitHub</a>.</p> Robo Instructus: 3 Years Old</a> #</a> </h3> </p> In 2019 the programming puzzler Robo Instructus</a> was released on Steam</a> & itch.io</a>.</p> This month Alex Butler</a> wrote “Robo Instructus: 3 Years Old”</a> about how well the game did in the last year & to date: Sales by platform/country/OS, player feedback, reviews & game updates.</p> Simon Arcade</a> #</a> </h3> a Simon Arcade gameplay with cheats enabled</figcaption> </figure> Based on Simon (Original)</a>, made with Bevy</a>, the goal of this game is to push buttons in the correct order, in an ever-increasing sequence.</p> This game was made to fit with the Rust Arcade Cabinet</a> and was showcased at RustConf Portland</a> on August 5th 2022.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> New cave systems to explore</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In July, Veloren released 0.13! You can read the full blog post</a> that includes a trailer for the release party, and information about the new features in the release. This release party set a new record for most players on the server at once, going from 195 to now 277! This version brings modular weapons, real-time weather, cliff towns, cave biomes, level of detail trees, and much more.</p> Other than the release party, July saw lots of work getting done. The translation system is undergoing an overhaul. Work is being done on the Scrolling Combat Text system, which gives some visual indicator to how much damage or healing you’re taking. Though is going into how to better handle server-side physics to reduce latency.</p> July’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #179</a>, #180</a>, #181</a>, #182</a>.</p> Agma</a> #</a> </h3> Moving around</figcaption> </figure> Agma</a> by @TuckerBMorgan</a> is a 3D game built in the Storm Engine</a> that is based on games like Lost Ark and Diablo. The author has been writing about their experience with changing how they approach working on personal projects here</a>. It is built using a custom UDP-based networking stack, a custom ECS, and a custom-skinned mesh renderer to maximize what the author could learn.</p> Combine&Conquer</a> #</a> </h3> Seamless transition between planet and space views</figcaption> </figure> Combine&Conquer</a> by Martin Buck</a> is a WIP strategy game about automation similar to Satisfactory or Factorio. This month’s updates include:</p> Audio support, a new space view, colonization of planets, inventory overlay, and better notifications</a>.</li> New textures for structures, info box, updated overlays and modles</a>.</li> </ul> Life Code #</a> </h3> </a></p> Bytellation shared the first video devlog</a> of a WIP ecosystem coding game “Life Code”:</p> The game is intended to run in the browser and will be written in Rust which will be compiled to WASM. I’m using a very new and not yet matured game engine called Bevy. I will be creating the art and models in the game using Blender.</p> This will be a coding game which means players will have to use languages such as Python, Javascript, Rust, C++, and hopefully many more. It will be possible to play even if you don’t know how to code but the game will try to guide you to use real code instead of predefined behavior sets. Follow my journey where I try to create an impossible solo indie game with little to no game dev experience.</p> </blockquote> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy v0.8</a> #</a> </h3> Bevy-shaped mountains in a Bevy-based Witcher 3 terrain texturing tool built by rmemr</figcaption> </figure> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> Bevy 0.8 was a massive community effort. You can check out the full release blog post here</a>, but here are some highlights:</p> New Material System</a></li> Camera-driven Rendering</a></li> Built-in Shader Modularization</a></li> Spot Lights</a></li> Visibility Inheritance</a></li> Upgraded to wgpu 0.13</a></li> Automatic Mesh Tangent Generation</a></li> Renderer Optimizations</a></li> Scene Bundle</a></li> Scripting / Modding Progress</a></li> ECS Query Ergonomics and Usability</a></li> ECS Internals Refactors</a></li> Reflection Improvements</a></li> Hierarchy Commands</a></li> Bevy UI Now Uses Taffy</a></li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Dims</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Dims</a> (Twitter</a>, Discord</a>, YouTube</a>) is a pre-alpha collaborative open-world creation platform. Users can hop in sessions and build a game together, allowing everyone to bring out their inner game-maker.</p> In July, development continued to make great strides. Some of the highlights include:</p> Continued work on the audio system, including in-game graphs of attenuation and other audio-related functions</li> The introduction of an intent system that allows for user actions to be undone and replayed arbitrarily</li> A complete UI facelift using Material UI icons and a new design language</li> A new scripting system using WebAssembly + WASI and Rust as a guest language (look forward to an article on this soon!)</li> The beginnings of a shared asset database that lets you and your team easily share assets amongst each other and with other projects</li> Various infrastructural and rendering fixes, including more accurate PBR</li> </ul> Want to try Dims out for yourself? Come join the Discord</a> to be notified of future public tests, see the latest features before everyone else, and to talk to the devs personally.</p> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot game engine.</p> The last few months have been a bit quieter around godot-rust. A lot of this can be attributed to developers exploring the GDExtension API</a>, the successor of GDNative for Godot 4. At this point, a lot of the foundation is still being built, however, some more concrete plans are outlined in #824</a>. Further updates will be posted in that issue or on Twitter.</p> Nevertheless, several improvements have been integrated to godot-rust since 0.10, with version 0.10.1 on the horizon</a>. Some notable examples:</p> GDScript utility functions like lerp, ease or linear2db (#901</a>)</li> Property support for standard collection types (#883</a>)</li> Methods for Rect2 and Aabb (#867</a>)</li> </ul> Gamercade</a> #</a> </h3> WASM 3d CPU Rendering On a 2d Fantasy Console?</figcaption> </figure> Gamercade</a> (Discord</a>, GitHub</a>) by @RobDavenport is a WASM-powered fantasy console focused on building multiplayer neo-retro games.</p> After over half a year in development, Gamercade and related tools are ready for pre-alpha testing. This includes the console</a> itself, as well as the editor</a>.</p> Gamercade’s killer feature is the ease of developing multiplayer games. The console is able to simplify networked game development process in the best way possible: build a local multiplayer game, and get full online play for free!</p> The WASM Api features powerful but simple built-in features like input, 2d graphics, random number generation, and more. Limitations do exist, but are flexible, such as resolutions up to 1920 x 1080, and a maximum of 256 color palettes with up to 64 colors each.</p> The community around the project is small, but is looking to expand. Come on over to the [subreddit][Gamercade-Subreddit], or hang out and chat on Discord</a>, where the developers interact with members and post updates daily. The project is newly open source</a> and looking for contributors, suggestions, as well as awesome game demos.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/fantasyconsoles</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Sand Fall With Compute Shaders in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> Drawing Sand</figcaption> </figure> @hakolao</a> published a tutorial</a> about creating cellular automata</a> sand fall simulations with compute shaders.</p> Typically, cellular automata sand fall is done with the CPU due to the two-way relationship between the cells on a grid. This article shows a way to tackle sand fall creation using compute shaders to achieve massive parallelism.</p> Additional to compute shaders, this tutorial is a great introduction to the Vulkano</a> library. It also works as a good base for learning how to create simple graphics pipelines. You will also get to use Bevy and Egui.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Pathfinding in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Pathfinding in Rust: A tutorial with examples</a> is an article with examples of how to use the pathfinding</a> crate to do breadth-first, Dijkstra’s, and A* search. It links to the gregstoll/rust-pathfinding</a> repo which has working code for all of these.</p> Creating Mountains From Planes with Vertex Shaders and Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Creating mountains from planes with vertex shaders and Bevy</figcaption> </figure> @chrisbiscardi</a> published a video</a> about using the new Material shader APIs in Bevy 0.8 to transform the vertex positions in a custom mesh plane using a vertex shader.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> What’s in a wgsl fragment shader? ft Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </a> What’s in a wgsl fragment shader? ft Bevy</figcaption> </figure> @chrisbiscardi</a> published a video</a> that introduces the new Material APIs in Bevy 0.8. It covers AsBindGroup, uniforms, and using Perlin Noise in a fragment shader to render different colors onto a cube in a variety of ways.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Rusteroids</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Rusteroids</a> is a tutorial recreating a clone of Asteroids in Rust, using SDL2 and the Specs</a> library.</p> New episodes are released weekly and added to the playlist. The most recent video shows how to safely create global state to store global values, such as the high score. The most recent code has been released for Windows, on Itch.io</a> (with other platforms coming soon).</p> You can subscribe to the YouTube Channel</a>, to never miss an episode, or follow @ecatstudios</a> on Twitter!</p> RuggRogue Source Code Guide</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @tung</a> has been working on a simple web-playable roguelike RuggRogue</a> inspired by the Rust Roguelike Tutorial</a> and documented the source code structure in a guide:</p> If you want to learn about the source code</a>, you’ll also want to check out the RuggRogue Source Code Guide</a>: a 23-chapter technical web book about the ideas, algorithms and structure of the code. It covers topics such as rendering, event handling, game states, the hand-rolled field of view and pathfinding calculations, game balance and more.</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/roguelikes</a>, /r/rust</a></em></p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> NES Bundler</a> #</a> </h3> NES Bundler in action</figcaption> </figure> NES Bundler</a> is a NES ROM packaging tool by @tedsteen</a>. Did you make a NES-game but none of your friends own a Nintendo? Don’t worry. Put your ROM and configuration in NES Bundler and build an executable for Mac, Windows or Linux. What you get is a single executable with</p> Simple UI for settings</li> Re-mappable Keyboard and Gamepad input (you bundle your default mappings).</li> Save/Restore state</li> Netplay!</li> </ul> It’s early days, but the key features are there, and work is ongoing to make it more mature!</p> Blackjack</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Blackjack</a> by @setzer22 is a new procedural modeling application made in Rust, using rend3, wgpu, and egui. It follows the steps of applications like Houdini, or Blender’s geometry nodes project and provides a node-based environment to compose procedural recipes to create 3d models.</p> The focus for the past few months has been on evolving Blackjack from a proof of concept into a usable application. Its current status is not yet production ready, but it can now be used to build complex procedural models editable inside a game engine thanks to its new engine integration system.</p> Some of the new features include:</p> A better data model for meshes, based on groups and channels.</li> Game engine integration with Godot, more engines coming soon.</li> Introduce Lua as an extension language.</li> Add many new nodes: Extrude along curve, Copy to points…</li> Add experimental support for L-Systems.</li> Reworked Look & Feel</li> </ul> A talk about Blackjack’s vision and a tour of its features was shared at the start of July in the Rust gamedev meetup</a>. Interested developers are encouraged to check the project out on GitHub</a> and post on the Discussion boards!</p> bevy_shadertoy_wgsl</a> and GLSL2WGSL</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_shadertoy_wgsl</a> is a Shadertoy</a> clone for the Bevy game engine, where the GLSL shader language is replaced by WGSL. It already comes with a dozen examples and plenty more to go. Feel free to add your own shaders to the list!</p> Plus, GLSL2WGSL</a> is a new translator tool that should help migrate the vast majority of GLSL code to WGSL.</p> The above GIF showcases the new additions to the examples for bevy_shadertoy_wgsl</a>: two shaders originally written in Shadertoy</a> by @leondenise</a>, and translated to WGSL with the help of GLSL2WGSL</a>. The first part is a reproduction of Joe Gardner from the movie Soul, and the second part is a lightweight fluid shader.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that will be based around a Rust-powered node graph compositing engine.</p> July’s sprint</a> focused on editor-centric refactors upgrading stopgap measures to more robust systems.</p> Making a splash: The default document is replaced by a welcome splash screen following a refactor allowing for zero open documents.</li> Modifying for Macs: Input handling supports the nonstandard modifier keys on Mac keyboards, including labels in the UI.</li> Setting a high bar: The menu bar cleans up actions and supports new ones like “File” > “Import”. Displayed hotkeys are based on the actual key mapping source, varying by OS.</li> Keeping organized: The editor codebase is restructured to cut away technical debt and create consistency for new contributors and better docs going forward.</li> </ul> Open the Graphite editor</a> in your browser to give it a try and share your creations with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> Nintendo Switch Will Be a Tier 3 Target in Rust 1.64 #</a> </h3> The pull request by @jam1garner</a> that adds a no_std support for the aarch64-nintendo-switch-freestanding target was merged this month after a lengthy legal investigation. This is the first step towards working on incrementally adding support for the Nintendo Switch. Check out this Twitter thread</a> for more details about the changes.</p> And btw, speaking of Nintendo targets: the std support for the Nintendo 3DS (armv6k-nintendo-3ds) was also merged this month</a>!</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> bevy_godot</a> #</a> </h3> bevy_godot</a> is an in-development library that offers a familiar Bevy environment inside of the Godot Engine</a>. bevy_godot</a> currently features Scene Tree integration, collision detection, spawning Godot scenes from Bevy, and included examples to demonstrate the API. The upcoming update will feature Godot signal events, Bevy assets integration, and a full implementation of the Dodge the Creeps example game.</p> bevy_godot</a> is looking for contributors to help grow the library to fit all Godot Engine game development needs.</p> hecs</a> #</a> </h3> hecs</a> is a fast, lightweight, and unopinionated archetypal ECS library.</p> Version 0.8</a> marks a breaking change to most methods that previously took a generic type parameter T: Component</code>, replacing them with methods taking type parameters which must be references to</em> component types instead. This resolves a long-standing footgun where users accustomed to writing &T</code> in queries might write world.get::<&T></code>, interpreted by rustc as referencing the valid component type &'static T</code>, resulting in code that compiles but fails to access the intended component.</p> bevy_mod_wanderlust</a> #</a> </h3> bevy_mod_wanderlust</a> (GitHub</a>) by @PROMETHIA-27</a> is a character controller plugin for Bevy engine.</p> Inspired by this excellent video</a>, it is implemented on top of Rapier physics</a> and highly customizable. Wanderlust includes a variety of settings to target many different character controller types, including 2D/3D platformers, spacecraft, and first/third person games.</p> Lyon</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Lyon</a> (GitHub</a>) by Nical</a> is a collection of crates providing various 2D vector graphics utilities, including fast tessellation algorithms, easy to integrate in typical GPU accelerated rendering engines.</p> Lyon made its symbolic 1.0.0 release</a> reflecting the stability of the project. Highlights in this release include:</p> Initial support for variable line width in the stroke tessellator.</li> An efficient algorithm to query positions at given distances along a path.</li> Improved support for specifying custom endpoint attributes in paths and algorithms.</li> And more. You can read the announcement blog post here</a>.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Renet</a> #</a> </h3> Demo using renet and bevy</figcaption> </figure> Renet</a> by @lucaspoffo</a> is a network library to create games with the Server-Client architecture.</p> Built on top of UDP, it has its own protocol to send and receive reliable messages more suited for fast-paced games than TCP. Some other features are:</p> Connection management</li> Authentication and encrypted connections</li> Communication through multiple types of channels: Reliable Ordered: guarantee ordering and delivery of all messages</li> Unreliable Unordered: no guarantee of delivery or ordering of messages</li> Block Reliable: for bigger messages, such as level initialization</li> </ul> </li> Packet fragmentation and reassembly</li> </ul> Renet comes with bevy_renet</a>, a plugin for the Bevy engine, and also with renet_visualizer</a>, an egui interface to visualize network metrics.</p> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> VirtualBox, gl2 as the only GPU acceleration available</figcaption> </figure> miniquad</a> is a safe and cross-platform rendering library focused on portability and low-end platform support.</p> This month OpenGl 2.1/GLESv2</a> PR got merged, adding support for old android phones, virtual machines, and just old computers. While the PR itself is quite small, it solved a very old design issue: compatibilities proposal</a>. Fixing this issue opened the door for both lower-end backends, like gl1, and higher-level backends. Metal is the next in line.</p> bevy_mod_fbx</a> #</a> </h3> model courtesy of Samuel Rosario</a>, rendered in bevy</figcaption> </figure> bevy_mod_fbx</a> is a pre-alpha library to load FBX (Autodesk Filmbox) files into bevy</a> 0.8, based on fbxcel-dom</a>. It currently:</p> Loads geometry and meshes</li> Loads mesh attributes such as color</li> Loads default material diffuse textures, normal maps, and emissive maps</li> Loads the custom Maya PBR materials, including all material textures</li> Load the scene tree and translate it to bevy’s hierarchy</li> </ul> Planned features include providing a basic Lambert/Phong shader to better handle more standard materials, loading animations and skinned mesh skeletons/rigs.</p> The project is poorly tested and is looking for testers. It will soon be available on crates.io.</p> shame</a> #</a> </h3> </p> shame</a> lets you author shaders and pipeline layouts in a single seamless piece of rust code. It offers:</p> a simple and lightweight setup,</li> type checks from input assembly all the way to fragment output,</li> (re)generate different shaders/pipelines based on runtime parameters,</li> shader hot reloading</a>,</li> examples using wgpu</a>!</li> </ul> A Discord channel for questions/feedback is linked in the GitHub readme</a>.</p> bonsai-bt</a> #</a> </h3> A visualization of a simple NPC behavior tree</figcaption> </figure> bonsai-bt</a> by @Sollimann</a> is a Rust implementation of behavior trees.</p> A Behavior Tree (BT) is a data structure in which we can set the rules of how certain behaviors can occur and the order in which they would execute. BTs are a very efficient way of creating complex systems that are both modular and reactive. These properties are crucial in many applications, which has led to the spread of BT from computer game programming to many branches of AI and Robotics.</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> shades</a> and shades-edsl</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @phaazon</a> has published a detailed article</a> that introduces shades</a> and shades-edsl</a> - two Rust crates to write shaders by writing pure Rust:</p> The shades</a> crate provides all needed types and other building blocks</li> while shades-edsl</a> provides a proc-macro EDSL</a> for transforming regular Rust code into the API from shades.</li> </ul> This crate provides an EDSL to build shaders, leveraging the Rust compiler (rustc) and its type system to ensure soundness and typing. Because shaders are written in Rust, this crate is completely language agnostic: it can in theory target any shading language - the current tier-1 language being GLSL. The EDSL allows to statically type shaders while still generating the actual shading code at runtime.</p> </blockquote> fdg</a> #</a> </h3> </p> fdg</a> by @grantshandy</a> is a force-directed graph</a> drawing framework.</p> The goal of this project is to provide a force-directed graph framework and algorithms for Rust, as well as 2D and 3D visualizers that work on the web and desktop. It sits on top of petgraph</a> and manages the positions of your nodes.</p> </blockquote> You can view all the examples online here</a>.</p> The project consists of three parts:</p> fdg-sim</a> - the underlying force simulation framework that handles your dataset’s positions based on a physics engine of your choice (or creation).</li> fdg-macroquad</a> - a visualizer that uses macroquad for rendering.</li> fdg-img</a> - a SVG visualizer for your graphs.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Hydrofoil Generation devs shared</a> a bunch of screenshots and videos with a new boat.</li> @epcc10</a> shared a few videos about Idu getting a better water rendering and physics</a> and better interaction with soil</a>.</li> Felix Windström</a> shared a couple of Paddlepunks updates: a wizard leveling up their walls</a>, and increased the active time on witch’s doritos</a>.</li> Legend of Worlds released their first devlog</a>.</li> The Bounce Up!</a> block breaker game shared a video preview of the practice mode</a>.</li> Theta Wave is now is now playable in the browser on itch.io</a>. Give it a try and let the author know what you think!</li> Fish Folly</a> posted a couple videos of their new AI</a> and the falling over mechanic</a>.</li> Punchy v0.0.2</a> and v0.0.3</a> were released, featuring scenes, egui UI, AI, playable web build, new enemy variants, controller remapping, and throwable bottles.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: annelid</a> is a speedrun timer with autosplitter for fxpak/sd2snes written using egui.</li> unitypacker</a> is a tool for creating .unitypackages from the command line.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: @PhaestusFox</a> released a bunch of Bevy tutorial videos covering: gamepads, touch input, bevy 0.8 update & migration, and hierarchy.</li> The “Learn WGPU” tutorial was updated to wgpu v0.13</a>.</li> KyleMayes has ported vulkan-tutorial.com to vulkanalia</a>.</li> bevy_roguelike</a> is a project that implements reusable Bevy ECS systems and components for writing roguelike games.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: wgpu v0.13 and naga v0.9</a> bring the newest WGSL spec support, improved presentation and pipelining, and lots of performance and correctness improvements. The devs also decided to make the DX12 backend default on Windows and are looking for testers.</li> bevy_pancam</a> is a 2d-camera plugin for Bevy that works with orthographic cameras.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust</a>: “Are these misconceptions about rust?”</a></li> </ul> </li> /r/rust_gamedev</a>: “Using WGPU + crates directly or Bevy?”</a></li> “A 2D, lightweight graphics library, Rust-only?”</a></li> “Framework or libraries for developing Android/iOS games”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #35 - June 2022 Unknown — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 35th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Podcast</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Rust Gamedev Podcast features interviews with indie game developers creating titles with the Rust programming language. It covers technical topics as well as the business of open source and commercial indie games development.</p> In June, the ninth episode</a> was released. It’s a chat with Carter Anderson about the Bevy engine</a>, and a dive into its history.</p> Listen and Subscribe from the following platforms: Rust GameDev Podcast (simplecast)</a>, Apple Podcasts</a>, Spotify</a>, RSS Feed</a>, or Google Podcasts</a>.</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 17th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in June. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> Choir - @kvark</a></li> RustConf Arcade Cabinet - @carlosupina</a></li> retime - @Togg</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on July 9th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> Rusty Jam 2</a> #</a> </h3> Aaron, the mascot of the jam</a></figcaption> </figure> The second Rusty Jam</a> just ended! 17 games</a> were completed and submitted over the one-week jam. The games were rated by the community and the top three games are:</p> 🥇 “Chick the Dog”</a> by Uriopass</li> 🥈 “A walk around the block”</a> by ramirezmike</li> 🥉 “Fight for the Frontier”</a> by rand0m and logicprojects</li> </ul> The Rusty Jam will be back, so stay tuned on the Rusty Jam Discord Server</a> for future updates!</p> RustConf Arcade Cabinet #</a> </h3> </p> Carlo</a> is building a custom arcade cabinet that will be at RustConf 2022 in Portland. It is an opportunity for Rust game developers to share their games with the broader community. If you are interested in getting your game on the cabinet, read this Twitter thread</a> and fill out the interest form</a>. The arcade cabinet has been assembled and painted. He is currently in the process of helping developers get their games playable on the machine. If you have a Bevy game, you can use the bevy-rust-arcade crate</a> to quickly get your game compatible. Deadline is the end of July! You can find the latest update here</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Hydrofoil Generation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> (Steam</a>, Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that will put you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing. Hydrofoil Generation is based on a custom-made DirectX 11 based engine in Rust.</p> June saw a lot of features added to the game, most notables being “New TV Overlays”, “Control Assists”, “Ropes Rendering” plus several physics improvements. Stefano Casillo, the developer went through all of them in a recent devlog</a>.</p> Work in July will focus on the physics implementation of a new boat, a foiling multihull coming with her own set of new challenges.</p> Hydrofoil Generation is targeting a Q4 2022 Early Access release on Steam.</p> RuggRogue</a> #</a> </h3> </p> RuggRogue</a> by @tung</a> is a simple web-playable roguelike, inspired by the Rust Roguelike Tutorial</a> and made using Rust and SDL. It can be played natively on Windows and Linux, and in the browser thanks to Emscripten.</p> Features:</p> Discover new monsters and equipment the deeper you go.</li> Hunger and regeneration: stay fed and stay healed!</li> Choose between graphical tiles and ASCII display.</li> Menu-based UI with hotkeys.</li> Auto-run to quickly follow corridors and cross open space.</li> Save and load system.</li> New Game Plus mode!</li> </ul> The source code is complemented by the RuggRogue Source Code Guide</a>, a 23-chapter technical web book covering the ideas, algorithms, and structure of the code.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/roguelikes</a></em></p> Rust Game Ports</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Rust Game Ports is a port of several games to Rust/pure-Rust game engines.</p> This month the last planned port has been completed; the games are:</p> Boing (Pong clone, ported to ggez</a>)</li> Cavern (Bubble Bobble clone, ported to Macroquad</a>)</li> Rusty Roguelike (from the Hands-on Rust book</a>; ECS ported to Bevy</a>)</li> Soccer (Sensible Soccer clone, ported to Fyrox</a>)</li> </ul> A Bevy ECS tutorial, based on Rusty Roguelike, has been published, and it’s announced in this newsletter.</p> vetovoima #</a> </h3> vetovoima gravity manipulation</figcaption> </figure> vetovoima</a> by @MatiasKlemola</a> is an arcade game where you control gravity!</p> The world is a hollow circle with a star in the center. You’re the Yellow Block and your goal is to navigate through shifting debris to the Tall Blue Block before the time runs out. The challenge is to survive the chaos that ensues from changes to gravity.</p> vetovoima is built with the Bevy engine using Rapier for physics and Lyon for rendering (via Bevy plugins).</p> The alpha 1 build was recently released.</a></p> Source available on GitHub</a>.</p> Botnet</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Botnet</a> is an upcoming programming-based multiplayer game, where you write scripts (compiled to WebAssembly) to control robots. Coordinate your bots to gather resources, build new industries, and expand your control of the server.</p> This month saw the start of the project, and a majority of the foundational code was written. Next month we’ll be adding more features, and aim to flesh out the game beyond basic pathfinding and resource harvesting</a>.</p> Interested in contributing? Head over to the github discussion page</a> and suggest some ideas!</p> Star Machine</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Star Machine</a> by @Seldom_SE</a> is a puzzle game built in Bevy, where you wire together components to escape each level.</p> Although its development is currently inactive, the developer recently made a video demo</a> of the early levels.</p> Quoridor-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Quoridor-rs</a> by @baehyunsol</a> is a Quoridor</a> game implemented in Macroquad</a>.</p> Quoridor is a 2-4 player strategy board game. Each player has a pawn. They move the pawn or place a wall each round. The objective of the game is to move the pawn to the opposite side of the board.</p> The game implements most of the basic Quoridor features, but it only supports 2 players, not 3 or 4. It also doesn’t have AI players or network games.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A glider ride above the woods at night</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In June, a memory issue was found within the graphics stack. Weather is also getting closer to completion. There is a large write-up about it in one of this month’s blog posts</a>.</p> Lots of work has also gone into optimizing the Site2 system. Site2 is used to create many different shapes around the world, such as houses in towns, or citadels around the world. With these optimizations, it will be significantly easier to render chunks, which will have a dramatic effect on their load time. You can read more about these optimizations in this blog post</a>.</p> June’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #175</a>, #176</a>, #177</a>, #178</a>.</p> Harvest Hero Origins - Summer Heat Update!</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Gemdrop Games</a> have worked with their friends at Octosoft</a> to bring Shroomella to Harvest Hero Origins!</p> Renaine</a> is an upcoming Action Platformer game about Aine, an immortal Phoenix Knight.</p> Shroomella is a Mushroom Shroom witch aiding Aine on her quest! In Harvest Hero Origins, she uses her variety of magical mushrooms to fight off the endless Grooble hordes.</p> On top of that, they’re adding:</p> A new map</li> Two new cards</li> Two new enemies</li> A revised story boss fight</li> </ul> The game is built on the Emerald Game Engine</a>.</p> Chimera Rancher</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Chimera Rancher</a> is a game where you must defend your ranch from an angry hoard of villagers with the help of your chimera friends!</p> Submitted as part of Rusty jam #2</a> by cdsupina</a>, Nightly Side</a>, hedgein</a>, and tigleym</a>. This game was developed using the bevy</a> game engine.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> ggez</a> 0.8.0-rc0 #</a> </h3> </p> ggez</a> by @icefoxen</a>, @nobbele</a>, and @PSteinhaus</a> is a cross-platform game framework for making 2D games with minimum friction. It aims to implement an API based on the LÖVE game framework.</p> This version has finally moved ggez away from pre-ll gfx and into the world of wgpu</a>! This hopefully means fewer bugs, greater stability, and easier maintainability at the cost of some low-performance devices such as the Raspberry Pi.</p> As for the user-facing API:</p> Instead of module functions, you now have methods on sub-contexts, which look like ctx.keyboard.is_key_pressed(key)</code>.</li> You are now required to pass around an explicit canvas to draw onto.</li> DrawParam</code> now has a Z (aka layer) parameter, so you don’t have to draw objects in order.</li> Shaders are far easier to use, via normal Rust structs with a simple derive.</li> </ul> As this is a rather large update and a first release candidate, there are plenty of bugs that are currently being fixed - please send any issues you encounter to their issue tracker</a>!</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Dims</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Dims</a> (Twitter</a>, Discord</a>, YouTube</a>) is a pre-alpha collaborative open-world creation platform. Users can hop in sessions and build a game together, allowing everyone to bring out their inner game-maker.</p> June brought about several developments for the platform, including:</p> Several development and testing streams, with the latest being a recreation of Rhodes from Red Dead Redemption 2</a> within the engine</li> A new audio engine with advanced real-time synthesis and composition capabilities, including network synchronisation</li> Improved terrain manipulation tools, including new brushes, biome presets, and more intuitive UI Choose between “Nordic Mountains” ⛰ and “Colorado Deserts” 🏜</li> </ul> </li> Various improvements to the rendering engine, including decal and billboard rendering, FBX loading, macOS support, and more</li> Initial work on a versatile new scripting system, with independent threads of execution for every object</li> </ul> Want to try Dims out for yourself? Come join the Discord</a> to be notified of future public tests, see the latest features before everyone else, and to talk to the devs personally.</p> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> </p> miniquad</a> is a safe and cross-platform rendering library focused on portability and low-end platform support.</p> In versions prior to 0.3, it was virtually impossible to integrate, for example, a big in-app payments or advertisement SDK into a Miniquad Android game. 0.3 has solved this, giving the possibility to interop with any Java code. The developer has posted a write-up of this functionality</a> on the macroquad site.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Brontefy Me Devlog #3</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @hedgein</a> continues the Brontefy Me</a> series! In this latest devlog, she gives an update on where Brontefy Me will be heading and why it slowed down. During a recent stream</a>, it was also mentioned that @hedgein</a> is leaning towards hosting a monthly Brontefy Me Game Jam for her community, as game jams give her better accountability. Further updates will be given in her Discord server</a>.</p> Learn Bevy’s ECS by ripping off someone else’s project</a> #</a> </h3> </p> “Learn Bevy’s ECS by ripping off someone else’s project” is a mini-book that uses the game Rusty Roguelike from the book Hands-on Rust</a> as a base, in order to explain Bevy’s ECS.</p> The idea is for a beginner to learn ECS concepts from the base book, then apply them using Bevy; the structure of the game is ideal for a gentle introduction to ECS architecture.</p> Bevy Basics</a> #</a> </h3> @PhaestusFox</a> is close to finishing the Bevy Basics</a> User Input</a> mini-series.</p> In this 5 part mini-series, they cover how a developer can go about collecting user input using the Bevy</a> game engine.</p> Episode 1</a> is an overview of Bevy’s various input structs</li> Episode 2</a> covers keyboard presses</li> Episode 3</a> covers mouse clicks and movement</li> Episode 4</a> covers gamepad buttons and joysticks</li> Episode 5</a> covers touchscreen or drawing pad strokes</li> </ul> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Noumenal</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Noumenal</a> (App Store</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by @HackerFoo</a> is an elegant 3D solid modeling app for iOS.</p> After a final stretch of performance improvements, bug fixes, and even some new features, Noumenal was released and is available on Apple’s App Store!</p> Discussion: /r/rust</a></em></p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor. It will be powered by a node graph compositing engine that supercharges your layer stack, providing a completely non-destructive editing experience.</p> June’s sprint 16</a> focused mainly on bug fixes and big under-the-hood changes:</p> Ahead of the curve: A long-awaited refactor replaces the underlying Bézier curve data structure in alignment with requirements for Pen tool improvements and the upcoming node system.</li> Sending mixed messages: The internal messaging system was upgraded to sequence the message processing in a more predictable stack-based order. A new subscription-based event broadcaster was integrated as well.</li> Back on the menu: The application menu bar content definitions were moved from the JS frontend to a permanent home in the Rust backend.</li> </ul> Open the Graphite editor</a> in your browser to give it a try and share your creations with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> quad-gif</a> #</a> </h3> </p> quad-gif</a> by @ollej</a> is a tiny library that can be used in a Macroquad game to show a looping GIF animation. It also includes a small example binary that displays a GIF in the middle of a window. The library can also be used as a simple way to make an animation from a list of textures.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> psf2</a> #</a> </h3> psf2</a> is a minimal, unopinionated, no-std parser for the v2 PC Screen Font</a> bitmap font format.</p> PSF2 fonts are simple, compact, and readily available due to their use as Linux console fonts. They are extremely fast to draw at their intended resolution, making them a great choice to quickly get text on the screen, especially when a low-resolution, fixed-width aesthetic is desired.</p> The psf2 crate parses font data, exposing font size, glyph lookup, and iterators to traverse a glyph’s bitmap for easy rendering. Due to its limited scope, it is much smaller and faster than conventional text rasterizers but cannot support variable-width, anti-aliased, or shaped text.</p> ezinput</a> #</a> </h3> ezinput</a> by @eexsty</a> is a powerful input-agnostic library, targeting complete support for axis and button handling in the Bevy game engine.</p> EZInput strives to be simple as possible using the nifty ECS features that Bevy offers, while still being powerful and flexible without using any unsafe code. This and the previous 0.3.* releases were targeted for performance and ergonomics improvements, including a new declarative macro to allow for cleaner and smaller code.</p> glam</a> v0.21 #</a> </h3> glam</a> is a simple and fast linear algebra crate for games and graphics.</p> This month version 0.21 of glam was released. Because glam is not a generic library, when support was added for f64</code>, i32</code>, and u32</code> types back in glam 0.12, macros were used internally to avoid a lot of code duplication. This unfortunately obfuscated the internals of glam for anyone who needed to view the source.</p> As of the 0.21 release the majority of glam code is now generated using an offline tool and committed to the repo. The macros that were used to define glam’s internal implementation are gone. This means what users see when reading docs or stepping through glam in the debugger is plain old Rust code. Many functions have also been made const fn</code> removing the need for macros to create const</code> values.</p> kajiya</a> #</a> </h3> </p> kajiya</a> by @h3r2tic</a> is an experimental real-time global illumination renderer.</p> In June, a long-standing branch landed, bringing with it a complete overhaul of indirect lighting. The new implementation uses spatiotemporal reservoir resampling (ReSTIR) and a novel irradiance cache, bringing forth larger scenes, quicker response to lighting changes, and less noise.</p> A detailed overview</a> of the new global illumination techniques is available, complete with animated diagrams!</p> June has also seen the addition of texture compression, automatic exposure, a new display rendering transform, and a simplification of the interface. The viewer app now supports drag-and-drop of scene files, glTF models, and HDRI backdrops.</p> Discussions: twitter (0.2 release)</a>, twitter (texture compression)</a>.</em></p> Notan v0.5</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Notan</a> is a simple and portable layer designed to create your own multimedia apps on top of it without worrying about platform-specific code.</p> The main goal is to provide a set of APIs and tools that can be used to create your project in an ergonomic manner without enforcing any structure or pattern, always trying to stay out of your way. The idea is that you can use it as a foundation layer or backend for your next app, game engine, or game.</p> The latest version v0.5</a> fixes multiple bugs, improves EGUI</a> support and adds a new feature to export texture to png</a> easily.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Fires of Eschaton</a> is a PvP focused turn-based fantasy game, currently under development.</li> Idu</a> is testing out some new water physics.</li> Combine and Conquer</a> has a new devlog about its sound support.</li> Fish Folly</a> is a new Fyrox showcase game, inspired by Fall Guys.</li> Punchy</a> is a beat-em-up spin off of Fish Fight</a>, built with Bevy.</li> Jungle Chess</a> is a WASM implementation of a Chinese board game.</li> Croquet</a> is working on synchronized physics, using Rapier.</li> Bevy City</a> is a voxel city generator, built with Bevy.</li> Measure Once</a> is a game about cutting wood into the right shapes.</li> Galactic Mess</a> has added new outfits and weapons.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: Rustacean Station</a> interviewed the developer of egui.</li> Rusteroids</a> is a video tutorial series, building an asteroids clone with Rust and SDL2.</li> NVIDIA GPU Profiling with Rust</a> is an introduction on how to use NVIDIA’s NSight tools with Rust.</li> Practical Programming with Dr. Xu</a> has continued their WGPU tutorial series.</li> Anthropic Studios</a> (developers of Way of Rhea) posted a dev interview video.</li> Lyrapuff</a> posted a video showing how to render a triangle with Vulkan and Rust.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: pufferfish</a> is a new, opinionated 2D game framework.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: GBemulator</a> is a Game Boy emulator written from scratch.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: bevy_mod_picking</a> released version 0.7 of their Bevy mouse picking plugin.</li> bevy_mod_outline</a> is a Bevy plugin for drawing outlines around meshes.</li> Bevy YOLECK</a> is a crate that allows Bevy games to be their own level editor.</li> bevy_mod_raycast</a> released version 0.5 of their raycasting plugin.</li> taffy</a> is a cross-platform UI layout library.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev</a>: “Shopping list”</a> (a list of things that are missing from the ecosystem)</li> “Hands-on Rust: Further reading”</a></li> “How can I start developing a 3D game engine?”</a></li> “Bevy or Fyrox for 3D Game Development?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> ‘Are We Game Yet?’ wants to know about projects/games/resources that aren’t listed yet</a>.</li> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> DIMS</a> (Stockholm/Remote): Various roles, open applications accepted</li> Embark Studios</a> (Stockholm/Hybrid Remote): Various roles, open applications accepted</li> Mutate</a> (Remote): Rust Backend Software Engineer</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> Rusty Jam 2 Unknown — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 </p> Hey everyone, we’re finally announcing the Rusty Jam #2</a>! It’s a great chance to try out some new Rusty tech, form a team of like-minded rustaceans, and feel what a full cycle of making a game in Rust feels like in miniature!</p> Submissions will be open from June 18th to June 26th. Voting on submissions will begin as soon as the jam ends and will run for a week.</p> This jam focuses more on using Rust than anything else. That means you aren’t restricted on your design, music, or graphics, as long as you use Rust to make it!</p> The optional-to-use theme for the jam is going to be announced in the Rusty Jam Discord</a> and pinned in the community section. While you’re waiting for the theme, you can start looking for a team in the #looking-for-team Discord channel. If you want to solo jam though, that’s fine too.</p> See the itch.io page for more details about dates, rules, modifiers, etc!</a></p> This jam’s mascot is Aaron the Rust-loving fox (submitted</a> by vSmiles)!</p> Aaron is a proud supporter of Rust and loves spreading this love around the world.</p> He hands out little red flags as he marks the places he’s reached, and with his big furry smile, he wants Rust to be an approachable programming language that’s suitable for anyone!</p> He also has a very special bandana that features his little friend Ferris.</p> </blockquote> This Month in Rust GameDev #34 - May 2022 Unknown — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 34th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust Graphics Meetup 2 #</a> </h3> </a></p> The 2nd Rust Graphics Meetup took place on the 21st of May. The videos of the talks have been released:</p> Vismut</a> - Lukas Orsvärn</a></li> Screen-13</a> - John Wells</a></li> Optimizing wgpu with Data Driven Design</a> - Connor Fitzgerald</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 16th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in May. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. Here was the schedule from the meetup:</p> RustConf Arcade Cabinet - @carlosupina</a></li> Puzzle platformer - @tesselode</a></li> Veloren - @AngelOnFira</a></li> Graphite - @GraphiteEditor</a></li> </ul> The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on June 11th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> 3D Ferris #</a> </h3> </p> @RayMarch</a> is creating a game-ready 3D model of Ferris the Rustacean</a>. These links provide a more detailed look: 360 overview</a>, Ferris dancing</a>.</p> Once the model is finished, it will be published under a permissive license on GitHub</a>, so you can use it in your 3D game, rendering demo, v-tuber avatar, you name it!</p> If you have any feedback feel free to share on Discord</a>.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> RustConf Arcade Cabinet #</a> </h3> </p> Carlo</a> is building a custom arcade cabinet that will be at RustConf 2022 in Portland. It is an opportunity for Rust game developers to share their games with the broader community. If you are interested in getting your game on the cabinet, read this Twitter thread</a> and fill out the interest form</a>. All of the parts for the cabinet are currently in production, and art for the sides is in progress. Check out the latest update here</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Battleship</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Battleship</a> by @orhun</a> is the battleship game</a> implemented in Rust.</p> Features:</p> Fully playable between 2 players on the terminal.</li> No installation required.</li> Works over TCP sockets.</li> Very lightweight to host your own server (only has 1 dependency).</li> </ul> ROOM4DOOM</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> ROOM4DOOM</a> is a rewrite of the classic Doom engine in Rust with some modernisation.</p> @flukejones</a> has been very busy in the last 4 months completing many parts of ROOM4DOOM; rendering, subsystems for menus, status bar, intermissions, and of course the actual gameplay - you can now complete Doom 1 in ROOM4DOOM.</p> A recent Twitter thread has been cleaned up and expanded into a blog post providing context to the project and a walk-through of the history. You can view that here</a>.</p> limbo_pass</a> #</a> </h3> </p> limbo_pass</a> by @shnewto</a> is a little 3D walking sim in Bevy that uses scenes, meshes, and materials exported directly from Blender.</p> Features include:</p> Blender assets exported to glTF</li> Collision detection with bevy_rapier3d</a></li> Looping audio with bevy_kira_audio</a></li> </ul> For more info, see the announcement post</a> and the gameplay video</a>.</p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> (Steam</a>, Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that will put you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing. Hydrofoil Generation is based on a custom made DirectX 11 based engine.</p> A new trailer</a> just landed showcasing new animations, the new Hong Kong location, and camera modes.</p> Meanwhile, private beta-testing is well underway with good feedback regarding boat controls and physics, netcode, and software stability, Rust for sure delivered on all the promises here.</p> The first set of Sailing rules has also been implemented and part of the current beta testing process with more rules to be added in the next months.</p> Sadly the target Q2 2022 Early Access release on Steam couldn’t be hit and now the team is aiming at a Q4 2022 release.</p> Country Slice #</a> </h3> </p> Country Slice (WIP name) is a relaxing building game being made by @anastasiaopara</a>.</p> This month, she added an animated undo system. You can find more details in this Twitter thread</a>, and follow the newsletter</a> for more updates.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle adventure with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. You can support development by wishlisting the game on Steam</a>, and giving feedback</a> on the Steam demo.</p> Way of Rhea was selected to be part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase! The event is over, you can still find the list of games and some of the demos here</a>. Recent updates:</p> More work was done on the Jungle Biome visuals</a></li> Dynamic gradient overlays were added to the engine to give a sense of depth</li> Fixed bug where Nvidia drivers would incorrectly trigger the crash dump writer</li> Fixed a long-running draw call sorting problem that could lead to popping</li> Fixed an audio failure when unplugging the active speaker</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A glorious flight to distant lands</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In May, work was done on Wyvern models. Smoke was improved from houses, and now has different colours and strengths. A rib cage generator was added, so now there are large bone structures from ancient times around the world. Level of detail objects were added, so trees can now be seen on far-off mountains. This makes the world feel significantly more alive. A lot of work was done on the performance of the game server, as Veloren has been seeing over 100 concurrent players at peak on the server nearly every day for the past few weeks.</p> Lots of work was done on balancing items and drop rates. Water caves have been worked on, which now means that you might need to enter them from underwater. Modular weapons were merged, which was a change several months in the making. NPCs are now able to pick up items that are on the ground. Work was done on taming and mounting various animals. Weather is still in the works, with improvements to the ambient SFX system for rain. A new UI concept was created for what Airshipper might be able to look like in the future.</p> May’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #170</a>, #171</a>, #172</a>, #173</a>, #174</a>.</p> Hug With Me?</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Hug Game</a> by the HIHAHEHO Studio</a> is an active ragdoll remote hugging simulator made with Bevy and rapier.</p> The arms are individually controlled using a keyboard on desktop and touch controls on mobile to make various hugs. You can click “Random” to play with a random person or “Room” to share a link to someone you want to play with.</p> The source code of the game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> Combine&Conquer</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Connect factories on different planets via spaceships</a></figcaption> </figure> Combine&Conquer</a> by Martin Buck</a> is a WIP strategy game about automation similar to Satisfactory or Factorio. This month’s updates include:</p> a new view to see in-flight spaceships</a>,</li> single render node</a>,</li> and the first public prototype release on itch.io</a>.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Fyrox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fyrox</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. In May it hit version 0.25 which added a lot of new functionality:</p> Static plugin system.</li> User-defined scripts.</li> Play mode for the editor.</li> Animation blending state machine editor.</li> Prefab inheritance improvements.</li> Layout and render transform support for widgets.</li> Shortcuts improvements in the editor.</li> UI performance improvements.</li> Double click support in fyrox-ui</code>.</li> Better serializer error recovery.</li> Tons of small improvements and fixes.</li> </ul> Sometime after, the engine hit version 0.26 which was primarily focused on bug fixing, but also added some interesting features:</p> Project template generator.</li> Script API improvements.</li> Shader cache fixes.</li> Skybox validator.</li> </ul> See full list of changes in respective blog posts - 0.25</a> and 0.26</a>. Everybody, who wants to learn how to use the engine should check the new 2D Platformer Tutorial</a>.</p> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> miniquad</a> is a pure Rust, cross-platform graphics library.</p> The biggest PR in miniquad’s history</a> landed this month, finishing the effort of removing all the sapp</code> legacy.</p> Changes include:</p> No more sapp-*</code> crates. Now it’s just one crate, miniquad! No mess with individual crates anymore, no FFI for miniquad - sapp communication.</li> On Linux, miniquad does not depend/statically link with lib*-dev packages. Miniquad can choose between glx/egl, x11/wayland at runtime.</li> MacOS implementation does not depend on any Objective C code anymore.</li> </ul> Dims</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Dims</a> (Twitter</a>, Discord</a>, YouTube</a>) is a WIP open-world creation platform. Some highlights from the project’s latest dev log</a>:</p> A terrain tool</a> that allows quick landscape creation while still making sure that the biomes are unique and diverse.</li> A tool to let creators script gameplay events</a> without having ever done any programming.</li> The pre-alpha is now open for a limited time, so come and try building your own open world games</a>!</li> </ul> Also, a bunch of feature videos and tutorials were uploaded on the YouTube channel</a> - make sure to take a look if you’re interested in Dims.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/worldbuilding</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Intro to Material/Shaders in Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Matthew Bryant</a> has created a series about Bevy’s Material abstraction</a>, showing how to use custom WGSL shaders in Bevy.</p> The series walks through the documentation to understand why steps are done in order to build a clear theoretical understanding of Bevy’s high-level abstractions.</p> The first of the three videos covers the bare minimum needed to render a material;</li> the second introduces bind groups to use textures and generic data in the shader;</li> and the final video ties into Bevy’s ECS to copy game data onto the graphics card every frame.</li> </ul> He will be releasing videos about UI in Bevy and Rapier physics next month.</p> Kubecon 2022, Lightning Talk: Wasmcloud + Bevy ECS</a> #</a> </h3> </p> QQparty</a> is a serverless multiplayer game built with Bevy ECS and Wasmcloud</a>.</p> This month, @rustropy_gaming</a> joined Cosmonic to give a series of Wasmcloud talks in Kubecon 2022 VLC. They demonstrated how Bevy can be added into Wasmcloud’s actors as a serverless game server.</p> You can check out a recording of the talk on YouTube</a>, as well as viewing the slides</a>. For updates on QQparty, follow @rustropy_gaming</a> on Twitter!</p> Rusteroids</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Rusteroids</a> is a tutorial recreating a clone of Asteroids in Rust, using SDL2 and the Specs</a> library.</p> New episodes are released weekly and added to the playlist. Most recently, collision detection was added to reset the game state when the asteroid and player collide. The latest episode is here</a>.</p> You can subscribe to the YouTube Channel</a>, to never miss an episode, or follow @ecatstudios</a> on Twitter!</p> Starting a new 2d platformer with Bevy ECS</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @chrisbiscardi</a> published a video</a> on setting up a new 2D platformer project using Bevy. The video covers integrating with LDTK, Rapier, and becy_ecs_tilemap to get a working character controller with collisions in a sandbox. It also touches on staple crates such as bevy_asset_loader and iyes_loopless.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Comparing a Voxel Game in F# and Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> This article</a> walks through the process of rewriting an F# game in Rust. It explores the similarities between the languages and talks about using simple code constructs where possible. It talks about the Rust crates used to help with the process. Finally, it goes over a conclusion comparing the speed of both versions of the games, and the sizes of the codebases.</p> Rustacean Station 66: Eric Smith</a> #</a> </h3> </p> In May the Rustacean Station</a> podcast interviewed Eric Smith</a>, the author of “Game Development with Rust and WebAssembly”</a>.</p> In this episode, lots is discussed about why Rust is becoming a good language for game development, different game engines, is Rust web-ready, insights on Rust game development, and Eric’s writing process.</p> GamesFromScratch: Rust Game Development in 2022</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> GamesFromScratch shared a YouTube video</a> with an overview of the most popular engines, frameworks, and libraries for Rust game development, including: Amethyst, Piston, Bevy, Fyrox, ggez, godot-rust, raylib, SDL2, and SFML.</p> New Book: Multiplayer Game Development in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The “Multiplayer Game Development in Rust”</a> book by @Extrawurst</a> and @lyonbeckers</a> is now available in Manning Early Access Program.</p> Multiplayer Game Development in Rust teaches you to construct your own multiplayer game. You’ll build a simple game client, but the real work happens on the backend. Chapter-by-chapter, you’ll add scalability, persistence, benchmarking, and tracing to support game features like real-time multiplayer scorekeeping, leader boards, and server-to-client messaging. Along the way, you’ll get pro tips about what makes Rust so great for game development, and you’ll work with state-of-the-art technologies that take full advantage of the cloud. Best of all, everything you learn will apply to any application that requires real-time server technology.</p> </blockquote> At the moment, 4 of 12 chapters are available:</p> Introducing Rust in Games</li> Building a Game Client</li> Building a Game Server</li> Making a Multiplayer Client</li> </ul> The book is estimated to be finished in early 2023.</p> Audio Libraries Considered Challenging</a> #</a> </h3> @tesselode</a> shared an article</a> about the difficulties of making audio libraries:</p> I develop a game audio library called Kira</a>. Here’s some of the hard parts I’ve figured out. If you decide to make an audio library for some reason, learn from my experimentation! <…> Making audio libraries is hard. I don’t know the best way to do it. This is just what I’ve tried and how it went for me.</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Bloom3D</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Bloom3D</a> is a minimalist web app for 3D modeling that’s built in Rust.</p> Bloom is powered by a custom game engine called koi</code></a> that is open-sourced on GitHub.</p> This month @kettlecorn</a> released a new version of Bloom3D</a> that adds a variety of new features including a rectangle tool, move tool, and OBJ export. Check out the Twitter announcement thread</a> for an overview and videos of all the new features.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free, in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor. It will be powered by a node graph compositing engine that supercharges your layer stack, providing a completely non-destructive editing experience.</p> Spring cleaning: The past month’s Sprint 15 work has focused mostly on technical debt cleanup, documentation, and bug fixes around the frontend. That continues with the Rust backend next month.</p> </li> A radiant gradient: The Gradient tool now supports radial styles in addition to linear.</p> </li> New blog post: Learn about the plans</a> for distributed computing across many CPUs and GPUs with Graphene, the Rust-based node graph engine and renderer that will power Graphite.</p> </li> </ul> Open the Graphite editor</a> in your browser to give it a try and share your creations with #MadeWithGraphite on Twitter.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> bevy_mod_scripting</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_mod_scripting</a> by @makspll is a brand new Bevy plugin enabling multi-language scripting (currently in Lua and Rhai).</p> The plugin is in early stages but as of now supports:</p> Handling events at multiple points of your stage pipeline.</li> Sending events to specific, or all scripts.</li> Setting event priority to order your callbacks.</li> Defining custom state and APIs at initialization.</li> Sending run-time error events (to for example show them in an in-game console).</li> One-shot scripts.</li> </ul> General Bevy API support is under-way so stay tuned!</p> bevy_silk</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_silk</a> by @ManevilleF</a> is a cloth physics plugin for Bevy.</p> Apply cloth physics to any mesh, by adding a single component to your entity!</p> Features:</p> Collision support using bevy_rapier</a></li> Global and per-entity physics customization</li> Dynamic smooth and flat normals</li> Wind forces</li> Custom cloth anchors</li> </ul> The library is fully documented and the repository provides various usage examples.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> bevy_asset_loader</a> #</a> </h3> bevy_asset_loader</a> by @nikl_me</a> is a Bevy plugin that helps with asset loading and asset organisation. It greatly reduces boilerplate code for loading states and can resolve asset configuration at run time.</p> This month, version 0.11.0</code> was released. It supports loading lists of files as Vec<HandleUntyped></code> or Vec<Handle<T>></code>. This is an alternative to loading folders, which is not supported on the web. You can now track the loading progress of your assets with iyes_progress</a> and build loading bars. Integrating with iyes_loopless</a> gives you some benefits of stageless scheduling in current Bevy. Additionally, the loading of assets fields without attributes was improved. It now uses the FromWorld</code> trait instead of Default</code>.</p> More improvements will likely follow for the dynamic asset story. One goal is to allow loading any custom values as dynamic assets.</p> bevy_kira_audio</a> #</a> </h3> bevy_kira_audio</a> by @nikl_me</a> is an alternative audio plugin for Bevy. It uses Kira</a> to play and control game audio.</p> This month saw the release of version 0.10.0</code>. The plugin now uses the latest Kira release, which was a major rewrite. The audio channel API is improved by making all channels resources in Bevy’s ECS and sounds can be directly loaded from asset files with settings like their volume, playback rate, or panning. Additionally, the audio backend can now be configured before creation through a settings resource.</p> Sparsey</a> #</a> </h3> Sparsey</a> by @LechintanTudor</a> is a sparse set-based Entity Component System with beautiful and concise syntax.</p> The latest release, 0.8.0, adds some convenience panicking functions for borrowing resources and a method for resetting a World</code> to its default state without having to recreate it.</p> Notan v0.4</a> #</a> </h3> Notan</a> is a simple and portable layer designed to create your own multimedia apps on top of it without worrying about platform-specific code.</p> The main goal is to provide a set of APIs and tools that can be used to create your project in an ergonomic manner without enforcing any structure or pattern, always trying to stay out of your way. The idea is that you can use it as a foundation layer or backend for your next app, game engine, or game.</p> The latest version v0.4</a> adds touch support</a> and fixes some minor bugs.</p> carrier-pigeon</a> #</a> </h3> carrier-pigeon</a> by @MitchellMarinoDev</a> is a rusty networking library for games. It builds on the standard library’s TcpStream and UdpSocket types and handles all the serialization, sending, receiving, and deserialization. This way you can worry about what to send, and pigeon will worry about how to send it. This also allows you to send and receive different types of messages independently.</p> bevy-pigeon</a> is a Bevy plugin for carrier-pigeon.</p> bong</a> is a combination of breakout and pong that showcases bevy-pigeon and carrier-pigeon.</p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #124 “Wanted: a good JPEG 2000 decoder for Rust”</a>.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: After the initial release of BITGUN</a>, LogLogGames</a> released a bunch of updates packed with various bugfixes and improvements</a>.</li> Gravity Well</a> is a simple two-player (shared keyboard) game in which you collect salvage and try not to fall into a black hole that can be played online here</a>.</li> Flesh</a> got a new enemy type</a>, new UI’s fade in/out</a>, and damage animation for enemies</a>.</li> Grocery Bagger 9000</a> is a WIP Tetris-like puzzler built with Bevy.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: clymene</a> by @LukeRaccoon</a> is a CLI atlas generation tool that doesn’t just outputs a packed image, but also a data set about its sources, which can be either static images or animations.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: The Unofficial Bevy Cheatbook by got a WIP chapter about rendering</a>.</li> @scvalex</a> shared a blog post</a> about how the NixOS flake for Rust/egui/eframe/glutin/OpenGL looks like</a>.</li> @ychshn</a> shared a live-stream recording “Let’s Code Snake with Rust and WASM”</a>.</li> PhaestusFox added a bunch of new videos to their “Bevy Basics”</a> YouTube series.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: mmap_cache</a> is a low-level API for a memory-mapped cache of a read-only key-value store.</li> crevice v0.10</a> brings mint integration and a couple of API improvements.</li> glyphon</a> provides a simple way to render 2D text with wgpu.</li> egui 0.18</a> was released, with the ability to embed 3D inside egui, table and date picker widgets, better text contrast in bright mode, and more.</li> Following the release of egui v0.18, bevy_egui 0.14</a> and puffin_egui 0.15.0</a> were published.</li> bevy_puffin</a> integrates the puffin</a> instrumentation profiler with Bevy.</li> bevy_rosc</a> integrates rosc</a> - an Open Sound Control library - into Bevy.</li> bustsuri</a> is a Bevy asset that provides 2D collision detector and kinematics.</li> The Bevy engine started collaborating</a> with @dioxuslabs</a> on a flexible, high-performance, cross-platform UI layout library sprawl</a> (based on abandoned stretch</a>).</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev</a>: “Choosing a networking library for my game”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> DIMS</a> (Stockholm/Remote): Various roles, open applications accepted.</li> Embark Studios</a> (Stockholm/Hybrid Remote): Various roles, open applications accepted.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> Rust Graphics Meetup 2 Unknown — Wed, 18 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 </p> The second Rust Graphics Meetup will take place on May 21st at 16:00 UTC+0</a>. This meetup is a chance to see what others have been working on in the Rust graphics community. You can see the videos from the first meetup here</a>.</p> The meetup will take place on the Rust Gamedev YouTube</a> and Twitch</a>.</p> Schedule #</a> </h2> Vismut | Lukas Orsvärn</a> #</a> </h3> 16:00 - 16:20 #</a> </h4> Vismut will be a procedural texturing tool for Windows and Linux, allowing for a 100% non-destructive material creation workflow. This means you build textures from scratch using procedural nodes, allowing for changes to any step in the process at any time, including changing the texture’s resolution.</p> </blockquote> Recording</a></em> #</a> </h4> Screen-13 | John Wells</a> #</a> </h3> 16:20 - 16:30 #</a> </h4> Screen 13 is an easy-to-use Vulkan rendering engine in the spirit of QBasic.</p> </blockquote> Recording</a></em> #</a> </h4> Optimizing wgpu with Data Driven Design | Connor Fitzgerald</a> #</a> </h3> 16:30 - 17:00 #</a> </h4> A look into how Data Driven Design is the key to the performance increases coming in wgpu 0.13 and what the future holds for solving long standing performance bottlenecks in the codebase. wgpu is the graphics abstraction at the core of many rust projects and ensuring it is as fast as possible will push the boundary of what is possible in safe Rust today.</p> </blockquote> Recording</a></em> #</a> </h4> This Month in Rust GameDev #33 - April 2022 Unknown — Sat, 14 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 33rd issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Announcements</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Announcements #</a> </h2> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h3> </p> The 15th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in April. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on May 14th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> Rust Graphics Meetup 2 #</a> </h3> The 2nd Rust Graphics Meetup will take place on the 21st of May, at 16:00 UTC+0</a>. This meetup is a chance to show off what you’ve been working on in the graphics community, or see what other people have been doing!</p> If you’re interested in speaking, please fill out the form</a>. You can also watch one of the talks</a> from the first meetup.</p> RustConf Arcade Cabinet #</a> </h3> </p> Carlo</a> is building a custom arcade cabinet that will be at RustConf 2022 in Portland. It is an opportunity for Rust game developers to share their games with the broader community. If you are interested in getting your game on the cabinet, read this Twitter thread</a> and fill out the interest form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle adventure with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. It has a demo available on Steam</a>.</p> Way of Rhea was recently shown off at PAX East!</a> A minor patch</a> has been released to the demo with post-PAX fixes:</p> An issue that made the last puzzle in the third forest level difficult to navigate with a controller was worked around</li> Colliders in the Hermes puzzle were fixed (previously you could land on top of a gate if you held left while sliding)</li> The attract mode that was used at PAX has been merged (not in demo)</li> More jungle biome scenery has been placed (not in demo)</li> A crash at startup on CPUs that don’t support the andn</code> instruction was fixed (part of the BMI extension to x64)</li> The game can now generate mini dumps on Windows and Linux in the event that it crashes and if given consent, forward them to the developer for analysis</li> </ul> You can stay up to date with the latest Way of Rhea developments by following it on Steam</a>, signing up for their mailing list</a>, or joining their Discord</a>.</p> BITGUN #</a> </h3> BITGUN gameplay</figcaption> </figure> BITGUN</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by @darth</a> and @shosanna</a> is an action roguelite zombie shooter with difficult and satisfying combat you can learn and master. Guns break quickly and you lose all your gear when you die.</p> The game was just released on Steam! It has been developed by a programming duo called LogLog Games. They have been working on it for the past year and it is their biggest game so far (they also have 2 smaller games). BITGUN</a> is written in Godot Engine but it is using Rust language extensively (it has around 7500 lines of Rust and 4200 lines of GDScript).</p> The main changes from the demo version of the game:</p> New missions added with extra difficulty</li> Improved AI which doesn’t just chase the player but behaves unpredictably</li> New zombie types - ranged zombie, big spider, zombie spawner</li> Added comic-book style story</li> Improved tutorial and new player experience</li> Reworked inventory system with simplified armor</li> </ul> Discussion: /r/rust</a></em></p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Out for a ride at night</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> For April Fool’s day, Veloren made a post about a new direction; Need for Voxels: Veloren Cart</a>. Enjoy the read! Veloren also participated in Reddit’s /r/place, and got a small place right below /r/rust. Several months of project finances were processed, and discussed in a blog post</a>. The Veloren Reading Club saw its 8th episode</a>, which was on the topic of graphics and particles. A second Veloren Code Review session</a> was held, in which two developers went through a merge request that focused on combat numbers.</p> Work was done to improve how loadouts work, specifically surrounding inheritance from other configs. Tweaks were made to arthropods, which should make them more fun to fight. Work is being done to prepare for the 0.13 release, with a custom map being built, and a special treasure map being created for the launch party. Player bank storages are being developed, which will allow players to store excess items in towns.</p> April’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #166</a>, #167</a>, #168</a>, #169</a>.</p> Oasis of Lost Hope #</a> </h3> </p> Oasis of Lost Hope is a game where fertile ground is steadily consumed by dark, barren land called blight. Water helps defend an area from being consumed, but reserves are finite. The player needs to collect ore to build more irrigation towers and delay doom for a few more seconds. Yet one thing is certain: the days of fertile land are counted.</p> The game is an entry for the Ludum Dare 50 Jam, the theme of which was “Delay the Inevitable”. It has been developed by setzer22 and Bromeon and open-sourced on GitHub</a>. The game is built on top of godot-rust alongside GDScript. The Rust language is not exactly known for fast prototyping, but with a slightly less safety-conservative fork of godot-rust, the game jam experience was surprisingly smooth. When modeling mechanics such as the expanding blight or the water pipe network, Rust really showed its strength as a strongly typed and fast language.</p> Extremely Extreme Sports</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Extremely Extreme Sports</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) is a multiplayer online downhill racing game made for Ludum Dare 50 game jam</a>, scored top 3 in fun. Explode the mountain, and race against the avalanche as well as your friends.</p> Features:</p> Online multiplayer</li> Character customization</li> Emoting</li> A little bit of gameplay</li> </ul> Developed by @kuviman</a> using custom engine</a>. A postmortem blog post</a> was written about the jam experience, and it includes postjam updates.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy v0.7</a> #</a> </h3> Creative Commons ‘Stylized mushrooms’ scene by QumoDone rendered in Bevy.</figcaption> </figure> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> Bevy 0.7 was a massive community effort. You can check out the full release blog post here</a>, but here are some highlights:</p> Skeletal animation and mesh skinning</a></li> GLTF animation importing</a></li> Unlimited* point lights in a scene</a></li> Improved clustered forward rendering: dynamic/adaptive clustering and faster, more accurate cluster assignment</a></li> Compressed texture support (KTX2 / DDS / .basis): load more textures in a scene, faster</a></li> Compute shader / pipeline specialization: Bevy’s flexible shader system was ported to compute shaders, enabling hot-reloading, shader defs, and shader imports</a></li> Render to texture: cameras can now be configured to render to a texture instead of a window</a></li> Flexible mesh vertex layouts in shaders</a></li> ECS improvements: Order systems using their names, Query::many_mut, use conflicting parameters in systems via ParamSets, WorldQuery derives</a></li> Documentation improvements: better examples, more doc tests, and more coverage</a></li> More audio control: pause, volume, speed, and looping</a></li> Power usage options to enable only updating Bevy Apps when input occurs</a></li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Dims #</a> </h3> Foliage rendering in Dims</figcaption> </figure> Dims is an open-world creation platform.</p> In their latest dev log</a> they demonstrate a new foliage rendering and spawning system, which automatically spawns foliage and trees based on “habitat rules”. This means a user can simply “paint” a world and it will get populated with plants and rocks automatically.</p> They are also planning to host a screenshot competition in the next few weeks for anyone who would like to try out the platform and create their own landscapes. Sign up for the newsletter on their website to get notified when it starts!</p> Discussions: Foliage rendering on reddit</a>, Erosion tool on reddit</a></em></p> Eldiron</a> #</a> </h3> Behavior Nodes of Eldiron</figcaption> </figure> Eldiron</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by @markusmoenig</a> is a creator for classic role playing games (RPGs) written in Rust.</p> Eldiron v0.5 features inbuild tilemaps, a node-based behavior system and region editors.</p> Development Updates in April:</p> Support for 4 layers of tiles for game regions. This enables transparency and support for top-down and isometric views.</li> Game regions can now contain named areas.</li> Areas can contain behavior nodes to spawn monsters, lay traps, or displace tiles (for example to open a door).</li> New “Systems” module to create behavior for Combat and soon for Crafting, Magic and more. System behavior trees can be called from any character.</li> </ul> Eldiron v1 will be able to create any kind of RPG utilizing square tiles, like the classical Ultima series.</p> Hotham</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot from The Station, an upcoming space station simulation game, built with Hotham</figcaption> </figure> Hotham</a> is a game engine for standalone VR devices, trying to make VR development just a little bit less painful.</p> 0.2 has been released with some breathtaking</em> maintenance and performance improvements that make Hotham marginally easier to use. If you’re interested in Rust and VR and haven’t checked out the project already, now is an excellent time to do so.</p> A huge thank you to our sponsors and contributors (big hat-tip to @jmgao) and the wonderful members of the Hotham discord</a>.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Game Development with Rust and WebAssembly</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Game Development with Rust and WebAssembly</a> by Eric Smith (a.k.a @paytonrules</a>) was published in April. It takes a tutorial approach to lead the reader through building an endless runner using Rust and WebAssembly. You can play the completed game here</a>.</p> From the summary: This book is an easy-to-follow reference to help you develop your own games, teaching you all about game development and how to create an endless runner from scratch. You’ll begin by drawing simple graphics in the browser window, and then learn how to move the main character across the screen. You’ll also create a game loop, a renderer, and more, all written entirely in Rust. After getting simple shapes onto the screen, you’ll scale the challenge by adding sprites, sounds, and user input. As you advance, you’ll discover how to implement a procedurally generated world. Finally, you’ll learn how to keep your Rust code clean and organized so you can continue to implement new features and deploy your app on the web.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a>, Discord</a></em></p> Why I choose to build my game from scratch</a> #</a> </h3> @HeavyRain266</a> published an article, ‘Why I choose to build my game from scratch</a>’, a short story about their implementation of the game ‘Forbidden Valley’ from scratch in Rust. The author aims to show how much you can learn from building your dream game without the help of any game engine.</p> Discussions: r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Brontefy Me</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @hedgein (GitHub</a>, Twitch</a>) started a devlog series called Brontefy Me. This series walks through the development of games in the Bevy engine</a>. There are two episodes released so far. The first episode</a> focuses on getting up and running with the engine, and the second episode</a> starts expanding into game mechanics.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Vismut 0.5</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Vismut</a> (GitLab</a>, Zulip</a>) by @lukors</a> will be a procedural texturing tool.</p> Version 0.5</a> contains a brand new backend to create a better base for future improvements. A blog post</a> describes the differences between the old and the new architecture.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (website</a>, GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a free in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor. It will be powered by a node graph compositing engine that supercharges your layer stack, providing a completely non-destructive editing experience.</p> The past month’s Sprint 14 has focused on further editor features and UX improvements:</p> It’s your type:</strong> The Text tool now provides over 1400 fonts with bold/italic styles from the Google Fonts library.</p> </li> Oh snap!:</strong> A refactor and polish pass on the snapping system provides better clarity and consistency. And shapes now have outlines on hover and selection for easier targeting.</p> </li> Have a dialog:</strong> Supported by a refactor that moved dialog layouts into the Rust backend, users can now create new documents of specified sizes and export artwork as PNG/JPG with new File menu dialogs.</p> </li> Pack it up:</strong> The web component of the stack was finally upgraded to Webpack 5 which cleans up a mess of outdated dependencies.</p> </li> </ul> Open the editor</a> in your browser and give it a try.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> Notan v0.3.0</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Notan</a> is a simple and portable layer designed to create your own multimedia apps on top of it without worrying about platform-specific code.</p> The main goal is to provide a set of APIs and tools that can be used to create your project in an ergonomic manner without enforcing any structure or pattern, always trying to stay out of your way. The idea is that you can use it as a foundation layer or backend for your next app, game engine, or game.</p> The latest version v0.3.0</a> comes with audio support for all platforms using as default backend oddio</a> and symphonia</a>.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Last of the Sky Folk</a> is a grapple-hook based platformer created for LD50.</li> Heute Nicht</a> rythm game is another LD50 submission.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates PhaestusFox started a Bevy tutorial servies</a> and 0.6 to 0.7 Migration Guide</a> YouTube series.</li> @TantanDev</a> released a “Rust multi-threading code review”</a> video.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: tween</a> is an std-optional tweening library, designed for use in games and animations.</li> cosync</a> provides a single-threaded, sequential, parameterized async runtime.</li> SuInput</a> is an input system designed to give pancake and XR applications access to a huge range of input devices while minimizing the amount of complexity needed to support them.</li> bevy_blender v0.2</a> with lots of new features is out.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> DIMS</a> (Stockholm/Remote) Tools Programmer</li> Internship: Game Design</li> </ul> </li> Embark Studios</a> (Stockholm/Hybrid Remote) Various roles</li> </ul> </li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #32 - March 2022 Unknown — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 32nd issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Rust GameDev Podcast</a></li> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Podcast</a> #</a> </h2> </p> The Rust Gamedev Podcast features interviews with indie game developers creating titles with the Rust programming language. It covers technical topics as well as the business of open source and commercial indie games development.</p> In March, two episodes were released:</p> The seventh episode</a> is a chat with Erlend and Ole about Fish Fight</a>, open source games development, and future game spin-offs.</p> In the eighth episode</a>, Forest chats to Dustin about A/B Street</a>.</p> Listen and Subscribe from the following platforms: Rust GameDev Podcast (simplecast)</a>, Apple Podcasts</a>, Spotify</a>, RSS Feed</a>, or Google Podcasts</a>.</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The 14th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in March. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy Jam</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Voting on the first-ever Bevy Jam</a> just finished! It was a week-long event, where the goal was to make a game in Bevy Engine</a>, the free and open-source game engine built in Rust. The theme was ‘Unfair Advantage’.</p> The full results can be found on itch.io</a>, and you can read an exploration of the entries</a> to find out about how these entries used different asset formats, crates, and Bevy features.</p> Here are the top five games:</p> 🥇 First Place: Petty Party</a> #</a> </h4> </p> Petty Party</a> is a Mario Party inspired board game, in which you play against the world’s worst opponent, who’s actively rigging the game against you.</p> The game was originally very hard to beat, so the devs balanced the jam release fairly heavily in the player’s favour - however, if you beat the game, you can unlock the original difficulty as a ‘hard mode’!</p> The source for the game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> 🥈 Second Place: ¿Quién es el MechaBurro?</a> #</a> </h4> </p> ¿Quién es el MechaBurro?</a> is a singleplayer/local multiplayer game (up to 4 players) with bots (8 total burros) inspired by twin-stick shooters and aspects of Mario Kart. Players choose to play as one of the burro piñatas and then attempt to be the last burro standing in each level of the game. At the start of each round, one burro is chosen randomly to be upgraded to the Mechaburro, giving them an unfair advantage.</p> A postmortem devlog detailing the process of making the game during the jam can be found here</a>, a trailer for the game is viewable on YouTube</a> and the source code for the game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> 🥉 Third Place: Chaz</a> #</a> </h4> </p> Chaz</a> is a platform racing game, where you have to stay close to your opponent in order to see where you’re going. Beat them to the floating heart to win - but be warned, once you do, they’ll steal your moves!</p> The source code is available on GitHub</a>.</p> Fourth Place: Warlock’s Gambit</a> #</a> </h4> </p> Warlock’s Gambit</a> is a puzzle game constructed like a card game, playable in the browser. You are given a static deck and have to play your cards carefully to beat your opponent. In keeping with the theme of the jam, the decks are stacked against you. In fact, it’s impossible to win by default. But you have a trick up your sleeve, literally. You can drag a card in your sleeve to play it later.</p> The jam release was limited and confusing, but a post-jam update fixed the most annoying bugs, clarified the game rules, enabled importing custom decks, and added great code documentation (including a flow diagram demonstrating the game state changes).</p> The game code is licensed under MIT or Apache-2 and is available on GitHub</a>.</p> Fifth Place: Cheaters Never Win</a> #</a> </h4> </p> Cheaters Never Win</a> is an unfairly difficult infinite runner set in a cyberpunk world.</p> Collect keycaps in order to unlock cheat codes, which will give you access to forbidden powers - like jumping, and moving left!</p> Since the jam, the team has begun work on a full release for the game.</p> The source for this game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> V-Racer</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot of V-Racer</figcaption> </figure> V-Racer (GitHub</a>) by @Syn-Nine</a> is a retro drift racing game inspired by Atari Battlezone and Wipeout, created using Syn9’s Rust Mini Game Framework</a>. The game is part of an open source repository</a> of several mini-games that use this framework.</p> Harvest Hero Origins - Spring Fever</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Harvest Hero Origins by Gemdrop Games is an Arcade Wave Defense game featuring a co-op survival mode.</p> Gemdrop Games</a> collaborated with Pixadome</a> to bring their featured character Blue from Chenso Club</a> to the survival roster. Please go wishlist Chenso Club to support the developers!</p> Blue is an android who wields a chainsaw to rip and tear through her enemies. Slice and dice, then ride through enemies in the new Spring Fever expansion</a>!</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Veloren on the Steam Deck!</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In March, Veloren was tested on the SteamDeck, which you can read about in detail in the weekly devblog</a>. Lots of work was done with Airshipper, Veloren’s launcher, including some bug fixes, but mainly the switch to GitHub Releases as the download backend. This will make game updates significantly faster and more reliable for players. Work is also being done to make use of GitHub’s HTTP range requests to do partial patches where possible. Audio work was done to improve swimming sounds playing unevenly, and more sounds to gliding.</p> Veloren was also mentioned on Hacker News</a>, and lots of great discussions happened in the comment section. In 2021, Veloren spoke at Rust in Arts, and the recording has recently been posted</a>. The 0.13 release map is in the works, with a jungle theme. CliffTowns are being developed, as a new town located in the mountains. Veloren recorded another reading club episode, this time about Tracy and optimizations</a>. A new series was also started, and the first Veloren Code Review was recorded</a>.</p> March’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #162</a>, #163</a>, #164</a>, #165</a>.</p> rust-nonogram</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Nonograms (AKA Picross) are logic puzzles that involve filling in cells on a grid. The goal of rust-nonogram</a> is to be a quick and engaging time-killer. Featuring random puzzles and simple controls, it is a great way to have some fun and test your skills.</p> Terrain Generator</a> #</a> </h3> </p> “Terrain Generator” is a website made by @kettlecorn</a> that generates procedural island landscapes. It uses WebAssembly SIMD and multithreading via WebWorkers to speed up generation.</p> The terrain is generated with multi-octave simplex noise using the new simplex-noise crate clatter</code></a>.</p> Terrain Generator’s code is open-sourced on GitHub</a>.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle adventure with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. It has a demo available on Steam</a>.</p> Latest developments:</p> A new demo</a> was pushed to Steam for PAX East</li> The mushroom biome</a> art was completed</li> All puzzles for the main game are complete</li> More secrets have been added</li> Four out of the five characters</a> are now in the game</li> SDL_mixer</code> was replaced with a custom Rust mixer built on top of libsoundio</a></li> Numerous minor bug fixes and quality of life improvements, you can find more details here</a></li> </ul> You can stay up to date with the latest Way of Rhea developments by following it on Steam</a>, signing up for their mailing list</a>, or joining their Discord</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot game engine.</p> We are pleased to announce the release of godot-rust version 0.10.0. This update brings many new quality-of-life features, such as basic async and serde support, more flexible exporting of Rust symbols to Godot, better CI and doc integration, among many more features that have previously been exclusive to the GitHub repo</a>.</p> This release also makes the API much more user-friendly than previous versions with more consistent naming, flatter module structure and fewer redundancies.</p> Thank you to all of the contributors who made this possible!</p> A full list of the changes is available in the changelog</a>.</p> Notan v0.2.1</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Notan</a> is a simple and portable layer designed to create your own multimedia apps on top of it without worrying about platform-specific code.</p> The main goal is to provide a set of APIs and tools that can be used to create your project in an ergonomic manner without enforcing any structure or pattern, always trying to stay out of your way. The idea is that you can use it as a foundation layer or backend for your next app, game engine, or game.</p> Version v0.2.1</a> improves and adds features focusing on the creation of apps, like select mouse cursor or lazy loop among other things. The main focus was to improve the integration with egui</a> supporting all its features.</p> Tetra</a> 0.7 #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. This month, Tetra 0.7 was released, featuring:</p> Support for a wider variety of texture formats</li> A more powerful API for blending</li> Lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and improvements</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> As mentioned in previous newsletters, this is likely to be the final release of Tetra, as the developer has decided to move onto other projects</a>.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Intro to Bevy Video Tutorial Series</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Matthew Bryant (Youtube</a>, GitHub</a>) has been working on a video series on using Bevy to create a Pokemon-style RPG, and just released four episodes. The goal is to show and explain all the core features of Bevy while creating a real game over ten 10-15 minute videos, currently releasing once per week. There is also an accompanying blog post</a> for the first video in the series.</p> Bevy Cheatbook</a> #</a> </h3> The Bevy Cheatbook</a> by Ida Iyes is an unofficial reference-style book teaching the Bevy game engine. It got many improvements over the past month.</p> There is a new guided tutorial page</a>, to help you navigate the book in an order that makes sense for learning, starting from beginner topics and progressing towards more advanced! There is also a new “getting started” page, as an alternative to Bevy’s official instructions.</p> New topics added to the book: working with Bevy Time/Timers/Stopwatches, ECS data storage kinds, exclusive systems, direct World access, non-Send types, and more…</p> Many pages have been overhauled for correctness and the quality of various code examples improved.</p> If you would like to support the project, donate to the author via her GitHub Sponsors</a>. Follow @IyesGames on Twitter</a> for updates.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Bloom3D</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Bloom3D</a> is an extremely minimalist in-browser 3D modeling tool made by @kettlecorn</a> that released earlier this month.</p> Bloom3D is built completely with Rust from the user interface to core algorithms. The game engine and many of the libraries powering Bloom3D are open-sourced on GitHub</a>.</p> Noumenal</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Noumenal</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by @HackerFoo</a> is a beautiful and fast 3D modeling app for iOS.</p> Noumenal officially went into public beta</a> this week, and so was presented to a larger audience for the first time.</p> The goals of Noumenal are:</p> Enjoyable to use on a mobile device</li> Accessible to as many people as possible</li> Real-time solid modeling with boolean operations</li> Non-destructive editing and robustness to prevent data loss</li> Intuitive manipulation by projecting from the screen glass into 3D space</li> Export to the most widely used formats, such as glTF, USDZ, and STL for 3D printing</li> </ul> These goals have led to a unique interface.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite is an in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that is free and open source. It will be powered by a node graph compositing engine that supercharges your layer stack, providing a completely non-destructive editing experience.</p> With the completion of the node graph UX design, work has begun building the frontend and backend systems for the big leap to node-driven vector editing. This works by composing groups of Rust functions together at runtime and/or compile time. Watch the (brief) talk</a> about how the backend implementation works around challenges imposed by Rust.</p> New editor features this month include importing bitmap image layers and customizing stroke styling with dashed lines and rounded or beveled corners. The project website</a> is also now mostly content-complete, including new node graph mockups.</p> Check out the new website</a>, try the Graphite editor</a> right now in your browser, star on GitHub</a>, follow on Twitter</a>, and join the Discord</a> to chat or get involved!</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> bevy_match3</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_match3</a> (GitHub</a>) by @Sheepyhead</a> is an event-based Bevy crate for handling the logic side of match 3 games so you can worry about making everything else!</p> This was recently released in its first public version, so there are several parts to improve, and it could really use some battle testing.</p> dos-like-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> dos-like-rs</a> by @E_net4</a> provides Rust bindings to Mattias Gustavsson’s dos-like</code>, a cross-platform framework for writing modern applications with the look & feel of MS-DOS programs from the early 90’s.</p> A few technical details about the conception of these bindings are presented in a blog post on Dev.to</a>.</p> kira v0.6.0</a> #</a> </h3> Kira</a> by @tesselode</a> is a backend-agnostic library to create expressive audio for games. It provides parameters for smoothly adjusting properties of sounds, a flexible mixer for applying effects to audio, and a clock system for precisely timing audio events.</p> v0.6.0 is a complete rewrite with a more elegant API, support for streaming sounds, swappable backends, and more flexible mixer routing. See the full changelog</a> for more details.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, twitter</a></em></p> screen-13 v0.2.1-alpha</a> #</a> </h3> Screen 13</a> is an easy-to-use 2D/3D rendering engine in the spirit of QBasic. The library provides a thin Vulkan 1.1 driver using smart pointers and a fully-generic render graph structure.</p> Earlier this year Screen 13</a> was updated with a dynamic graph pattern, but there was no good starter documentation and a few bugs. There is a getting started</a> guide now! Also, a ton of new features have been added in the last month:</p> ImGui support</li> Mac support</li> Shader specialization</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Space Frontiers</a> posted a video</a> of their Atmospherics update.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: Hedgein</a> started a ‘making one game per week’ YouTube series.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> DIMS</a> (Stockholm/Remote) Tools Programmer</li> Internship: Game Design</li> </ul> </li> Embark Studios</a> (Stockholm/Hybrid Remote) Various roles</li> </ul> </li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #31 - February 2022 Unknown — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 31st issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Bevy Jam</a></li> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Rust GameDev Showcase</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Bevy Jam #1</a> #</a> </h2> </p> The first-ever Bevy Jam</a> just finished! Bevy Jam is a week-long event, where the goal is to make a game in Bevy Engine</a>, the free and open-source game engine built in Rust.</p> The theme was Unfair Advantage. 431 people joined the jam and 75 teams submitted entries. A ten-day “voting period” has started, which will end on March 14th. Anyone can play and vote on the submissions</a>.</p> The winning team will receive any two items from the Bevy Merch</a> store.</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The 13th Rust Gamedev Meetup took place in February. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Rust GameDev Showcase #</a> </h2> The Rust Gamedev Working Group is working on a showcase of games made in Rust! If you’re interested in submitting your own footage, fill out this form</a>. You can also read more about the process of creating the showcase in the showcase discussion on GitHub</a>. The deadline for submissions has been extended until the 19th of March 2022. Hope to see your game in there!</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Name Needed</a> #</a> </h3> The player orders a selection of blocks to be broken, and a brick wall to be built.</figcaption> </figure> Name Needed</a> by @DomWilliams0</a> is a one-man effort to produce an open source, intuitive, and high-performance Dwarf Fortress-esque game with a custom engine.</p> Recent progress has been on procedural terrain generation, the player UI, item stacks, and build jobs. A major refactor of the AI system integrated Rust’s superb async</code>/await</code> support, which is documented in the most recent devlog.</p> Devlog #5: voxel world goals</a></li> Devlog #6: async activities</a></li> Devlog #7: custom async runtime</a></li> </ul> This is Fine Sokoban</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot of This is Fine Sokoban</figcaption> </figure> This is Fine Sokoban (GitHub</a>) by @Syn-Nine</a> is a Sokoban game inspired by the This is Fine meme created for the Game Developers Refuge 4x4x4 Challenge</a> in February 2022. Use the arrow keys to push the TPS reports into the file folders while the room is burning down and you’re surrounded by clocks - a metaphor for the developer’s work life.</p> The 4x4x4 Challenge was to create a game based on four emojis. In this case the chosen emoji combination was: :nerd_face: :open_file_folder: :clock830: :fire:</p> The game is part of an open source repository of several mini-games that use Syn9’s Rust Mini Game Framework</a>.</p> Build A Better Buddy</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Build A Better Buddy is a cute auto-battler built by @cart_cart</a> using Bevy Engine</a> for Bevy Jam #1</a>. The source code is available here</a>. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and the Web.</p> Weegames</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Weegames</a> is a fast-paced minigame collection available on web and Windows. The latest release:</p> Uses quad-storage</a> on WASM to save high scores and a record of how games the player has played</li> Fixes bug where the game was being played at an incorrect speed when the player’s monitor was not 60hz</li> Adds 8 more minigames</li> </ul> Dis-order</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Dis-order by @jkhelsing</a> is a short sokoban-esque puzzle game made in 72 hours for MiniJam 100. In Dis-order you’re making chaos instead of order, you win when there are no patterns or order in the level.</p> It’s made using Bevy</a> and uses bevy_smud</a> for shape rendering, and a compute pass for the particle effects</a>. The levels are made with ldtk and loaded using bevy_ecs_ldtk</a>. Read more about this in the post-mortem</a>.</p> Download the game on itch.io</a>.</p> Molecoole</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Molecoole is a top-down shooter roguelike where you build your character from different atoms. Each atom has a unique ability to provide tons of variety between playthroughs. It’s made using the Bevy Engine</a>.</p> This month Molecoole launched on Steam</a>, making it the first game made with Bevy Engine there! It’s available on Windows and Linux. You can check out its gameplay on youtube</a>, or on the Steam page.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Looking out over the Gnarling fort</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In February, Veloren 0.12 was released</a>. For the release, a trailer with some of the changes</a> was posted. This release was 5 months in the making, so the changelog is quite large. During the release party, the official server reached a cap of 195 players online at once, which is another record for Veloren. Changes were made to allow server owners to handle IPv4 and IPv6 connections. Improvements were also made to trading price calculations to properly normalize loot tables.</p> Two Veloren Reading Clubs were held in February. The first one</a> explored using Git to contribute, and how to add some new NPC characters. The second one</a> explored how some of Git’s more intricate features worked, as well as how economy simulations are done. Work was done to allow species to defend others of the same species, to allow for more realistic combat in the wild. A Mastodon page</a> was also created for Veloren. Gnarlings forts were also added, which adds a whole new area for players to fight in.</p> February’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #158</a>, #159</a>, #160</a>, #161</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> DIMS</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @jfnoren (Twitter</a>, GitHub</a>) posted a video</a> about a first look into their engine, DIMS. DIMS allows you to create open worlds, script gameplay, and mess around with physics. DIMS has been in the works for several months, but you can now sign up for early access on their website</a>.</p> Discussions: Reddit</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy Minesweeper</a> #</a> </h3> Demo Screenshot</figcaption> </figure> @ManevilleF</a> published a 12 step course</a> on how to make a simple 2D Minesweeper using bevy</a> 0.6. A public repository</a> is available, as well as a live demo</a>.</p> The tutorial showcases:</p> essential features of the bevy</a> engine</li> important ECS notions for beginners</li> WASM build</li> and soon, android native APK build</li> </ul> Discussions: Twitter</a>, dev.to</a></em></p> Computing image filters with wgpu-rs</a> #</a> </h3> @Redwarp</a> posted a blog post</a> that goes through the process of creating a simple image processing pipeline with compute shaders, using wgpu-rs. The post takes you through several steps in this process:</p> Wgpu basics</li> Loading a texture</li> A simple shader</li> Bind group</li> Workgroup and dispatch</li> </ul> Actor Pattern with Async Rust</a> #</a> </h3> @Sorokya (Twitter</a>, GitHub</a>) published a blog post</a> about how they improved their game server by switching over to an actor pattern approach. This method allowed the server to be refactored to be more modular and cleaner.</p> Godot-Rust to Android without Android Studio</a> #</a> </h3> Proof of concept Godot app running on Android</figcaption> </figure> @coffeecodechem</a> published a blog post</a> on how to export godot-rust as an Android APK on Windows without using Android Studio. It goes beyond the godot-rust book that specifies “steps are tested and confirmed to work on Linux only”, and details what is needed to make it work on Windows.</p> The post shows how to set up the JDK and Rust, set up the keystore, and how to build the required GDNative libraries.</p> Supercharging your Web with Rust and Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> Bruno Lipovac released a blog post</a> that detailed building 3D applications for use on the web with Bevy. It walks through setting up a Bevy project and importing some models. It also details some more fine-detail items, such as lighting and sky. It then shows how to compile the project and serve it.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Vismut</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Vismut</a> (GitLab</a>, Zulip</a>) by @lukors</a> will be a procedural texturing tool.</p> This application saw its first public release a month ago, where it added support for its first use case: manual channel shuffling.</p> The latest version, v0.4.0</a>, brings an all-new interface that’s not only prettier but also much easier to use thanks to bevy_egui</code>!</p> Upcoming versions will turn it into a fully-featured node-based procedural texturing tool. Read the introduction</a> on the author’s blog for more information.</p> Blackjack</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Blackjack</a> by @setzer22 is a new procedural modeling application made in Rust, using rend3, wgpu, and egui. It follows the steps of applications like Houdini, or Blender’s geometry nodes project and provides a node-based environment to compose procedural recipes to create 3d models.</p> The last two months have been quite busy for Blackjack. After an initial open source release, several new features have been added:</p> Added a resizeable viewport system, with node graph pan and zoom.</li> Built an initial implementation for a properties inspector and geometry spreadsheet panels.</li> Added a subdivision node, with a fast catmull-clark subdivision technique based on this recent paper</a></li> Separated the node graph functionality into its own crate</a></li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/rust</a></em></p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite is an in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that is free and open source. It will be powered by a node graph compositing engine that supercharges your layer stack, providing a completely non-destructive editing experience.</p> After officially launching the alpha version last month, work has progressed in designing the node graph system. Also, the team has spent this month adding polish to the application and continuing work on more website content.</p> A new editor feature is the Gradient tool which makes it possible to add some colorful pizzazz. This means that finally all vector editing tools are implemented, but some can still use improvement. (Ask how you can help with that!) Additional work has gone into visual changes to help aid in clarity and discoverability for new users.</p> Check out the new website</a>, try the Graphite editor</a> right now in your browser, star on GitHub</a>, follow on Twitter</a>, and join the Discord</a> to chat or get involved!</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> vach</a> #</a> </h3> vach</a> is an archiving file format developed from the ground up for games and other real-time applications by @zeskeertwee</a> and @sokorototo</a>. It is written in pure Rust.</p> Its primary objectives (in no particular order) are:</p> Have a simple, yet complete API.</li> Fine control over each individual entry in an archive, i.e. neighbouring entries can have vastly different compression schemes.</li> Support compression (with multiple compression schemes), encryption, and signatures for data authentication</li> Efficient fetching of data by avoiding unnecessary traversal of the file. Once a file is parsed, locations of every entry are known to the loader.</li> Be as compact as possible - the smallest valid archive is only 13 bytes.</li> Each entry has some metadata attached to it - this is implemented using bitflags and up to 8 bits are free to the user.</li> Has multithreaded implementations of both the loader and the writer.</li> </ul> A CLI</a> is allowing one to use vach as a general-purpose archive format. The CLI is fully multithreaded, allowing for insane un/packing speeds.</p> Feel free to drop into the repo</a> and open an issue, pull request, or drop a star 🌟. It helps maintain momentum in the project.</p> Sparsey 0.7 #</a> </h3> </p> Sparsey</a> by @LechintanTudor</a> is a sparse set-based Entity Component System with a beautiful and concise syntax.</p> The biggest change in this release was the removal of component change detection which had a significant impact on performance and memory usage. As a result, Sparsey performs much better in all benchmarks and the codebase is easier to maintain.</p> The systems module received a major overhaul with an improved scheduling algorithm, allowing more systems to run in parallel, and an important usability improvement allowing systems to be added to schedules without having to call .system()</code> on the system functions.</p> Encase</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Encase</a> (docs.rs</a>, crates.io</a>) by @teoxoy</a> is a new library that provides a mechanism to layout data into GPU buffers according to WGSL’s memory layout</a> rules.</p> Features</p> supports all WGSL host-shareable types</a> + wrapper types (&T</code>, &mut T</code>, Box<T></code>, …)</li> extensible by design; most traits can be easily implemented for user-defined types via macros (see design</a>)</li> built-in support for data types from a multitude of crates (enabled via features</a>)</li> covers a wide area of use cases (see examples</a>)</li> </ul> Example</p> use </span>encase::{WgslType, UniformBuffer}; </span> </span>#[</span>derive</span>(WgslType)] </span>struct </span>AffineTransform2D { </span> </span>matrix</span>: glam::Mat2, </span> </span>translate</span>: glam::Vec2 </span>} </span> </span>let</span> transform = AffineTransform2D { </span> matrix: glam::Mat2::</span>IDENTITY</span>, </span> translate: glam::Vec2::</span>ZERO</span>, </span>}; </span> </span>let mut</span> buffer = UniformBuffer::new(Vec::new()); </span>buffer.</span>write</span>(&transform).</span>unwrap</span>(); </span>let</span> byte_buffer = buffer.</span>into_inner</span>(); </span> </span>// write byte_buffer to GPU </span></code></pre> Notan</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The first version of Notan</a> was released. Notan</a> aims to be a simple and portable multimedia layer, designed to make your own multimedia app on top of it without worrying too much about platform-specific code.</p> The main goal is to provide a set of APIs and tools that can be used to create your project ergonomically without enforcing any structure or pattern, always trying to stay out of your way. The idea is that you can use it as a foundation layer or backend for your next app, game engine, or game.</p> This first version comes with windowing, input, and rendering support on MacOS, Linux, Windows, and Web. Behind feature flags, you can use a fast 2D renderer, text rendering, and egui</a> integration.</p> You can try Notan</a> by adding it to your Cargo.toml</code> -> notan = "0.1.0"</code> or checking the online demos</a>.</p> bevy_asset_loader</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_asset_loader</a> by @nikl_me</a> is a Bevy</a> plugin that aims to reduce boilerplate for asset handling in Bevy apps.</p> Last month saw the release of version 0.9</code> which added support for loading asset configurations from .ron</code> files like the one shown above. This allows for resolving asset configurations like their file path or sprite sheet dimensions at run time. The feature is called “dynamic assets” and enables use cases like internationalised assets.</p> @nikl_me</a> wrote a blog post</a> about dynamic assets in bevy_asset_loader</a>. The post outlines the idea of the feature and describes current and planned functionality.</p> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/bevy</a>: “Recommended Bevy/ECS Project Structure/Conventions”</a></li> </ul> </li> /r/rust_gamedev</a>: “Which is a better game engine to start with as a beginner”</a></li> </ul> </li> gamedev wg</a> #121 Rust Gamedev Showcase</a></li> #122 Length of meetups</a></li> #119 Engine benchmark repo</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Fish Fight</a> introduced mod loading.</li> vange-rs</a> published a blog post about using Emscripten with Rust.</li> makiomino.fun</a> introduced a new level-up animation.</li> country-slice</a> added shadows and the ability to adjust wall height.</li> flesh</a> has a new animation for the mid-boss.</li> Rustenstein 3D: Game programming like it’s 1992</a> is an article walking through creating a Wolfenstein-like game in Rust.</li> Making a 3D Super Munchers Clone with Bevy</a> is a video walkthrough of creating a 3D game in Bevy.</li> Vulkan with Rust by example</a> is the latest post in a series about using Vulkan with Rust.</li> Fyrox</a> got assets to hot-reload.</li> Hotham</a> released a video demo of the engine.</li> godot-rust</a> introduced C#-style properties.</li> cosync</a> is a single-threaded executor for deferred async code for games.</li> SPIR-Q v0.5</a> was released after two years of v0.4 maintenance.</li> egui 0.17.0</a> was released, with custom text styles, any-sized fonts, and much more.</li> sparticles-rs</a> is a particle system generator.</li> blender_bevy_toolkit</a> is making process in opening Blender files in Bevy.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> Embark Studios</a> (Stockholm/Hybrid Remote) - Various roles</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #30 - January 2022 Unknown — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 30th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Jobs</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The twelfth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in January. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Flesh #</a> </h3> the second level’s background + new enemy</figcaption> </figure> Flesh</a> by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and an organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> The completed first level, with a mid-boss and main boss.</li> The second level of the game with new enemies.</li> </ul> Rusty Vangers</a> #</a> </h3> Rusty Vangers engine in action within the original game</figcaption> </figure> Rusty Vangers</a> by @kvark</a> is a modern re-implementation of the original Vangers</a> game from the last century. It’s in Rust, and uses GPU and multiple threads heavily.</p> Something incredible has been brewing within the small but dedicated community of the original game. They prototyped a pluggable rendering interface in order to support rendering the game via Rusty Vangers</a> instead of the default CPU-based rasterizer. The plugin is made as a static library sub-crate with a bunch of C-exported functions. The approach worked for the terrain, so the mini working group transitioned to moving more visual features off the old path and into the Rust-based plugin.</p> At the same time, Rusty Vangers</a> engine got a number of important fixes and additions:</p> water is rendered fair as transparent surfaces</li> lighting evaluation on the second layer is fixed</li> dynamic terrain and palette modification is supported</li> custom viewport support</li> can render menu screens, not just the game levels</li> </ul> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle adventure with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics being produced by @masonremaley</a> in a custom Rust engine. It has a demo available on Steam</a>.</p> Latest developments:</p> Making Your Game Go Fast by Asking Windows Nicely</a> was published, discussing Windows-specific performance tweaks in Way of Rhea’s engine</li> Work started on the Snowcrab + Teleporter puzzles, completing nearly all the puzzles in the main game</li> Work began on art for The Professor (pictured left), Shrew, and Hermes</li> Work began on artwork for the Mushroom Biome, and continued on the Hub World</li> The narrative was reworked, and the dialogue system was improved</li> The main menu, pause menu, and option screen UIs were replaced</li> </ul> You can stay up to date with the latest Way of Rhea developments by following it on Steam</a>, signing up for their mailing list</a>, or joining their Discord</a>.</p> Garden of the Centaur</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot of Garden of the Centaur</figcaption> </figure> Garden of the Centaur (GitHub</a>) by @Syn-Nine</a> is an action-puzzle mini game where you navigate a garden maze and steal the Centaur’s gems. Getting caught spells certain doom.</p> The game was created using Syn9’s Rust Mini Game Framework</a> and is part of an open source repository</a> of several mini-games that use this framework.</p> Kataster</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Kataster</a> by @Bobox214</a> is a single-screen space shooter mini-game, using bevy</a> and heron</a> (powered by rapier</a>).</p> Its goal is to be a simple demonstration game for bevy</a>, and provide newcomers another example to look into when they begin their journey with the engine.</p> The latest version includes:</p> Support for bevy</a> 0.6</li> A new shader background to showcase integration with the new renderer.</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A light to keep the night away</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In January, another Veloren Reading Club was recorded</a>! The entity_sync</code> system was refactored to be parallel. This was the largest bottleneck during the last release party, and this fix will allow us to more easily surpass the 200 player mark on the server. Work has been done to improve dagger animations. Sounds for flowing rivers are now more bubbly sounding. Work is happening to get the OpenGL renderer to work with WGPU for Veloren, as the project transitioned to Vulkan, but wants to keep backward compatibility for older GPUs.</p> Skiing and ice skating have gotten to a playable state. The mounts system was overhauled to make it more ergonomic to work with, you can watch a video of that here</a>. Several experimental shaders have been added, along with a “point glow” which help lanterns look better. With these new shaders, swimming underwater is a whole new experience! A tracking issue was created for worldgen issues that will help coordinate direction for some large systems in the future.</p> January’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #152</a>, #153</a>, #154</a>, #155</a>, #156</a>.</p> Not Snake</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Not Snake (GitHub</a>, Itch</a>) by Michael Ramirez</a> is a 3D snake game where you don’t play as the snake.</p> Not Snake is being developed using the Bevy game engine</a>. The first version can be played here</a>. An updated version is now being worked on since the 0.6 release of Bevy</a>.</p> The bulk of the work this month was spent on creating a level editor using the egui</a> and bevy_mod_picking</a> crates to make it easier to add new features/modes to the game.</p> Current features include:</p> Able to create, customize, and delete game entities</li> Multi-select entities for bulk changes</li> Can play-test levels in the editor</li> Camera controls</li> Save/Load levels</li> </ul> More details on the initial editor work and a retrospective of the first version of the game can be read here</a> and a video of the save/load feature can be seen here</a>.</p> Harvest Hero Origins</a> is now available #</a> </h3> </p> Harvest Hero Origins</a> is an Arcade Wave Defense game that has been in development by Gemdrop Games</a> for the past 10 months.</p> It is the studio’s first commercial release, developed in the Emerald</a> game engine.</p> The game is available now on Windows and Linux for $2.99 with a launch discount of 10%!</p> The studio plans to provide free updates for a period of time, before moving on to focusing 100% of their efforts on the sequel, Harvest Hero.</p> Features</p> Story Mode</li> Survival Mode Competitive Leaderboards</li> Infinitely Replayable</li> 3 unique heroes</li> 3 skins per hero</li> Local co-op (online through steam remote play)</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Hydrofoil Generation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> (Steam</a>, Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that will put you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing.</p> The last couple of months saw great disappointment for the failed port to WGPU due to unexpected performance losses compared to the old renderer. The game is now back to its original DirectX 11 renderer.</p> February will see the beginning of the private alpha testing program, an exciting opportunity to gather the first feedback about boat handling and controls before diving into one of the most challenging tasks of the game: sailing rules implementation.</p> Content-wise, Hong Kong will soon join Den Haag as a race location while the racecourse is becoming more and more alive with the addition of spectators boats. The playable foiling catamaran Jx50 is also constantly getting graphical updates and physics tweaks.</p> Hydrofoil Generation is scheduled to release on Steam Early Access in Summer 2022.</p> Country Slice #</a> </h3> </p> Country Slice</a> is @anastasiaopara</a>’s hobby project, where users can draw a small procedurally assembled scene.</p> The newest addition is an erase brush and an ability to continue existing walls.</p> @anastasiaopara</a> also shared a Twitter thread</a> about doing procedural generation in Houdini vs Rust & OpenGL.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot game engine.</p> The start of 2022 is a good opportunity to showcase a few godot-rust games in development. More info is available in the book</a>.</p> </p> Using custom builds of the Godot engine involved quite a bit of ceremony in the past: manual CLI invocations, code replacement, and re-wiring of the gdnative-bindings</code> subcrate. The approach has been fundamentally overhauled, and is now as simple as specifying the crate feature custom-godot</code> (#833</a>). The library will automatically look for a godot</code> executable in the system path (or a GODOT_BIN</code> environment variable), and regenerate api.json</code>. This makes using older or module-extended Godot versions a breeze.</p> The latest master</code> branch has now been updated to support Godot 3.4 out of the box (#829</a>).</p> Upcoming godot-rust version 0.10 seems to be finally on the horizon, with only a handful of tasks left (#842</a>). A changelog since v0.9.3 is now available. The continuous stream of small improvements here and there has led to a sizable list! (#845</a>)</p> Rusty Engine 4.0</a> #</a> </h3> The updated collider visualization (white outlines) in Rusty Engine 4.0</figcaption> </figure> Rusty Engine</a> by Nathan Stocks</a> is a game engine built on top of Bevy for people who are learning Rust.</p> Notable new features in Version 4.0 include: no need for an init!</code> macro, new collider visualization, text can now be rotated and scaled, and an updated online tutorial</a>. See the changelog for 4.0</a> for the full details. On the back end Bevy has been updated to 0.6 and bevy_prototype_debug_lines</code> was replaced with bevy_prototype_lyon</code>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, twitter</a></em></p> Bevy v0.6</a> #</a> </h3> The Lumberyard Bistro scene rendered in the new Bevy Renderer.</figcaption> </figure> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> Bevy 0.6 was a massive community effort. You can check out the full release blog post here</a>, but here are some highlights:</p> A brand new modern renderer that is prettier, faster, and simpler to extend</a></li> Directional and point light shadows</a></li> Clustered forward rendering</a></li> Frustum culling</a></li> Significantly faster sprite rendering with less boilerplate</a></li> Native WebGL2 support</a>. You can test this out by running the Bevy Examples in your browser</a>!</li> High level custom Materials</a></li> More powerful shaders: preprocessors, imports, WGSL support</a></li> Bevy ECS ergonomics and performance improvements. No more .system()!</a></li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> three-d</code> 0.10</a> #</a> </h3> Environment lighting example</figcaption> </figure> three-d</code></a> is a 2D/3D renderer targeting both desktop and web that aims to make rendering simple and give the user full control.</p> three-d</code> 0.10 has been released featuring:</p> Environment lighting (image-based lighting)</li> HDR environment map</li> Headless graphics context</li> Tangent vertex attributes</li> Texture transform</li> Cube map render targets</li> f16 and u16 texture data types</li> and more…</li> </ul> See this Twitter thread</a> for videos.</p> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. This month, an alpha version of Tetra 0.7 was released, featuring:</p> Support for a wider variety of texture formats</li> A more powerful API for blending</li> Lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and improvements</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Alongside the release of this version, it was also announced</a> that Tetra is no longer under active development. The developer has written a retrospective blog post</a>, explaining what went well and what didn’t go so well with the engine’s development, and giving some rationale for why they decided to move on from the project.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Making Your Game Go Fast by Asking Windows Nicely</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Mason Remaley</a> published a blog post</a> covering Windows-specific performance tweaks employed in his Rust game engine:</p> Normally, to make your software go faster, it has to do less work. This usually involves improving your algorithms, skipping work the user won’t see, factoring your target hardware into the design process, or modifying your game’s content.</p> We’re not talking about any of that today. This post is a list of ways to make your game run faster on Windows–without making any major changes to your game’s content, code, or algorithms.</p> </blockquote> You can read more here</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Refactoring from Legion to Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> Justin Hurstwright</a> published a blog post</a> describing how to migrate from Legion ECS into Bevy ECS without giving up on the other frameworks one might rely on.</p> You can read it here</a>.</p> Writing an AH Scanner in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Trimoq (GitHub</a>, Twitter</a>) wrote a blog post</a> about writing a game client for a popular MMORPG. It focuses on some negative parts of Rust and its ecosystem. There are three key takeaways from this post:</p> Stay away from low-level libraries if you are not aware of how deep the rabbit hole goes.</li> Evaluate the library ecosystem of Rust thoroughly before using it for a project that requires somewhat exotic functionality.</li> Rust forces you to care about the details, regardless of whether you want to.</li> </ul> The remainder of the article goes into depth on these three points.</p> Bevy Cheatbook</a> #</a> </h3> This month, Bevy Cheatbook</a> focused on refactors to improve navigation, usefulness, and make maintenance easier going forward.</p> Updated for Bevy 0.6</li> Chapters reorganized to present content better and make things easy to find</li> New page summarizing all the useful built-in types in Bevy</a></li> Better info about working with WASM</a></li> Info about cross-compiling for Windows from Linux</a></li> Internal refactor for easy management of links, easier to avoid old/stale links</li> Can link everything from everywhere! All pages are now full of links!</li> All mentions of Bevy APIs now link to docs.rs</a></li> </ul> The next priority for the project is to provide at least some coverage of the areas of Bevy still not in the book: 2D, 3D, UI, scenes, rendering…</p> If you’d like to support the project, donate to the author via GitHub Sponsors</a>. Follow @IyesGames on Twitter</a> for updates.</p> Extreme Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Extreme Bevy is a tutorial series</a> on how to create a low-latency P2P web game.</p> It covers how to:</p> Use Matchbox</a> for setting up P2P connections using WebRTC data channels.</li> Implement rollback using GGRS</a></li> And using Bevy</a> with the above</li> </ul> The game itself is also live here</a>, and its source is on GitHub</a></p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Nodus</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Nodus (GitHub</a>) by @r4gus</a> is a digital circuit simulator built with the Bevy game engine. The project is in an early stage of development but, most of the basic features are implemented. That includes:</p> Insert components like gates, switches, clocks, or light bulbs into the world using a radial context menu.</li> Build digital circuits by connecting inputs and outputs of components with each other.</li> Save projects to a .ron file and reload them later.</li> </ul> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that is free and open source. It is powered by a node graph compositing engine that supercharges your layer stack, providing a completely non-destructive editing experience.</p> The team is proud and excited to announce Graphite alpha, the minimum viable product release for a web-based vector graphics editor. After one year in pre-alpha development by Rust Gamedev community members, this first milestone of alpha is here.</p> Graphite alpha launches Saturday, February 12</strong> together with a new project website</a>.</p> Work now commences on the second alpha milestone, focused on building the node graph system and vector render engine. You are invited to join the team and help make this exciting endeavor possible. Join the Discord</a> and get involved!</p> Try Graphite right now in your browser</a> and please star the GitHub repo</a> to build momentum. Thank you for helping reach 1000⭐!</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> leafwing-input-manager #</a> </h3> leafwing-input-manager</code> (GitHub</a>, crates.io</a>) by @alice-i-cecile</a> is an ergonomic, featureful and fully documented Bevy library for expressively abstracting over user input.</p> Supports local multiplayer, enables input rebinding, integrates with bevy_ui</code>, and handles chords!</p> rafx</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Sci-fi base demo scene, watch TAA demo on youtube</a>!</figcaption> </figure> Rafx</a> is a multi-backend renderer that optionally integrates with the distill</a> asset pipeline.</p> Since the previous rafx update in this newsletter (6 months ago!), many new features have been introduced to improve performance and image quality. The main rendering pipeline has also been split into “modern” and “basic” pipelines. Unlike the basic pipeline which focuses on wide compatibility, the modern pipeline uses forward-clustered lighting and handles hundreds of shadow-casting lights. It is targeting compute shaders and will be adding bindless and GPU-driven rendering soon.</p> Since the last update, the modern pipeline adds GPU-accelerated light binning, SSAO, shadow map atlasing/caching, TAA with sharpening, and auto-exposure/HDR. In addition, both modern and basic pipelines now support transparency. A video demonstrating TAA</a> (temporal anti-aliasing) is available on youtube.</p> With these performance improvements, rafx</code> is now able to render challenging scenes with photorealistic style at 60FPS/1440p on modern, mid-range GPUs.</p> erupt-bootstrap</a> #</a> </h3> </p> erupt-bootstrap</a> by @Friz64</a> is a Vulkan Bootstrapping library for Rust.</p> When starting a new Vulkan project, there’s always the struggle of writing a whole bunch of boilerplate code in order to, e.g., get your first triangle on the screen. You have to create a VkInstance</code>, with the validation layers set up and working for development. Then select the best suited VkPhysicalDevice</code> for your app’s requirements. Use that to create a VkDevice</code> with the appropriate queue families chosen. Oh, and after that, you need to struggle with managing and resizing a Vulkan swapchain.</p> That’s no fun — and this is where erupt-bootstrap</a> comes in. It aims to abstract over all of this to get you up and running in no time. It’s inspired by the excellent vk-bootstrap</a> library for C++.</p> Edict</a> #</a> </h3> Edict</a> is a new archetype-based ECS implementation by @zakarumych</a>.</p> The novel feature of Edict</a> is entity ownership implemented via reference counting. This optional feature allows creating owned kind of Entity</code> “reference”, that ensures the entity is alive and despawns it on drop. Storing owning Entity</code> in the component of another entity creates ownership relation between those entities. Even though Entity</code> is an owning reference, components of the entity are can be queried from World</code> as usual. Shared ownership is also available.</p> Optimized for both high density World</code>s with thousands of entities and also for World</code>s with a lower number of entities spread among many archetypes. Edict</a> is aimed at a wide range of game genres and use cases outside of games.</p> Built-in change detection with epochs allows systems to query for components that were updated since the last run of that query, or since any other epoch as defined by Tracks</code> argument. This opens the possibility to have multiple POV on changes even in a single system. For example, server-side netcode can track changes individually for each client and query for changes since the last ACK. Edict</a> optimizes iteration significantly when entities with modified components are queried.</p> Although ECS abbreviation implies, Edict</a> does not come with predefined System</code> trait and systems scheduler. We can call it ECQ (Entity-Component-Query) as an alternative to ECS.</p> Edict</a> is added to ecs_bench_suite</a> so anyone can compare performance in some trivial examples with other ECS.</p> Development focus for February is making more public API, including unsafe parts, to allow writing custom queries, implement schedulers with parallel execution, etc.</p> bevy_backroll v0.3</a> #</a> </h3> Backroll</a> is a 100% type-safe native Rust implementation of the GGPO</a> rollback netcode library. The core library has gone through superficial updates, but the Bevy plugin</a> has been massively overhauled. This update significantly improves the ergonomics of setting up rollback netcode for your game (no more ugly turbofishes! No more generic type parameter config type!), provides an automatic way of saving and loading Bevy components and resources, and fully parallelizes the saving and loading of game state when a rollback occurs.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Bevy Smud</a> #</a> </h3> A bevy drawn with Bevy Smud</figcaption> </figure> Bevy Smud</a> is a new Bevy</a> plugin for drawing 2D shapes using signed distance fields.</p> It contains ports of all of Inigo Quilez’ 2D SDF primitives</a>, and allows easily composing said primitives together.</p> Shapes that share the same SDF and fill are automatically instanced, as shown in the demo video of 100k birds</a></p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Molecoole</a> has some new gameplay footage from #screenshotsaturday.</li> Wordlet</a> is a command-line clone of Wordle, written in Rust.</li> BITGUN</a> is looking for beta testers.</li> System Fault</a> is now in early access.</li> Lantern</a> is a cute adventure game about a cat taking a nap.</li> Fish Fight</a> has a new devlog about their past, present and future.</li> Starframe</a> has a new devlog about rope physics.</li> Cake Thieves</a> is a strategy game about protecting cake from ants… with cannons!</li> Idu</a> has released a new demo.</li> Sugarcane</a> is a minigame-focused Minecraft server written in Rust.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: ‘How Bevy Uses Traits For Labelling</a>’ explains a cool usage of traits in the Bevy game engine.</li> ‘Writing a Tiny Rust Game Engine For Web</a>’ shows how to write a game engine with zero Rust dependencies.</li> ‘Extending States in Bevy</a>’ shows how to make Bevy’s State</code> system more powerful.</li> ‘Mastering Plugin Loadings in Bevy’ (part 1</a> and part 2</a>) is an overview of how Bevy plugins work, and how to write your own.</li> ‘Bevy Stages or The Frames Lifecycle</a>’ is an overview of the Bevy engine’s game loop lifecycle.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: Fyrox 0.24</a> (formerly known as rg3d) has been released.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: Fun Notation</a> is a Bevy-based guitar tab viewer.</li> gbrs</a> is a Rust Game Boy emulator.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: Dimforge</a> posted a retrospective on their 2021, and goals for 2022.</li> poll-promise</a> is a crate for polling asynchronous operations.</li> ezinput 0.2</a> was released, providing easier input handling for Bevy.</li> bevy_asset_loader</a> had several new releases.</li> bevy_game_template</a> was published.</li> big-brain 0.10</a> (a library for Utility AI in Bevy) was released.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust</a>: “Rust alternative for PyGame?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help build the new node graph and 2D rendering systems.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> Jobs #</a> </h2> Embark Studios</a> (Stockholm/Hybrid Remote) - Various roles</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #29 - December 2021 Unknown — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 29th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The thirteenth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in December. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Tet-Rust</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot of Tet-Rust</figcaption> </figure> Tet-Rust (GitHub</a>) by @Syn-Nine</a> is a mini game based on the famous falling puzzle block game.</p> The game was created to exercise Syn9’s Rust Mini Game Framework</a> and is part of an open source repository</a> of several mini-games that use this framework.</p> The Beast of Monte Carlo #</a> </h3> Screenshot of The Beast of Monte Carlo</figcaption> </figure> The Beast of Monte Carlo by @Syn-Nine</a> is a mini role-playing game in development to help work out new features for Syn9’s Rust Mini Game Framework</a>.</p> This month’s progress included:</p> prototyping tilemap and frame-based animation to make a simple walkaround engine</li> creating a general purpose maze generation algorithm and porting random world map generation from C++ to Rust</li> creating new sprite artwork and animation, as well as mocking up the battle system</li> </ul> The gameplay and art are influenced by games such as Final Fantasy VI and Lufia II with a heavy focus on procedural content generation.</p> 10x Sprint Master</a> #</a> </h3> </p> 10x Sprint Master</a> (GitHub</a>) by @E_net4</a> is a simulation game where you play the role of a software development lead engineer. Write tasks, coordinate a team of developers, fix bugs and manage feature delivery, while trying to mitigate the torments of technical debt.</p> The game was submitted to GitHub Game Off 2021, and was written using Yew</a> with graphics done in pure HTML and CSS.</p> The author also published a blog post on Dev.to</a> about the game’s technical and social dimensions.</p> Molecoole</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Molecoole is a top-down shooter roguelike where you build your character from different atoms. Each atom has a unique ability providing tons of variety between playthroughs. It’s made using the Bevy Engine</a>.</p> This month Molecoole devs focused on adding more variety</a>: different enemies, atoms etc…</p> They also launched their first teaser video</a>, it gives us a glimpse into 3 different bioms, bosses, enemies and more.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A peaceful winter night</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In December, Veloren ran a Christmas week. From the 20th to the 30th of December, there were several winter-themed changes on the main server. Snow was everywhere, decorations were added to locations, and NPC wore Christmas hats! The 150th Veloren blog was also released in December. An experimental new section of the newsletter gives video recaps of the last week’s blog post.</p> The ability to edit the appearance of characters was added to the game. Work was done on armor tooltips to make them more clear. Skiing is in the works, with some work to still be done on animations and physics. New images were created for item displays, which are now stored as .vox files.</p> December’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #149</a>, #150</a>, #151</a>, #152</a>.</p> Country Slice #</a> </h3> </p> Country Slice</a> is @anastasiaopara</a>’s hobby project, where users can draw a small scene, and their input is amplified with real-time procedural generation.</p> This month’s biggest update was adding an ability to draw paths that, if intersected with walls, automatically generate arches. You can read a Twitter thread that briefly covers how it was optimized to run in 1-2ms</a>.</p> Fish Fight #</a> </h3> </p> Fish Fight (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, website</a>)</p> Fish Fight is a tactical 2D shooter, played by up to 4 players. It is also a 2D-pixels-platformer game engine optimized for modding.</p> In-game level editor was released</a>, along with an editor tutorial</a>. A retrospective devlog was posted: Fish Fight’s past, present, and future</a>.</p> BITGUN</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> BITGUN (Steam</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>) by @LogLogGames</a> is an action roguelike zombie shooter with lots of blood. The game is built using Godot and Rust (via godot-rust</a>).</p> They are now heading to a public playtest via Steam and you can signup here</a> to play the game for free in exchange for a short feedback. They recently added cutscenes</a>, which are telling a bit more story about this post-apocalyptic zombie world where people are scared of getting infected and supplies are rare. They also launched a project Name your zombie</a> where you can get your Twitter or TikTok username as a name of a random zombie and a tombstone in the game!</p> vange-rs WebAssembly Port</a> #</a> </h3> </p> vange.rs</a> is the project of re-implementing the Vangers</a> game (from 1998) in Rust using modern development practices, parallel computations, and GPU.</p> This month @caiiiycuk</a> ported it to the “wasm32-unknown-emscripten” target via wgpu’s GLES3 backend and posted an article</a> about the process and observations.</p> The web version of vange-rs can be played online here</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Bevy Combat</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Bevy Combat</a> by @ElliotB256</a> is a WIP sci-fi battle simulation written using Bevy.</p> Some of the current features:</p> Combat and targetting AI;</li> Simple weapons (instant hit), damage, health, shields, and mortality;</li> Death animations and explosions;</li> </ul> Check out the web demo here</a>.</p> Rust City #</a> </h3> </p> @oliviff</a> is working on a city building game. Some of this month’s updates</a>:</p> Basic zoning placeholders when building roads.</li> Advanced zoning for residential, commercial, and industry.</li> Populating zoned areas based on demand.</li> Buildings don’t function unless they have utilities.</li> Finances and transactions</li> Population tracker.</li> pipes required for a house to receive water.</li> cables required for a house to receive electricity.</li> build mode for pipes and cables.</li> UI to toggle different layers visibility.</li> </ul> Antorum Isles (pka Antorum Online) #</a> </h3> </p> Antorum Isles</a> is a micro-multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game server is written in Rust, and the client is Unity-based.</p> Main highlights of the latest @dooskington’s devlog</a>:</p> Now you can download the client and play the game</a>!</li> The project is mostly finished, it won’t receive more major new features or updates.</li> The editor and the dedicated server binaries should be released soon.</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Rusty Engine 3.0</a> #</a> </h3> {{ image_figure( alt=“An example Rusty Engine game” src=“rusty_engine3.png” caption=“The “Road Race” game prototype running under Rusty Engine 3.0“) }}</p> Rusty Engine</a> by Nathan Stocks</a> is a game engine built on top of Bevy for people who are learning Rust.</p> Version 3.0 is a large release with many breaking changes. Notable new features include: a full tutorial</a>, custom asset loading (sprites, sounds, fonts), customizable game state, an interactive collider creator, and much more. See the changelog for 3.0</a> for the full details.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, twitter</a></em></p> Pyxel</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Pyxel</a> (Discord</a>) by @kitao</a> is a retro game engine (inspired by PICO-8</a> and TIC-80</a>) that uses Python for scripting:</p> 16 color palette,</li> 256x256 sized 3 image banks,</li> 256x256 sized 8 tilemaps,</li> 4 channels with 64 definable sounds,</li> 8 peces of music which can combine arbitrary sounds,</li> Image and sound editor,</li> Keyboard, mouse, and gamepad inputs.</li> </ul> Check out the official</a> and user-provided</a> examples.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Rust SFML Windows Setup</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @TheFern2</a> published a video tutorial</a> on how to set up Rust with SFML bindings</a> for Windows users (using MSVC C++).</p> rust-sfml’s wiki page with instructions for Windows</a> was also updated.</p> Rust and Unity Game Development</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @TanTanDev</a> published a video</a> about the process of adding Rust support for the Unity game engine.</p> Is it really possible? YES it is! I managed to make a game 100% coded in Rust, but using Unity as editor and runtime. This has to be one of my craziest projects yet!</p> I utilized a library called Bevy game framework/engine, to handle the gameplay programming. Utilizing Bevy systems I was able to hide the FFI code from the gameplay code.</p> </blockquote> The resulting source code can be found here</a>.</p> Tetris Livecoding</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> “Tetris in Rust from scratch”</a> is a series of livestreams by Over Developed</a> that showcases beginner/intermediate Rust concepts using Tetris as an example. Episodes:</p> In the first episode</a>, we lay the groundwork for the project, creating the overall structure and some of the primitives that will be used by the game engine.</li> In the second episode</a>, we flesh out some more behavior in the game engine, and fix some bugs that were introduced in the previous session.</li> In the third episode</a>, we start writing the interface code for rendering the GUI.</li> In this episode</a>, we connect the game logic to the GUI and finally see some interactivity.</li> </ul> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Blackjack</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Blackjack</a> by @setzer22 is a new procedural modeling application made in Rust, using rend3, wgpu and egui. It follows the steps of applications like Houdini, or Blender’s geometry nodes project and provides a node-based environment to compose procedural recipes to create 3d models.</p> The project was recently announced, and an official open-source release is planned during the following month. Here’s a highlight of the upcoming features:</p> A node-based editor to compose operations like 3d math, vertex/edge/face selections and mesh edit operations.</li> Several polygon edit operations like bevel, chamfer and extrude.</li> Viewport display with support for displaying primitive ids and triangle half-edge winding.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/rust</a></em></p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-development vector and raster graphics editor built on a non-destructive node-based workflow.</p> The completion of Sprint 10</a> wraps up a productive month of features and stability improvements. Documents persist page reloads via IndexedDB browser storage. The layer panel got some love. Vector anchor points can be dragged (beginnings of the Path/Pen Tools). Per-tool footer bar hints teach possible user input actions. And a big code cleanup/refactor took place behind the scenes.</p> Additional new features and QoL improvements: artboards, panel resizing, the Navigate Tool, outline view mode, support for touch input and non-Latin keyboards, an About Graphite</em> dialog with version info, plus dozens of bugs and crashes were resolved.</p> Try it right now in your browser.</a> Graphite is making steady progress towards becoming a non-destructive, procedural graphics editor suitable for replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. Join the Discord</a> and get involved!</p> Fun Notation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fun Notation</a> (GitHub</a>) is @yjpark</a>’s experimentation on musical notations built on top of Bevy. The idea is to help with music visualization, practicing, and provide a nicer way to show scores or tabs.</p> Some of current ideas tried in the app:</p> colors for notes (based on the relative notation),</li> color and shapes for chords,</li> guitar tabs to show both pitch and durations for notes.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> assets_manager</a> #</a> </h3> assets_manager</a> provides a high-level API to load and cache external resources with a focus on performance and hot-reloading.</p> In addition to built-in support for new formats like WebP, glTF and fonts, version 0.7</a> brings a few quality of life improvements. Additionally, hot-reloading is now supported for custom asset sources.</p> These features led to a new crate: ggez-assets_manager</a>, whose goal is to ease use of assets_manager with ggez engine!</p> wgpu</a>-0.12 release #</a> </h3> experimental pathtracer on wgpu from @llamajestic</figcaption> </figure> The team concluded 2021 with the release of wgpu-0.12 and naga-0.8. Details can be found on the gfx-rs blog</a> and wgpu reddit discussion</a>. Lots of fixes are shipped alongside one much-awaited improvement: the error messages from validating shaders were finally made readable:</p> ┌─ interpolate.wgsl:</span>21</span>:</span>25 </span> │ </span>21</span> │ out.linear_centroid = vec2<</span>f32</span>>(</span>64.0</span>, </span>125.0</span>, </span>1.0</span>); </span> │ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ naga::Expression [</span>16</span>] </span> </span>Entry point vert_main at Vertex is invalid: </span> Expression [</span>16</span>] is invalid </span> Composing expects </span>2</span> components but </span>3</span> were given </span></code></pre> Pixels</a> 0.9.0 👾 #</a> </h3> Pixels</a> is a tiny hardware-accelerated pixel frame buffer. It is popularly used for emulators, software renderers, 2D pixel art games, and desktop utilities.</p> Version 0.9.0 brings a few breaking changes. Notably, wgpu was updated to 0.12 and it now requires Edition 2021. Full details are available in the release notes</a>.</p> bevy_proto</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_proto</a> is a small plugin for the Bevy</a> game engine, allowing entities to be defined in their own config files (called “Prototypes”). These config files are then read into a resource that you can use to spawn their pre-defined entities from within any Bevy system.</p> The recently released 0.2 version, adds a templating feature (as suggested by @chrisburnor</a>). This new feature allows any entity prototype to define one or more templates, from which it will inherit additional component definitions (including those from a template’s templates).</p> This makes defining many entities with common functionality (such as enemy types or weapons) much easier and reduces code duplication for an overall better experience.</p> For more info, check out the original PR</a>, or explore the assets</a> and examples</a> folders.</p> bevy-remote-devtools</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy-remote-devtools</a> is a plugin and UI application for the Bevy</a> game engine allowing to view entities and their components, asset resources like meshes, events from the tracing</a> crate and system timings using a very basic profiler. It also supports all of that over network so debugging can be done from any remote machine and vice versa.</p> The first release of the 0.1 version comes with basic support for the aforementioned features. It contains a plugin for Bevy</a> that will extend you application with a small REST HTTP API that can be consumed by the included Tauri</a> based UI application.</p> kajiya</a> #</a> </h3> </p> kajiya</a> (Discord</a>) by @h3r2tic</a> is an experimental real-time global illumination renderer made with Vulkan, and utilizing rust-gpu</a>.</p> Last month the project was released into open source along with a tiny sample: Cornell McRay t’Racing</a>.</p> The renderer is permissively licensed, and includes several cutting-edge algorithms, including ray-traced effects. It isn’t built to ship games (yet), but serves as a convenient platform for learning and research.</p> Discussions: medium</a>, /r/rust</a>, twitter (kajiya)</a>, twitter (cornell-mcray)</a>.</em></p> Shard</a> #</a> </h3> Shard</a> by @HindrikStegenga is an Archetype-based Entity Component System.</p> Version 0.2 is a complete rewrite of the ECS, with the main new feature that it supports no_std environments.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> rapid-qoi</a> #</a> </h3> rapid-qoi</a> by @zakarumych is an implementation of QOI format written in Rust.</p> QOI format can fit nicely as a replacement for PNG and other common loseless image formats for game engines given its simplicity and blazing fast encoding and decoding.</p> rapid-qoi</a> has a simple API, zero unsafe, zero dependencies, fast build times and high performance. It is compatible with finalized QOI spec published in December.</p> ash</a> v0.34 #</a> </h3> ash</a> is lightweight wrapper around Vulkan.</p> This month v0.34 was released</a>. Highlights include:</p> Now ash defaults to linking Vulkan directly, which saves the libloading dep and is more idiomatic for apps that don’t have a fallback.</li> Debug impls can be disabled for a faster build.</li> More extensions and lots of miscellaneous API cleanup.</li> </ul> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: BENDYWORM</a> now runs on Linux natively</a>.</li> Rust Shooter progress report</a>: enemies are proper player entities with rudimentry AI now, new indoor environment.</li> aous</a> is a Game Off’21 game about the survival of a mutating ant colony.</li> Embark’s Arc Raiders game is using some Rust on the server side</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: @DmitryNStepanov</a> did a few more rg3d</a> live-coding streams, here’re the recordings: second</a>, third</a>, fourth</a>.</li> godot-rust was upgraded</a> to support Godot 3.4 out of the box, so the manual api.json is not needed.</li> Oxygengine</a> v0.26 brings: different image types (2D, 2D Array, 3D), samplers instead of textures, render target fixes, and also an RPG template</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: bevy_midi</a> v0.2 is now using crossbeam-channels meaning it is more responsive.</li> egui 0.16</a> brings: context menus, rich text (colors, underline, etc) in all widgets, bar charts and box plots.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev</a>: “Should I use a sync/await, threads, or both to make a game server?”</a></li> “Rust server for Unreal Engine Client? Is this a bad idea for any reason?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help reach the 0.1 Alpha release.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #28 - November 2021 Unknown — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 28th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The eleventh Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in November. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on December 11th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Flesh #</a> </h3> The melee weapon in action</figcaption> </figure> Flesh</a> by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and an organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> Support different types of ships that players can choose.</li> Add a melee weapon.</li> </ul> One-Click Ninja</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot of One-Click Ninja</figcaption> </figure> One-Click Ninja is a rhythm game made in 10 days for 1-Button Jam 2021</a>, written in Rust using the Bevy</a> engine.</p> The source is available MIT licensed on GitHub</a>, and you can play in your browser on itch.io</a>.</p> Fish Fight: The Prequel</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Fish Fight is a fast-paced 2D brawler game, played by 1-4 players online or on a shared screen, built with macroquad</a> game engine.</p> This month it got a trailer, and the game is now available to wishlist on Steam</a>!</p> BITGUN</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> BITGUN (Steam</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>) by @LogLogGames</a> is an action roguelike zombie shooter with lots of blood. The game is built using Godot and Rust (via godot-rust</a>).</p> They recently implemented a mission system, where you can select one of three types of missions</a> to go to from the central camp. One is to defend supplies from a horde of zombies, the second is to search a facility for some object or clear all the zombies and the last one is to fight your way through a tunnel full of spiders and other enemies! They also worked on a tutorial</a>.</p> Halloween Mahjong Solitaire</a> #</a> </h3> Screenshot of Halloween Mahjong Solitaire</figcaption> </figure> Halloween Mahjong Solitaire (GitHub</a>) by @Syn-Nine</a> is a game created for the Game Developers Refuge 4x4x4 Challenge</a> in October 2021.</p> The challenge was to create a Halloween-themed game based on four emojis. In this case the chosen emoji combination was: skull_and_crossbones, bat, game_die, and shinto_shrine (☠️ 🦇 🎲 ⛩️).</p> The game is part of an open source repository of several mini-games that use Syn9’s Rust Mini Game Framework</a>.</p> Country Slice #</a> </h3> </p> Country Slice</a> is @anastasiaopara</a>’s hobby project, where users can draw a small scene, and their input is amplified with real-time procedural geometry generation.</p> Country Slice uses Bevy Engine</a> for entity management, and has recently been ported to OpenGL</a> (using gl-rs</a> and glutin</a>). It is being developed openly on GitHub</a>.</p> You can follow the development of Country Slice on Twitter</a>.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A merchant paused in their travels</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In November, Veloren started a new initiative to help new developers learn more about the codebase; the Veloren Reading Club. You can watch the first</a> and second</a> sessions now. Hats were merged, and a major rewrite of the server-hosting section of the book happened. New textures were made for item drops. Some concept art was created for what massive cities could look like. Dynamic weather was added, and you can watch that in action</a>.</p> Experience sharing went through a large overhaul to evenly distribute EXP gained across groups. The difficulty of dungeons was adjusted to be more balanced for new players. Persistence was added to skills, and measures were put in place to help with future migrations to new skill trees. Work was done on site2, the system that is used to generate structures procedurally. This will help make the variance more dynamic by adding more parameters that can be adjusted. In December, Veloren will release 0.12, hopefully with some holiday spirit!</p> November’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #144</a>, #145</a>, #146</a>, #147</a>, #148</a>.</p> BENDYWORM</a> #</a> </h3> Watch out! The entire world bends around you!</figcaption> </figure> BENDYWORM (GitHub</a>, Twitter</a>) by @bauxitedev</a> is a platformer with a twist: the entire world bends and twists around you as your progress through the level. Why? Because you’re inside of a gigantic worm, and worms are bendy.</p> The game was made for GitHub Game Off 2021, and uses godot-rust</code> behind the scenes.</p> The game is available for free on itch.io</a>, and the source code is available on GitHub</a>. (Windows only for now, Linux build available soon)</p> Discussions: /r/rust/</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Molecoole</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Molecoole is a top-down shooter roguelike where you build your character from different atoms. Each atom has a unique ability to provide tons of variety between playthroughs. It’s made using the Bevy Engine</a>.</p> This month Molecoole launched its Steam page</a>! They also added new weapons</a> and new bosses</a>.</p> In December their main focus will be on audio and polishing the game.</p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation</a> (Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that will put you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing.</p> November was dedicated to the launch of the Steam Store</a> page and associated trailer</a> showcasing Hydrofoil Generation’s custom Rust engine in motion for the first time. Constant tweaks to the boat behavior and addition of gameplay features are ongoing as the planned Q2 2022 Steam Early Access release gets closer and closer.</p> December 2021 will see an attempt to port the rendering backend of the game from DirectX 11 to WGPU to widen the number of platforms reachable with a particular interest in the Steam Deck that seems to offer the perfect controller layout for such a demanding simulation as Hydrofoil Generation.</p> You will be able to follow the progress of the port Mondays and Fridays on Twitch</a>.</p> Idu #</a> </h3> </p> Idu (Discord</a>) by @logicsoup</a> and @epcc10</a> is an upcoming game centered around growing realistic plants.</p> In November, a new major update was released that overhauled the automatic watering system. In addition, an automatic stair builder and a grass-cutting tool was added to reduce the tediousness of these common tasks.</p> A free playable alpha demo is available at Idu’s Discord server’s demo-download channel</a>! Updates are posted to their Youtube</a> as well.</p> Combine&Conquer</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Combine&Conquer by Martin Buck</a> is a WIP strategy game about automation similar to Satisfactory or Factorio.</p> This month Martin finished writing a detailed devlog</a> for the project from the first commit up until now. A few dozen short posts cover various topics including simulation of arms and conveyor belts with moving items, blueprints, testing, rendering, save and load, tech tree and research, and multiplayer.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> PaddlePunks</a> #</a> </h3> One of the characters can spend super meter to rewind time, this is strong but pretty situational.</figcaption> </figure> PaddlePunks is a versus tennis game by Felix Windström</a> with a diverse cast of characters and playstyles and online play with rollback netcode.</p> Latest developments:</p> Some engine work to improve performance on laptops with integrated GPUs</li> Balance updates to make the skeleton less overbearing</li> Presented the game at Rustfest</a> in an interactive session.</li> </ul> You can download and play the game now on itch.io</a>, or join the Discord</a> to chat with the developer and other players.</p> Shroom Kingdom</a> #</a> </h3> Shroom Kingdom (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an upcoming play-to-earn video game built with web technologies running on the NEAR Blockchain</a>. It is a 2D platformer, where players can also build their own levels and share them with others.</p> Currently, a prototype of the game is in development. The game is written with the Bevy game engine</a> and the Rapier physics engine</a> and is compiled to WebAssembly. The prototype is still very basic, but you can already place and remove blocks and have a feeling about the physics recreation of the original games.</p> In the past months, there also has been the SHRM token launch and a token airdrop</a> for NEAR early adopters. The Shroom Kingdom DAO</a> is looking for people, who want to become involved and get paid with their very own token.</p> To onboard new users to blockchain gaming, a linkdrop campaign</a> is currently in development, where people can claim a small amount of NEAR token to create their own wallet.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Tetra</a> 0.6.7 #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. This month, version 0.6.7 was released, featuring:</p> Updates to the gamepad backend, adding rumble support for a much wider variety of controllers (including DualShock 4s)</li> Various bugfixes and docs improvements</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Additionally, development has begun on version 0.7 - check out the planned features and changes</a>, and feel free to suggest more!</p> Oxygengine</a> v0.24.0 #</a> </h3> </p> The hottest HTML5 + WASM game engine for games written in Rust with web-sys.</p> @PsichiX</a>, the creator of Oxygengine</a>, spent the last two months on making:</p> First few chapters of the book explaining how Oxygengine works in: Oxygengine Essentials Book</a>.</li> New hardware-accelerated renderer based on Material Graphs (to allow making faster and better quality game visuals - more about that in Material Graph based rendering</a> chapter).</li> New Overworld game module (which aims to provide all essential features needed by RPG game developers, to let them focus on making an actual game).</li> New AI feature module (WIP) that integrates Emergent AI</a> crate with the engine.</li> Plugin-based asset pipeline as well as support for LDtk software projects.</li> </ul> All of these changes mark the beginning of stabilizing phase of the engine. The API more or less won’t change much - now the focus is put entirely on the features that will push progress towards the Ignite visual game editor for artists and game designers to use.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> The Raytracer Challenge</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> The Raytracer Challenge</a> is a project with the goal to write a raytracer from scratch in Rust, while showing each step of the way as a weekly live coding session</a>. Everything is documented, starting with implementing Vectors</a> and Matrices</a> all the way to creating Phong Lighting</a>.</p> November has been a busy month for the project with lots of visual changes in the raytraced results:</p> A camera</a> was added to allow arbitrary views on the World</a>.</p> </li> Basic animation support</a> came along allowing the easy creation of video sequences.</p> </li> More realistic and life-like scenes due to Shadow Casting</a>.</p> </li> As a new basic body type Planes</a> came to life.</p> </li> </ul> Rustacean Station 48</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Rustacean Station</a> is a podcast about the Rust language.</p> In November, Herbert Wolverson</a> was interviewed</a> about game development in Rust. In this episode, lots is discussed about existing game development engines, and how Rust is breaking into this space with engines like Bevy, Amethyst, and RG3D. There is also a discussion on the Entity Component System paradigm in comparison to Object Oriented Programming.</p> Rust on the GPU</a> #</a> </h3> In this blog post</a>, Raph Levien</a> describes the current state of coding on a graphics card. The post describes how going about writing custom code still induces many issues in this day and age, and what modern technologies can be used to help make this easier. Rust-gpu</a> is mentioned as a possible way to write compute shaders in a “real language”.</p> Rust Roguelike Tutorial</a> #</a> </h3> A nasty demon monster at the exit to Abyss</figcaption> </figure> The Roguelike Tutorial</a> by @herberticus</a> got a new 75th (!) chapter</a> that shows how to generate a chaotic Voronoi-based city plaza inhabited by dark elves and adds a new big demon enemy to guard the Abyss portal.</p> You can battle your way down to the Dark Elf Plaza, and find the gateway to Abyss - but only if you can evade a hulking demon and a horde of elves—with very little in the way of help offered. Next up, we’ll begin to build the Abyss.</p> </blockquote> Hands-on Rust</a> #</a> </h3> A Dungeon Crawler running in a browser</figcaption> </figure> Another update from @herberticus</a> is a bonus article for the Hands-on Rust</a> book: “Run Your Rust Games in a Browser”</a> that guides the reader through the basics of building and publishing bracket-lib</a> games in WebAssembly.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> SPV</a> #</a> </h3> </p> SPV</a> by Albin Sjögren</a> is a calculator utility for working with astronomical position and velocity data.</p> In the last month, a relative position and velocity calculation system has been added. This is due to the inaccuracy of astronomic data. With this new method that relies on the orbital elements of two body systems getting data for multibody simulation is now possible.</p> Apart from this new equation set, SPV</a> now also has a more standard color scheme based on the one GitHub uses. This month also came with numerous bug fixes and a more concrete plan for future development.</p> For any feature requests, reach out to the developer on Discord</a> or GitHub</a>.</p> PickPicPack</a> 0.1.6 #</a> </h3> </p> PickPicPack</a> (GitHub</a>, Gumroad</a>) by @p4ymak</a> is a tiny yet powerful utility for packing images into rectangles with arbitrary aspect ratio.</p> It is useful for creating mood boards, daily art reports, presentations and other collages.</p> Features so far:</p> Interactive loading</li> Scaling images to equal size</li> Optional margin between images</li> Custom aspect ratio; now you can set aspect ratio by text in any form</li> CLI; you can use it without GUI and embed it into your project manager tool</li> </ul> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-development vector and raster graphics editor built on a non-destructive node-based workflow.</p> The previously announced Alpha release was delayed as core devs returned to school - January is the new goal. Development now continues to pick up speed. Design of the project website has continued for its launch soon, alongside the Alpha release.</p> The project upgraded to the Rust 2021 edition and made big improvements to the frontend TypeScript and web infrastructure. The editor UI is now fully responsive at small window sizes. Unsaved document tabs display an *</code> and warn before closing the window. Ruler measurements now move and scale with the document. And the new snapping system helps draw/move shapes aligned with others.</p> Try it right now in your browser.</a> Graphite is making steady progress towards becoming a non-destructive, procedural graphics editor suitable for replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. Join the Discord</a> and get involved!</p> Solid Editor</a> #</a> </h3> </a> A [demo video][solid-video] of using the editor</figcaption> </figure> Solid Editor</a> is Solid Engine</a>’s custom-built voxel graphics editor. It is designed to be a key part of the engine’s asset pipeline, enabling the creation of game-ready voxel graphics assets. Since the engine part is pretty far from being done, the author decided to release this editor as a standalone application.</p> Besides being natively compatible with Solid Engine, the editor sports some generally interesting and unique features.</p> True WYSIWYG editing. The editor scene is rendered using Solid Engine’s path tracer in real-time, yielding realistic lighting while editing.</li> The possibility to edit voxels directly in 3D, by using any brightly colored ball as a 3D pointing device. Read more about the Ball Pointer</a>.</li> A novel approach to editor tools. Instead of many different tools with overlapping functionality (e.g. “draw square” vs. “select square”, or “bucket fill” vs. “magic wand”) there is only one, a versatile Selection tool. Different effects can be applied to the selected voxels, producing the same results as regular editor tools. Combined with real-time effect preview, the user experience is very similar to that of classic graphics editors, with the added benefit of being able to tweak every edit before applying it.</li> </ul> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> Pixels</a> 0.8.0 👾 #</a> </h3> Pixels</a> is a tiny hardware-accelerated pixel framebuffer. Its goals include pixel-perfect rendering and custom shader pipelines for textures with direct pixel access. It’s perfect for making 2D animations, games, and emulators.</p> Version 0.8.0 was released this month, bringing highly-anticipated support for WASM targets, as well as support for Raspberry Pi 4. A minimal example for web browsers</a> is included to get you started. Full details are available in the release notes</a>.</p> Quinn</a> #</a> </h3> Quinn</a> is an async-enabled implementation of the state-of-the-art IETF QUIC transport protocol, a robust foundation for real-time networking.</p> Quinn 0.8</a> introduces support for the final QUIC 1 specification defined in RFC 9000</a>. Other highlights include an improved CUBIC congestion controller, a more ergonomic configuration API, and numerous performance and robustness improvements.</p> hecs</a> #</a> </h3> hecs</a> is a fast, lightweight, and unopinionated archetypal ECS library.</p> Version 0.7</a> introduces several new features, including two new query combinators, a CommandBuffer</code> for recording operations to be applied to a World</code> at a future time, accessors for efficient random access within columns, and a variant of EntityBuilder</code> that clones its components and can therefore be spawned from repeatedly. Other improvements include compatibility with 32-bit MIPS and PPC, and introduction of a niche to Entity</code> so that e.g. Option<Entity></code> will not consume additional space.</p> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot game engine.</p> November has been a month of refactoring for godot-rust. The API was cleaned up across different locations, reducing confusion and making the library more accessible:</p> The module simplification (#811</a>) continued initial efforts on the module structure, such as shorter paths and avoidance of redundant re-exports. Some differences between v0.9.3 and now can be seen in the above picture.</li> Several core symbols were renamed for consistency (#815</a>): RefInstance</code> -> TInstance</code> and TypedArray</code> -> PoolArray</code>, among others.</li> Another refactoring affects the Variant</code> conversion methods (#819</a>). Instead of Variant::to_i64()</code> which may silently fail and return a default value (Godot behavior), the recommended method is now Variant::to<T>()</code>. This enables genericity and is more idiomatic in Rust, returning an Option</code> to indicate success or failure.</li> </ul> As a binding to a C++ library, one topic godot-rust has to deal with is the use of unsafe</code>, which sometimes boils down to a trade-off between safety and ease-of-use. Even though Rust provides basic guidelines, there are different philosophies on their execution, see The CXX Debate</a> for an example. To discuss how APIs interacting with Godot can be as ergonomic as possible while preserving safety, issue #808</a> was opened.</p> NavMesh</a> v0.12.1 #</a> </h3> NavMesh crate is a pathfinding library for 2D and 3D games.</p> This month changes by @PsichiX</a>:</p> Added NavGrid structure to find paths on grids.</li> Added NavFreeGrid structure to find paths on cells put in free layout manner (used for example on clusters of cells rather than the condensed grid).</li> Added NavIslands structure to allow hierarchical pathfinding (used for example with streamed navigation islands, such as other pathfinding structures).</li> </ul> Rust CUDA</a> #</a> </h3> Rust CUDA</a> by Riccardo D’Ambrosio</a> is a newly-released project</a> with the goal of making Rust a Tier-1 language for fast GPU computing. There are still many bugs, and it’s in an early stage.</p> With this release comes a few crates. rustc_codegen_nvvm</a> for compiling Rust to CUDA PTX code using rustc’s custom codegen mechanisms and the libnvvm CUDA library. cust</a> for actually executing the PTX is a high-level wrapper for the CUDA Driver API. cuda_builder</a> for easily building GPU crates. cuda_std</a> is the GPU-side standard library which complements rustc_codegen_nvvm. gpu_rand</a> is a GPU-friendly random number generation. nvvm</a> is high-level bindings to libnvvm, and ptx_compiler</a> is high-level bindings to the PTX compiler APIs, which are currently incomplete. find_cuda_helper</a> is for finding CUDA on the system. There are many other works in progress.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: Rust Shooter progress report</a>: GLTF import, more character animations and weapons, and underwater effects.</li> A video of the new record for speedrunning the Way of Rhea demo</a> (spoilers!)</li> Necrophaser</a> is a recently alpha-released Top-Down Shooter made with Bevy.</li> A new spaceship for Stellary 2</a>.</li> Endless Trial</a> is a 2D bullet-hell game made in Tetra.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: GBA From Scratch</a> is a tutorial on how to code for the Game Boy Advance using Rust.</li> Ping Pong Tutorial</a> is a walkthrough on creating a ping pong game in Rust.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: rg3d now has a cheat/guide book</a>.</li> miniquad got a GL2 backend</a> for even better support of old and/or virtual systems.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: natura</a> is a simple and efficient spring animation library.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev</a>: “Using an ECS as a general-purpose storage container?”</a></li> “Where to start?”</a></li> “status of wasm32 support in existing game frameworks/engines”</a></li> “Can Rust do what any C++ game server can at a similar speed?”</a></li> “Developing a cross-platform game for browser, Ios, and Android using rust?”</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help reach the 0.1 Alpha release.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #27 - October 2021 Unknown — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 27th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Other News</a></li> Meeting Minutes</a></li> Discussions</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The tenth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in October. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on November 13th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Hydrofoil Generation Sailing</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Hydrofoil Generation Sailing</a> (Facebook</a>, Discord</a>) is a realistic sailing/foiling inshore simulator in development for PC/Steam that will put you in the driving seat of modern competitive sailing.</p> The game is the brain child of industry veteran Stefano Casillo (of Assetto Corsa fame) and features a custom made 3D engine based on DirectX11 via winapi-rs.</p> An engine conversion to WGPU is currently under evaluation in order to guarantee an easier port to platform such as Steam Deck or even mobile in the future.</p> Early Access release on Steam is expected in mid 2022.</p> The Process</a> #</a> </h3> Firing Carrockets™!</figcaption> </figure> The Process</a> by @setzer22 is an upcoming game about factory building, process management, and carrot production, built with Rust using the Godot game engine!</p> For the past two months the project has seen some slow but steady progress. Work has started towards a simple combat system that will have the engineers fighting hordes of robots to defend their factories.</p> This month the game has seen the following changes and improvements:</p> New assets like a robot enemy</a> (concept by @Kath_Art_ic, modelling by @mkdirsrc), a shoulder mounted gun</a> and new machine icons</a>.</li> A new system to attach armor-like models to in-game characters.</li> Foundations of a combat system.</li> Carrockets™! 🥕🚀 (1)</a> and (2)</a></li> </ul> LibraCity</a> - city planning on a needle! #</a> </h3> </p> LibraCity</a> is a puzzle city planning game by @djeedai</a> where you need to build a city while balancing it on a needle (the center of the board). It was built for Ludum Dare 49</a> using the Bevy Engine</a>, and is a first-time use of the engine.</p> Post-jam, a webassembly version was added and published, which now allows playing the game online</a>.</p> The code source is freely available on GitHub</a>.</p> Chaos Theory</a> - gamified double pendulum simulator #</a> </h3> </p> Chaos Theory</a> is a tiny HTML5 game by @necauqua</a> where you can draw and simulate pendulums with a few goals and restrictions per level. It was done for Ludum Dare 49</a> with a help of a small custom engine with Rust being compiled to WASM and drawing shapes to an HTML5 canvas.</p> You can play the game online</a>, and the source code is available here</a> and here</a>.</p> Me And My Unicycle</a> #</a> </h3> Can you handle this unstable ride?</figcaption> </figure> Me And My Unicycle</a> is a 2D physics game by @nikl_me</a> submitted to Ludum Dare 49. It is build with Bevy</a> and the code can be found on GitHub</a>.</p> Following the LD49 theme “unstable”, the game is about riding a unicycle with challenging controls. Try making it through each level without falling.</p> All assets are self-made. The developer had a lot of fun recording audio and sound effects!</p> Crunda</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Crunda</a> is a game created in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 49.</p> Its unique wobbly planets are controlled by a Rust library.</p> Crunda was created by Dan Slocombe</a>, came third, and was rated the most fun competition game! The sources can be found here</a>.</p> Berry Run</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Berry Run</a> is a community stream meme game by @bombfuse_dev</a> built on top of Emerald Engine</a>. It’s centered around the Twitch streamer @berrybebopboy</a> and was built in about 2 days.</p> Help Berry run as far as they can without tripping and falling!</p> Dodge the babies (no kids, no babies), evade the grannies (they’re heading to the grand canyon), and don’t touch belf (belf is sacred). Also a bunch of dunces left their logs and rocks lying around, better not to touch those, it would be rude to touch someone’s logs and rocks.</p> </blockquote> Lonely Star</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Lonely Star</a> is a 2D ‘endless runner’ game by @17cupsofcoffee</a>, featuring simple generative music. It was built with Tetra</a> back in February 2020, for Weekly Game Jam 135.</p> This month, it was made open-source</a>, and received a small update to improve the UI and fix a few bugs.</p> Soldank</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Soldank</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by @smokku</a> is an open source clone of Soldat</a> engine. It aims for full compatibility with original game files, mods and gameplay with modernized graphics engine and multiplayer networking code.</p> Recent developments include:</p> Engine/game code split</li> Command Line Interface</li> Rhai</a> scripting</li> hecs_rapier</code> integration</li> Key/mouse-binding support</li> Soldat’s .cfg</code> files support</li> Custom debug shapes rendering</li> Performance degradation fix</li> Refactored code to build on hecs</code> ECS</li> ECS entities debug UI</li> </ul> The developer have also written a blog post: ‘Engine and scripting</a></em>’</p> Graph Game</a> #</a> </h3> Navigating the graph map can be stressful</figcaption> </figure> Graph Game</a> (GitHub</a>) uses Bevy</a> as its engine. You can play it from your browser</a> - click on colored triangles, guess the rules and survive as long as possible!</p> Development has just begun, and the future of the project is not clear - the developer welcomes you to come and discuss next steps on the game’s Discord server</a>.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle adventure with hard puzzles and forgiving mechanics. It is being produced by @masonremaley</a>.</p> Latest developments:</p> Way of Rhea now has a free demo available on Steam</a></li> Way of Rhea was shown at PAX West</a> this year (as were a couple other Rust games!), and will also be showcased at MAGWest</a></li> A new trailer showing off new level art was published</a></li> Additional animation work, visuals</a>, and puzzles have been added to the game</li> Improvements were made to the undo system, the tutorial level, and the dialogue system in response to user feedback</li> Some Proton compatibility problems were fixed, some visual glitches were fixed, and support was added for adaptvie vsync</li> </ul> You can stay up to date on the latest developments of Way of Rhea by following it on Steam</a>, or signing up for the mailing list.</a></p> PaddlePunks</a> #</a> </h3> A round between a player and the AI set to Hard</figcaption> </figure> PaddlePunks is a versus tennis game by Felix Windström</a> with a diverse cast of characters and playstyles and online play with rollback netcode. The game takes cues from both fighting games and arcade classics, and besides netplay supports local play against another human or several levels of AI.</p> You can download and play the game now on itch.io</a>, or join the Discord</a> to chat with the developer and other players. Updates are also posted to Twitter</a>.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> An early-morning sunrise</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In October, Veloren hit 10,000 commits, as well as 10,000 members on the Discord server! Shrubs got added, along with improvements to rivers, and the addition of waterfalls. There have been efforts to diagnose some network issues that have been causing downloads to not work for some people. Crafting is going through overhauls on the backend. New aurora shaders</a> were added as well.</p> Initial ideas are being discussed to try and improve the amount of asset files that have to be downloaded with each update of the game, which will help improve the 200MB that has to be downloaded after each nightly update. New jewelery has been added, and sneaking is being improved to make agents in the game react better to it. Ongoing worldgen improvemnts are also being made as we head into November.</p> October’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #140</a>, #141</a>, #142</a>, #143</a>.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Amethyst - Starting Fresh</a> #</a> </h3> </p> This month, the developers of the Amethyst game engine announced that they would be winding down development</a>.</p> The Amethyst Foundation, however, lives on! It will be shifting focus to support the wider Rust game development ecosystem, through engine-agnostic libraries, curated guides/lists, and more inititives yet to be announced.</p> All is Cubes</a> 0.3.0 #</a> </h3> </a></p> All is Cubes (GitHub</a>, Crates.io</a>) by kpreid</a> is a game/engine for worlds made of blocks made of voxels. It is intended to be usable both as an engine or rendering library, or as a game with built-in editor/programming functionality (genre(s) to be determined). While the project is still highly incomplete and API-unstable, the 0.3.0 release marks a lot of now-usable functionality (changelog</a>):</p> UI: mouselook, multiple example scenes, inventory with stacks, and rendering to image files.</li> Simulation/mechanics: character collision against arbitrary voxel shapes, much-improved light propagation, transactional state updates (all-or-nothing, internally order-independent), and “behaviors” attached to game objects for scripting/animation.</li> Rendering: high-voxel-count blocks (incomplete, but usable for text as seen in the above screenshot), “smooth lighting” (interpolated across faces), frustum culling, and correct sRGB-versus-linear color handling.</li> </ul> The next planned milestone is saving/loading.</p> Tetra</a> 0.6.6 #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. After a few quiet months, version 0.6.6 has been released, featuring:</p> A big overhaul of the keyboard API, with better support for international layouts</li> Lots of new functions for manipulating the game window</li> A long-requested ECS example</a></li> Bugfixes and docs improvements</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> GameDev Mini Symposium</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to watch the talk</figcaption> </figure> Back in September, the University of Glasgow’s GameLab held a ‘GameDev Mini Symposium’ online. One of the featured speakers was Herbert Wolverson</a>, writer of ‘Hands-on Rust</a>’, who gave a talk on using Rust for game development.</p> This talk is now available to view on Herbert’s YouTube channel</a>.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> SPV</a> #</a> </h3> </p> SPV</a> by Albin Sjögren</a> is a calculator utility for working with astronomical position and velocity data.</p> What was added for the first alpha release:</p> A new UI</li> Corrected vector normalizing</li> JSON and TXT exporting</li> </ul> The primary features that are being worked on:</p> A crate version</li> Output file structure</li> Batch processing</li> </ul> For any feature requests, reach out to the developer on Discord</a> or GitHub</a>.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> wgpu</a>-0.11 release #</a> </h3> experimental Bevy branch running on WebGL2 via wgpu</figcaption> </figure> The team is happy to announce the release of wgpu-0.11 and naga-0.7. Details can be found on the gfx-rs blog</a>. The most exciting feature is WebGL2 support. With some caveats, users no longer need to wait for WebGPU in the browsers in order to deploy on the Web. Support is still a bit rough, and patches come out regularly, but most examples work.</p> @kvark also visited Rust LA Meetup</a> to talk about Naga</a> and the history of processing shaders with Rust.</p> rend3</a>-0.2 Release #</a> </h3> Improved shadows and rendering with rend3 0.2</figcaption> </figure> rend3 is a 3D rendering library that focuses on having an easy to use interface without sacrificing performance or customizability.</p> As part of their monthly release schedule, the developers are excited to announce the release of rend3-0.2. The most prominent change is the ability to use fully customizable materials. Any combination of data and textures can now be used as a material for custom render routines. This unties the user from PBR-based materials.</p> Along with the customizability that comes with this change, the CPU time required to render a complex scene is 7x less due to highly optimal data structures. For more information see this talk</a> at the Rust graphics meetup.</p> The v0.2 version</a> was published on crates.io (docs</a> and examples</a>). The 0.3 release is just a week away and further improves customizability.</p> hecs_rapier</a> 0.11.0 #</a> </h3> hecs_rapier</a> is a physics engine for hecs ECS. It is a direct port of bevy_rapier2d</a>.</p> Recent development added joints and physics_hooks support. This makes hecs_rapier</code> feature complete, with bevy_rapier2d</code> feature parity.</p> bevy_atmosphere</a> 0.1.1 #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_atmosphere</a> (GitHub</a>) by @JonahPlusPlus is a procedural sky plugin for Bevy.</p> By adding the AtmospherePlugin</code>, users get a skybox around the camera in their scene. Users can also set the appearance of the sky adding a AtmosphereMat</code> resource.</p> 0.1.0 and 0.1.1 have been released on crates.io</a>.</p> 0.1.1 changes the default position of the sun to be in the sky, so only the plugin is needed to get a Unity-like sky.</p> bevy_kira_audio</a> #</a> </h3> bevy_kira_audio</a> is a Bevy</a> plugin that integrates the audio library Kira</a> into Bevy</a> applications.</p> In the latest version 0.6.0</code>, you can load files with custom semantic durations and play looped audio with an intro. The plugin now also cleans up old sound instances. Following Bevy, bevy_kira_audio</a> is now licensed under dual MIT + Apache 2.0, and the library will no longer crash on systems without an audio device.</p> bevy_verlet</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_verlet</a> is a lib for projects using Bevy Engine</a> providing a plugin to use verlet integration</a> physics. Very useful for cloth simulation and joints, and less expensive than complex physics engine, it is a nice addition to 2D or 3D projects. Making good use of the Entity-Component-System architecture of the bevy engine, any entity can become a VerletPoint</code> and have physics applied to it.</p> The crate also provides sticks</em> which constrains the points in order to create strings or cloth. With its modularity, you may customize the physics precision (iterations), the gravity, and the physics time step to use.</p> New features:</p> Query parallel batching and custom batching size</li> Global documentation</li> Fixed issues with timesteps</li> Improved examples</li> </ul> You may contact the author on Twitter at @ManevilleF</a> or join the discussion</a>.</p> Bevy Pen Tool</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Bevy Pen Tool is a plugin that helps developers make 2D paths using Bezier curves. Its user interface provides functionality for:</p> spawning Bezier curves,</li> moving end points and control points of Bezier curves,</li> linking individual Bezier curves to each other,</li> grouping curves,</li> saving and loading paths as look-up tables (typically for animations and agent movement),</li> generating arbitrary 2D meshes that fill the interior of a path using the Lyon crate,</li> generating a mesh that follows a path like a road,</li> saving meshes and roads in “.obj” format,</li> </ul> A stable version of Bevy Pen Tool should come out as a crate shortly after Bevy 0.6 shows up. Here is a link to the repo for more information</a>.</p> Sparsey</a> #</a> </h3> Sparsey</a> by @LechintanTudor</a> is a sparse set-based Entity Component System (ECS) with component storage grouping, granular component change detection, fallible systems and beautiful syntax.</p> The latest release (0.4) adds support for optional system parameters, which allows Option<Res<T>></code> and Option<ResMut<T>></code> to be used in system functions.</p> This release also features a refactored ComponentStorage</code> which makes adding, removing and swapping components faster, swapping being especially important since it enables component grouping, a features that makes certain queries specified by the user extremely fast.</p> Finally, some implementation details were hidden from the public API and the #[must_use]</code> attribute was added to functions whose results should not be discarded.</p> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot game engine.</p> Recent developments have added foundational support to async</a> that enables users to make use of the Rust async runtimes with the Godot Engine (thanks to chitoyuu for the PR).</p> In addition to the foundational support, lyonbeckers was kind enough to include a new recipe in the User Guide</a> that covers how to configure async with tokio</code>.</p> The team also merged several smaller bug fixes in #791</a>, #795</a>, and #800</a> and is making steady progress towards version 0.10.0.</p> Finally, the team has recently added a third party project</a> section in the book to help promote games, applications, and libraries/tools that are working with godot-rust. If you have a project that you would like to be included, please feel free to reach out to the godot-rust team.</p> Other News #</a> </h2> Other game updates: LD49 Unbalanced Brawl</a> (GitHub</a>) is an autochess with ever-changing rules in the shop.</li> LD49 Chevalchemy</a> (GitHub</a>) is a game where you play as a horse alchemist working for the great Neighcolas Flamel.</li> LD49 Proc Spider</a> (GitHub</a>) is a small game where you play a big spider chasing small spiders.</li> mk48.io</a> (GitHub</a>) is an online multiplayer naval combat game, in which you take command of a ship and sail your way to victory.</li> Tweets about Bitgun</a> progress: new inventory and weapon systems</a>, new item pickup</a>, jumping zombies</a>, death animation</a>.</li> An update about the progress of Rust version of Nox Futura</a>.</li> A Recall Singularity</a> shared a YouTube video</a> that shows new shooting sounds, camera movement, and asteroid dragging.</li> </ul> </li> Other learning material updates: A video by TanTan</a> about rewriting a voxel game three times: in Unity, Rust (no engine) and Bevy.</li> </ul> </li> Other engine updates: A recording of the first rg3d live-coding stream</a>.</li> The first prototype of VNgine</a> - Visual Novel Engine - was announced on /r/rust</a>.</li> Also, a general purpose graphics engine Blue Engine</a> was announced on /r/rust_gamedev</a>.</li> </ul> </li> Other tooling updates: Fearless-NES</a> is a NES emulator written using egui, macroquad, and GilRs.</li> FishSteam</a> is a tool for deploying SteamWorks-enabled steam builds for Windows/macOS/Linux without SteamWorks SDK on a CI.</li> </ul> </li> Other library updates: Crevice v0.8</a> brings a direct support for many math libraries and allows to generate GLSL source from structs.</li> SPV</a> 0.0.6 is the second pre-alpha release of a celestial object position and velocity calculator.</li> Thunderdome</a> generational arena library released 0.4..0.5 versions</a>.</li> egui 0.15</a> brings: syntax highlighting, horizontal scrolling, new monospace font, and a new opt-in glow backend for eframe.</li> New puffin-egui/puffin-viewer</a> allows selection and manipulation of multiple frames.</li> Shalrath</a> is a fully-safe Rust representation and nom parser for Quake map files.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Meeting Minutes #</a> </h2> There is currently discussion ongoing around bringing back the Rust GameDev Working Group’s regular meetings.</p> If you are interested in getting involved, please join the discussion thread</a> on the working group’s issue tracker!</p> Discussions #</a> </h2> Async Game Server Design</a> #</a> </h3> On the Rust user forum, there was a post</a> asking how to use async/await (more specifically, tokio</code> and tokio_tungstenite</code>) to develop a multiplayer game server. The responses contain some useful ideas and advice which may be helpful for other people’s projects!</p> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help reach the 0.1 Alpha release.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #26 - September 2021 Unknown — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 26th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Rust Graphics Meetup #1</a></li> Rust GameDev Podcast #6</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> Discussions</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The ninth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in September. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Rust Graphics Meetup #1 #</a> </h2> </p> The Rust Graphics Meetup is an online gathering where rustaceans share technical details of their work related to graphics and compute, not affiliated to any particular stack. The pilot edition has happened on Oct 2nd! Check out the talks:</p> gfx-rs Lessons Learned</a> - @kvark</a>, slides</a>.</li> rend3 Architecture: Efficient, Customizable Rendering</a> - @cwfitzgerald</a>, slides</a>.</li> Blub - Interactive GPU Fluid Solver</a> - @wumpf</a>, slides</a>.</li> </ul> Learn more at the gfx meetup repo</a>. Thanks everyone for tuning in and helping to make this happen!</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Rust GameDev Podcast #6</a> #</a> </h2> </p> The sixth episode</a> is an interview with Remco and Basz, creators of Mun</a>. Programming language creation is discussed, along with challenges and what future developments are incoming from the Mun project</a>.</p> Listen and Subscribe from the following platforms: Rust GameDev Podcast (simplecast)</a>, Apple Podcasts</a>, Spotify</a>, RSS Feed</a>, Google Podcasts</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> BITGUN</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> BITGUN (Steam</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>) by @LogLogGames</a> is an action roguelike zombie shooter with lots of blood and guns, similar to games like Hotline Miami, Nuclear Throne, and Heat Signature. The game is built using Godot and Rust (via godot-rust</a>).</p> They recently re-worked the in-game UI using egui</a> with godot-egui</a>, allowing much easier custom widgets such as drag & drop on items between inventory slots</a>.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Weegames</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Weegames</a> is a fast-paced minigame collection. The Windows version of the game has been rewritten to use Macroquad, so now the web and downloadable versions of the game share the same codebase. Development for the web version has moved to the Weegames GitHub</a> repository.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> An odd structure in the woods</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In September, Veloren hosted its largest release party ever! At peak, 181 players were playing on the server together. You can read about all the changes to 0.11 in the release blog</a>, and be sure to watch the release trailer</a>! During the release party, several devs spoke about the changes, which you can watch here</a>. This release party was the first one to handle the high player load with no issues, and give hope for much larger servers in the future.</p> Shaderc was replaced with Naga early on in the month. This was the result of over a year of work. Hitboxes are in the process of being overhauled to handle non-cylindrical targets better. Improvements were made to how the cursor selects objects in game. As always, lots of experimental work is being done to the economic system. Cultist raiders were added, which means that raiding parties will now attack nearby settlements. This is a great example of how the realtime simulation is starting to become more visible to players.</p> September’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #136</a>, #137</a>, #138</a>, #139</a>.</p> Harvest Hero Origins</a> @ PAX West 2021 #</a> </h3> Gemdrop Games booth at PAX West 2021</figcaption> </figure> Harvest Hero Origins</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an arcade wave defense game by Gemdrop Games</a>, built in Rust on top of Emerald</a>.</p> Gemdrop Games recently took Harvest Hero Origins to PAX West 2021</a> and had a very positive response from most of the players! Being able to watch people play the game was extremely valuable, the developers were able to see pain points in UI/UX design and can now fix them without worry. They were also able to see what players find fun about controlling each hero, which helps with the next hero planning in the full release of the game.</p> Harvest Hero Origins is still planned to release by the end of 2021, please wishlist it on Steam</a>!</p> Molecoole #</a> </h3> </p> Molecoole is a topdown action roguelite where you connect with different atoms to create the strongest Molecoole to defeat the baddies! Molecoole was created by two brothers: Márton</a> and Dániel</a>.</p> In Molecoole the strongest focus is about making different combos by connecting atoms. The original version was made in Unity for a game jam, but they decided to make an actual game out of it using the Bevy engine. It currently includes their own implementation for 2D animation, collision detection, and particles. In September, one of the main development areas was making the game nicer to play, so they introduced the ezing</a> crate and also implemented slowing the game time</a>. They are using the LDtk</a> editor to make the level sections for the procedural generation.</p> Circle Race</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Circle Race was made by @kuviman</a> for TriJam 135</a>, where you needed to create a game in three hours. The theme was “Circles”. You are a circle, connected with two other “thruster” circles. You play inside a circle, consisting of “tire” circles. Circle around it to find your best circle time!</p> Made using @kuviman</a>’s own engine geng</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Monke Pizza</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Game made by @kuviman</a> for VimJam 2</a>. The theme for this jam was “Boss” and the limitation was “On The Edge”.</p> Monke Pizza is an online multiplayer monke pizza restaurant simulator. You are always on the edge of being fired. That is if</em> you work here. Otherwise, you are on the edge of being hired. Because that is how BOSS is bossing.</p> Made using @kuviman</a>’s own engine geng</a>.</p> Idu #</a> </h3> </p> Idu (Discord</a>) by @logicsoup</a> and @epcc10</a> is an upcoming game centered around growing realistic plants.</p> In September, the project previously codenamed “garden” has been renamed to “idu”! In Idu, every plant is continuously formed by the simulation. There are unique responses from a plant’s surroundings and your care. Simulated leaves and shoots grow into plants with a mind of their own. Here is the changelog of Demo Version 4:</p> Fixed freezing when help menu was displayed</li> Added support for all older Ubuntu versions from 16.04</li> Fixed crashing when roots extended over the world border</li> Pressing ESC in menus acts as a back button</li> Fixed the issue where pruning didn’t work on the first day after loading the game</li> Fixed the game choosing integrated GPU even when a discrete one was available</li> </ul> A playable alpha demo has been released and is freely available at Idu’s Discord server’s #demo-download channel</a>!</p> Antorum Online</a> #</a> </h3> It’s a good day for fishing…</figcaption> </figure> Antorum Online</a> is a micro-multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game server is written in Rust, and the official client is being developed in Unity.</p> A few new features and lots of fixes were released to players this month, including item enchantments and the mining skill! Crafting has been expanded as well, and there are a ton of new monsters to fight and gear pieces to create.</p> #36: Item Enchantments</a></li> #37: Audio Sources And Other Stuff</a></li> #38: Mining</a></li> </ul> rpg-cli</a> v1.0 #</a> </h3> </p> rpg-cli</a> by @facundoolano</a> is a minimalist computer RPG written in Rust. Its command-line interface can be used as a cd replacement where you randomly encounter enemies as you change directories.</p> This month, the v1.0 version was released. Some of the updates</a>:</p> New magic rings.</li> A bunch of new quests including ring-related ones.</li> Stat increasing stones.</li> Sorcerer enemy class.</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> good-web-game</a> #</a> </h3> </p> good-web-game</a> has been released on crates.io, together with ggez</a> 0.6.1! ggez is a lightweight cross-platform game framework for making 2D games with minimum friction, with an API inspired by Love2D. good-web-game is a subset of ggez, which is based upon miniquad</a> and can therefore run natively on the web, mobile and of course desktop as well.</p> good-web-game was originally created to run Zemeroth</a> on the web. However, as Zemeroth switched from using ggez to macroquad</a> the project was discontinued, until recently. In search of a new graphics backend for ggez</a> the ggez team now picked up development again and released a massive update, updating good-web-game for compatability to ggez 0.6, expanding its functionality.</p> With only a single change in boilerplate code</a> many ggez 0.6 games can now be directly ported to good-web-game. Yet, it’s no drop in replacement for ggez as several key differences remain</a>.</p> godot-rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot-rust (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a Rust library that provides bindings for the Godot game engine.</p> In the last month, a lot of documentation has been added to the book. The new entries in FAQ</a>, Recipes</a> and Game Architecture</a> don’t focus on specific APIs, but put them into a bigger context and highlight typical challenges encountered in practice.</p> Besides smaller bugfixes, the library itself added support for serde</code> serialization of core types (#743</a>, thanks to Waridley).</p> In terms of automation and tooling, September was a very productive month:</p> Translation of Godot’s documentation based on [bbcode]</code> to RustDoc with intra-doc links, making Godot APIs much more readable and discoverable.</p> </li> Refactoring of GitHub Actions CI, allowing quick and precise feedback for contributors.</p> </li> Automation of latest documentation, now hosted under godot-rust.github.io/docs</a>.</p> </li> </ul> As the godot-rust community keeps growing, the project can now be found on Twitter</a> with the GodotRust handle.</p> Emerald</a> #</a> </h3> Built in texture hot reloading, just call emd.loader().hotreload()</code></figcaption> </figure> Emerald</a> by @bombfuse</a> is a 2D game engine focused on being super portable and easy-to-use.</p> Currently supported platforms are: Windows, Linux (WIP gamepad support), macOS (WIP gamepad support), Web, Android (WIP audio, gamepad Support), GameShell</a>, and even WearOS</a>!</p> Recently added features include:</p> Texture hot reloading (sound hot reloading is coming soon!).</li> Cross-platform file saving/loading. This is essential for games, basically allows the user to save their files to the platform specific save directory.</li> </ul> Emerald</a> has slowly been growing, both in contributor size and feature sets recently. If any of this interests you and you’d like to contribute, feel free to grab a task</a>, fork and PR!</p> Starframe</a> #</a> </h3> Grouping bodies into disjoint “islands”</figcaption> </figure> Starframe</a> by @molentum</a> is a work-in-progress game engine for physics-y sidescrolling 2D games.</p> This month, a lot of work was done on optimizing the physics engine. Most importantly, spatial partitioning was added</a> to speed up collision detection. Also notably, a graph algorithm was implemented</a> to divide the world into disjoint islands, enabling some parallelism and skipping of computations.</p> Starframe’s physics is now very close to game-ready, and it no longer makes sense to work on the engine without a concrete project to use it. Thus, work has begun on a platformer based around connecting things with ropes. More details to be shown soonish!</p> Arcana</a> #</a> </h3> Two clients connected to the same server</figcaption> </figure> Arcana</a> is ECS based game engine focused on simplicity and performance.</p> It recently got huge progress towards multiplayer support. Traditional client-server systems were added and used in the “Tanks” example</a>.</p> Clients send only command queue to the server and server sends game world updates to the clients. Engine supports multiple players per client. For example, players may be added for each active input device.</p> To allow wide variety of genres player is not attached to one specific entity and may control many. In RTS player may control all their units and will send commands for each one.</p> Gameplay system that consumes commands doesn’t even need to be aware of netcode. Either way, it just drains command queue of an entity and utilizes them. That system must not be run on clients at all.</p> Arcana</a> is very early work-in-progress and may not always work out-of-the-box atm, but stability improvements are expected next month.</p> rg3d</a> v0.23 #</a> </h3> </a> A feature highlights video</a></figcaption> </figure> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>, Patreon</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. This month v0.23 was released</a>. Some of the updates:</p> Physically based rendering (PBR) with metallic workflow.</li> High dynamic range (HDR) rendering pipeline & textures.</li> Custom shaders and materials.</li> Emission maps - allows you to define glowing parts using emission map.</li> Gamma correction, manual/auto exposure, and color grading.</li> Lots of the editor’s improvements: material editor, unified material pipeline for terrains, improved inspector, etc.</li> </ul> Check out the blog post</a> or the feature highlights video</a> for more info.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Rust RPG Toolkit</a> #</a> </h3> Capstone</a> - a WIP game that uses Rust RPG Toolkit</figcaption> </figure> Rust RPG Toolkit</a> by @olefasting</a> is an engine for creating highly customizable and user modable action 2D action RPG’s using Rust amd JSON.</p> The project started out as a part of the Capstone</a> game but was separated as it grew in scope. It uses JSON files for most of its game data and resources specification so that games can be created with very little interaction with the Rust code. This has the benefit of making the end product very easy to modify, both for non-developers involved in the development process, and by end users. Modification can be done either by modifying a game’s data files directly, or by creating user modules, which are supported out-of-the-box.</p> Note that this is in early and very heavy development: the API is subject to constant change, as it has newly transitioned from being a game project to a library.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> GDC: Rust for Game Tooling by Dan Olson</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Dan Olson</a> gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference in July about using Rust for game tooling. The talk describes how Rust is being integrated at Treyarch. Dan gives a “sales pitch” about several Rust benefits, and goes over several case studies about where it is used. It makes appearances in the Treyarch image packer, and is used in 3 major tools, and around 20 smaller one-off tools. Around 120k lines of Rust code have been written for the projects.</p> If you have a GDC Vault account, you can watch the video</a>. If you don’t, you can still read the slides</a>.</p> Learn Wgpu</a> Updated: No More Swap Chains! #</a> </h3> As part of the update to 0.10, the wgpu team removed the SwapChain</code> from the API. The Surface</code> will now be used to retrieve textures to render to wrapped in SurfaceTexture</code>s. You configure the Surface</code> in a similar way to how you would configure the SwapChain</code>, except the struct is now called SurfaceConfiguration</code> instead of SwapChainDescriptor</code>.</p> If you want to know more, you can check the tutorial’s news page</a>.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Borderlands 3 Save Editor</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Borderlands 3 Save Editor</a> by ZakisM</a> is a tool to help you modify your Borderlands 3 Saves and Profiles written using Iced</a>. Currently, it runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It supports modifying PC saves as well as decrypted PS4 saves (and converting between them).</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> deno-wgpu</figcaption> </figure> wgpu</a> is a cross-platform, safe, pure-rust graphics API that runs natively on Vulkan, Metal, D3D12, D3D11, and OpenGLES; and on top of WebGPU on wasm.</p> wgpu has set up the infrastructure to run WebGPU proper tests on its CI, via Deno</a>. This will ensure correctness down the road when we reach a decent level of coverage. Read more on gfx-rs blog</a>.</p> Aside from that, wgpu team has been pumping out patches. In fact, wgpu-0.10 is easily the most patched release of all!</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Matchbox</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Matchbox by @jkhelsing</a> is a new peer-to-peer networking project for establishing unreliable, unordered connections between peers on the internet. The goal is to enable low-latency multiplayer games written in Rust WASM.</p> Matchbox consists of:</p> A tiny signaling server, matchbox_server</code></a>, which acts as a rendezvous point. It helps peers discover each other and deal with NAT traversal in order to establish more direct ways of communication.</li> A crate, matchbox_socket</code></a>, which handles connecting to a signalling server and establishing a WebRTC data channel between each connected peer.</li> A demo/template project</a> using Bevy</a> and GGRS</a> to implement a web game with peer-to-peer rollback netcode. A live version is hosted here</a>.</li> </ul> More info is available in the repository</a> and introductory blog post</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, twitter</a></em></p> Sparsey</a> #</a> </h3> Sparsey</a> by @LechintanTudor</a> is a new sparse set-based Entity Component System (ECS) with component storage grouping, granular component change detection, fallible systems and beautiful syntax.</p> The goal of Sparsey</a> is to provide a sparse set-based ECS which fully takes advantage of its core data structure. An example of this is component storage grouping, a feature which allows getting the best performance possible when iterating over queries that match certain patterns described by the user, at the cost of a performance penalty when inserting or removing components from these storages.</p> To get started with Sparsey</a>, check out the Sparsey Cheat Sheet</a> and the examples on GitHub</a>!</p> bevy_verlet</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_verlet</a> is a lib for projects using Bevy Engine</a> providing a plugin to use verlet Integration</a> physics. Very useful for Cloth simulation and joints, and less expensive than complex physics engine, it is a nice addition to 2D or 3D projects. Making good use of the Entity-Component-System architecture of the bevy engine, any entity can become a VerletPoint</code> and have physics applied to it.</p> The crate also provides sticks</em> which constrains the points in order to create strings or cloth. With its modularity, you may customize the physics precision (iterations), the gravity, and the physics time step to use.</p> Not yet available on crates.io, the lib will be released after a few missing features are provided:</p> Primitive collision</li> Object batching (optimization)</li> Global documentation</li> </ul> You may contact the author on Twitter @ManevilleF</a> or join the discussion</a>.</p> hecs</a> #</a> </h3> hecs</a> is a fast, lightweight, and unopinionated archetypal ECS library.</p> Version 0.6 introduces PreparedQuery</code>, allowing query set-up cost to be amortized across multiple invocations. EntityRef</code>’s API was expanded to include a single-entity query</code> method, and now exposes the referenced entity’s handle. Finally, World::spawn_batch</code> and reserve</code> were optimized for better performance when called repeatedly.</p> ktx2</a> #</a> </h3> A revamped and refactored version of @F3kilo’s ktx2-reader, this serves as a parsing library for the texture container format of ktx2. This format allows you to store textures in formats that GPU apis directly accept, without decoding costs. For more information, read the docs</a>.</p> ktx2 writing support will come a future release.</p> rend3</a> #</a> </h3> rend3 rendering a complex scene</figcaption> </figure> rend3 is a new 3D rendering library that focuses on having an easy to user interface without sacrificing performance or customizability. It comes with PBR materials and render routine out of the box and utilizes GPU culling to enable incredible performance with such a simple API.</p> There’re many fun things in the pipeline including a full custom shader system, both cpu and gpu side optimization, and more rendering features.</p> The v0.1 version</a> was published on crates.io (docs</a> and examples</a>) and v0.2 is going to be coming out very soon.</p> imgui-rs</a> v0.8 #</a> </h3> imgui-rs</a> is the Rust bindings for the Dear ImGui framework, allowing users to easily build up complex debug widgets and tools.</p> In v0.8.0</a>, the library’s API continued its overhaul to both be more similar to the C++ API while feeling like native Rust. Specifically, the odious im_str!</code> macro was deprecated – using inline strings directly (and anything AsRef<str></code>) simply works. Most functions also make extensive use of RAII-style drop tokens to track begin</code>/end</code> calls. Lastly, it was updated to use current Dear ImGui v1.84, and bound to the new APIs, including the new Tables API.</p> Emergent AI</a> #</a> </h3> Example of game behavior using Utility AI</figcaption> </figure> Emergent AI</a> by @PsichiX</a> is a new crate designed to provide modern AI solutions for games written in Rust. Its highly modularized and hierarchical architecture allows users to express a wide range of AI behaviors complexity, from small scale, to big scale, allowing user to pick proper solution to each AI problem using smaller building blocks.</p> Along with the library, there is an “Emergent AI - Smart agents and events for games”</a> book being written with goal to explain in-depth to readers how modern AI systems works and showing step by step process of how one could build them on their own.</p> hexagonal_pathfinding_astar</a> #</a> </h3> _______ </span> / E \ </span> _______/ (4,3) \ </span> / \ W:3 / </span> _______/ (3,2) \_______/ </span> / \ W:1 / </span> / (2,2) \_______/ </span> \ W:3 / </span> \_______/ </span> / \ </span> _______/ (2,1) \ </span> / \ W:3 / </span> _______/ (1,0) \_______/ </span> / S \ W:4 / </span> / (0,0) \_______/ </span> \ W:6 / </span> \_______/ </span></code></pre> hexagonal_pathfinding_astar</a> is an implementation of the A-Star pathfinding algorithm tailored for traversing a bespoke collection of weighted hexagons. It’s intended to calculate the most optimal path to a target hexagon where you’re traversing from the centre of one hexagon to the next along a line orthogonal to a hexagon edge. Check out the project’s README</a> for more info.</p> pixels</a> v0.6 #</a> </h3> </p> pixels</a> by @parasyte</a> is a tiny hardware-accelerated pixel frame buffer based on wgpu. It gives you a pixel buffer and you can poke colors into it (on the CPU side). The buffer is uploaded to the GPU as a texture, and all scaling and clipping is handled by a default shader. For additional control, you can add your own custom shaders for pre- and post-processing.</p> The v0.6 release adds support for wgpu 0.10 which is a huge improvement. The only breaking changes are reexports and an error variant name change. In most cases, this upgrade is a drop-in replacement.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> KAS</a> GUI v0.10 #</a> </h3> Widget gallery demo</figcaption> </figure> KAS</a> by @dhardy</a> is a general-purpose retained UI toolkit. This month v0.10 was released:</p> KAS now supports dynamic linking, allowing faster builds. Additionally using a faster linker (lld or mold) allows 6x improvement on re-build speed for the Gallery example.</li> Keyboard navigation has been revised to match standard desktop GUIs.</li> Themes have been improved, with (better) shadows under pop-up menus and (on one theme) under buttons.</li> Crates have been reshuffled so that now (most) users only depend on kas.</li> OpenGL on Linux is supported (mostly thanks to WGPU improvements).</li> KAS-text now exposes its fontdb::Database</code>, allowing text in SVGs.</li> </ul> Also, the author notes that this may be the last release of KAS</a> because of the lack of interest to the project.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/rust-gamedev.github.io</a>: #636 “Better solution for hosting images (or the site as a whole)?”</a>;</li> #785 “Discussions section”</a>.</li> </ul> </li> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #90 “Rust on Consoles”</a>;</li> #113 “Rust GameDev Community Assets Store”</a>;</li> #115 “Official WG meeting”</a>.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Discussions #</a> </h2> /r/rust_gamedev</a>: “Is WGSL a good choice?”</a>.</li> “Unity files patent for ECS in game engines that would probably affect many Rust ECS crates, including Bevy’s”</a>.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Graphite is looking for contributors</a> to help reach the 0.1 Alpha release and are participating as a Hacktoberfest</a> project.</li> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #25 - August 2021 Unknown — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 25th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rusty Jam #</a> </h2> </p> The first (unofficial) Rust Game Jam just completed! The Rusty Jam</a> is a game jam to work on games made completely in Rust. 19 games were completed and submitted over the one-week jam. The games were rated by the community, and the top three games were:</p> First place: Winter</a> by MrRafael</li> Second place: Murder User Dungeon</a> by Sheepyhead, cdsupina, and Nightlyside</li> Third place: To be Dire</a> by mdaffin, TimeLark and septum</li> </ul> The Rusty Jam will be back, so stay tuned on the Rusty Jam Discord Server</a> for more updates!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The eighth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in August. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a> and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on September 11th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Pixie Wrangler</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to play the game in your desktop browser!</figcaption> </figure> Pixie Wrangler (itch.io</a>, GitHub</a>) by @rparrett</a> is a puzzle game reminiscent of old school printed circuit board design software.</p> Help the Pixies get from their outputs to their inputs while doing battle with the intentionally less-than-ergonomic circuit design software. Pixie Wrangler is currently a prototype, but includes 9 complete levels.</p> Pixie Wrangler was built with Bevy 0.5</a> with support from these other great projects: bevy_webgl2</a>, bevy_prototype_lyon</a>, bevy_asset_ron</a>, bevy_easings</a>.</p> vange-rs</a> #</a> </h3> vange-rs on wgpu-0.10</figcaption> </figure> Vange-rs is a rewrite of the iconic Vangers game from 1998 in Rust, heavily utilizing GPU for rendering.</p> The rendering engine has seen a major upgrade. Essential shaders were rewritten into WGSL</a>, which streamlined the shader pipelines and culled out the dependency tree. Code was ported on the latest wgpu</a>-0.10 release and helped identify a few issues. Most importantly, this change made the game able to finally be distributed, and maybe even compiled for the Web in the future. Read more on the WGSL-related blog post</a>.</p> In order to take advantage of the new superpowers, the Rusty Vangers</a> game (the new working title) was published on Itch.io.</p> RecWars</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to play in your browser</figcaption> </figure> RecWars</a> by @martin-t is a free and open source Rust clone of RecWar</a>, a top down vehicle shooter.</p> The game is a work-in-progress, this month it gained split-screen for 2 players and an in-game console to change cvars - you can edit any of the configuration variables that define its gameplay balance while playing.</p> RecWars uses the macroquad</a> engine so it can be played on the desktop as well as in the browser</a>.</p> Vehicle Evolver Deluxe</a> #</a> </h3> Vehicle Evolver Deluxe in action!</figcaption> </figure> Vehicle Evolver Deluxe</a> (GitHub</a>, Twitter</a>) by @bauxitedev</a> is a simulation that runs in your browser, using AI (to be specific: genetic algorithms</a>) to try to build better and better vehicles. The vehicles have to overcome an obstacle course, starting with some slight hills, followed by steeper hills, and finally some jumps. The vehicles are made out of panels and wheels, connected together, similar to the game Besiege</a>, except in 2D. It was built using Rust and the Bevy game engine.</p> Try the live web demo here.</a> (It needs a relatively fast computer, on mobile browsers, it’ll run really slow.)</p> There is also an in-depth explanation available on how it works internally, in the form of an educational video.</a></p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Liminal Lab 000 #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to play the game in your desktop browser!</figcaption> </figure> Liminal Lab 000 (live version</a>) by @pebaz</a> is a tiny, minimalistic puzzle game with 1 puzzle designed around the concept of Liminal Spaces</a>. Liminal Spaces are usually abandoned, transitional places where life once thrived. These spaces are somehow familiar to the viewer but the viewer has never been there. The unsettling feeling of being alone comes from the realization that the viewer does not belong in that space but is merely passing through it.</p> Liminal Lab 000 was built using Macroquad</a>, utilizes voxel rendering with 8x8x8 chunks, and is hosted on Google Firebase Hosting.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Not Snake</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Not Snake (GitHub</a>, Itch</a>) by Michael Ramirez</a> is a 3D snake game where you don’t play as the snake.</p> Not Snake was developed using the Bevy game engine</a>. It was completed and released for free</a> in August and can be played on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and in browser (Chrome recommended) although there are fewer audio/performance issues running the executables versus the browser version.</p> There have been several large changes since the last update in June including adding new levels, new music, and adding a narrator who does an OK job of keeping score.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, /r/indiegames</a></em></p> A Day at the Movies</a> #</a> </h3> The kids getting ready to sneak into a movie</figcaption> </figure> “A Day at the Movies” (GitHub</a>, Itch</a>) by Michael Ramirez</a> is a short game about stealth, movies, and friendship.</p> “A Day at the Movies” was made using the Bevy game engine</a> in 7 days as part of the Rusty Jam. Despite the placeholder art and lack of audio, it can be played from start-to-finish and is literally guaranteed to bring a smile to all who play it. Just make sure to follow the instructions on how to get into the “Ferris the Crab” movie room.</p> It’s playable in-browser on itch</a> and the code can be viewed on GitHub</a>.</p> Sombervale</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Sombervale (GitHub</a>, itch.io</a>, Twitch</a>) by @blipjoy</a> is a game built in seven days for Rusty Jam. It is styled like an old handheld game with a 160x128 screen resolution and 16-color palette.</p> The top 3 things that went well for this project were the art, tilemap support, and ECS. On the art side, the silhouettes in the background turned out better than expected. The backlighting (or at least the impression of backlighting) looks quite nice, even in motion. Tilemap support was added near the end of the jam built on tiled</a>. It catapulted development progress from seeing major changes every day to making major changes every hour. shipyard</a> is the Entity Component System crate used in Sombervale. This had a tricky learning curve, but simplified complex interactions between entities.</p> Something that went poorly was choosing a scope that couldn’t possibly be completed on time. As usual, everything turned into a stretch goal! Secondly, a lot of time was allocated to features that didn’t make the cut. Much of this was a result of trying to be perfect instead of efficient. It’s a good game jam lesson that often has to be relearned the hard way.</p> Shattersong Online #</a> </h3> </p> Shattersong Online is an online sandbox game written in Rust, with the goal of supporting thousands of players in a shared universe, with hundreds of players per shard. In-game portals let players travel between shards hosted on separate physical servers.</p> Since the initial announcement in July, we have worked on restructuring large parts of the codebase to make adding new content more ergonomic. We tested out the new organization by adding a new monster type from scratch (pictured above).</p> Read the dev blog</a> for more info, follow @triplehex</a> on twitter for updates, and join the shattersong discord</a> for questions!</p> The Process</a> #</a> </h3> A smelter factory setup in The Process</figcaption> </figure> The Process</a> by @setzer22 is an upcoming game about factory building, process management, and carrot production, built with Rust using the Godot game engine!</p> This month has seen a lot of activity: More improvements to the level editor, in-game assets, and general gameplay improvements. But the main focus has been on a new building system with improved ergonomics. The game is now approaching a point where all the core mechanics for the factory simulation are in place, but more in-game content and assets are still required to reach the first playable demo.</p> This month the game has seen the following changes and improvements:</p> New assets like wooden planks</a>, machine parts</a> and mashed carrot cans</a>, with their in-game recipes.</li> A new machine, the centrifuge</a></li> A new system to tweak properties with OSD sliders</a> to speed up iteration times. Short explanation here</a>.</li> A new egui-powered main menu</a> for the main game screen.</li> Improvements to the building system: ghost markers</a>, ramps</a>, walls</a>, machines</a> and conveyor belts</a>!</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Murder-User Dungeon</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Murder-User Dungeon (MUD) (GitHub</a>, Itch</a>) by @Nightlyside</a>, @cdsupina</a>, @Shippyhead</a> is a 2D game made for the Rusty Jam 21</a> in just one week with the theme “Illusion of Security</em>”.</p> Tony is a young man. Finally having his own apartment is a good thing! He will learn how to live by himself and how to enjoy the small things in life like playing on his old retro computer: the Astaria 3600 running SafeOS 3.1.</p> However, you will quickly realize that the internet is not so friendly. You will meet new people in the Labyrinth(TM) game, and not being friendly to them can have a serious impact on your real life!</p> In Murder-User Dungeon you will juggle between exploring the Labyrinth(TM) game in your console, hiding from vengeful gamers and making sure you fulfill your human needs.</p> To win the game, you must reach the end of the Labyrinth(TM)!</p> </blockquote> The developers aimed to make the player feel that they were safe in their apartment at first - however as the game goes on and the player makes enemies of other gamers in the Labyrinth, they risk them coming to their apartment to get revenge.</p> The team split development of the game, so that each member could work independently on separate features. While @cdsupina</a> worked on the needs system and the graphics, @Sheepyhead</a> worked on the UI and menus, and @Nightlyside</a> worked on the console and Labyrinth gameplay.</p> MUD was developed using the Bevy game engine</a>, Rapier2D for collisions, Aseprite for the graphics, and a lot of free assets from the internet (which are credited at the end of the game’s description).</p> Linux and Windows builds are available on the Itch page, and feedback is welcomed!</p> Discussions: r/rust_gamedev</a>, r/rust</a>, Rusty Jam Discord</a></em></p> Theta Wave</a> #</a> </h3> </a> All mobs ported to Bevy Theta Wave</figcaption> </figure> Theta Wave</a> is an open-source space shooter game by developers @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a>. In the past month, they have been working towards porting Theta Wave to the Bevy Engine. Most of the work this month has been focused on implementing all of the existing mobs in Bevy and Rapier.</p> Progress on this port is going strong - you can find the GitHub issue for the port here</a>.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Shroom Kingdom</a> #</a> </h3> SHRM token distribution</figcaption> </figure> Shroom Kingdom (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an upcoming play-to-earn video game built with web technologies running on the NEAR Blockchain</a>.</p> This month the whitepaper draft</a> has been published and a lot of thoughts have been put into the token economics and how to integrate the game with the blockchain. The Shroom Kingdom DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organization) is looking for self-motivated people, who want to help build the project. DAO members will be rewarded with the $SHRM token, which will soon be launched on the NEAR mainnet after the final feedback round from NEAR core team members.</p> A Proof of Concept has also been published for the app, which will be built with Bevy and Rapier compiled to WebAssembly and which uses React for the GUI.</p> To incentivise early adoption of the project, an NFT airdrop</a> has been announced. The NFT will only be acquirable for a limited amount of time.</p> Fish Fight</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fish Fight</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, website</a>) is a love letter to its spiritual predecessor Duck Game</a>.</p> As promised</a>, after months of private prototyping of early invitees, the Fish Fight devs are finally ready to make their code and community channels available to the general public. They also launched their website! You can read the announcement post</a> and the design doc</a>.</p> TO BE DIRE</a> #</a> </h3> </p> TO BE DIRE by @mdaffin</a>, @TimeLark</a> and @septum</a>, is a prototype survival game made in a week with Bevy</a> for the first Rusty Jam</a>.</p> The main idea behind the design of TO BE DIRE is venturing out of the safe zone in order to survive, adding elements of gameplay like gathering resources, and maintaining the player character health and hunger, which are common for the genre, finally having the implementation of the monsters and fear system as a way to further address the first Rusty Jam’s theme “Illusion of Security”. Read more about TO BE DIRE’s design in the issues at GitLab</a>.</p> Download the game at itch.io</a> (available for Linux and Windows) and/or get the source code at GitLab</a>.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Exploring the caves</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In August, lots of preparation was done to get Veloren ready for the 0.11 release coming in September. Work was done on refactoring parts of the codebase, and making server administration more ergonomic. Towers were added, which allow for above-ground dungeons. Skill trees were tweaked for better progression. Modular weapons had a heavy amount of work put into them and were recently merged. Work was done to prevent the camera from clipping through walls as much.</p> Improvements were made to the physics system, as well as other optimizations to the real-time simulation system. Terrain persistence was completed and is now being tested on the main server. Balancing was done to loot tables, and more animations were added to characters. In September, 0.11 will be released. Come out to the release party on the 11th at 18:00 UTC</a>!</p> August’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #131</a>, #132</a>, #133</a>, #134</a>, #135</a>.</p> What’s the word</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A UI-based game in which you tap (or miss) buttons. Created with Bevy engine</a> and egui</a>, it demonstrates how small</em> you can scope your project for a (Rusty) game jam</a>!</p> Humankind’s Encyclopedia</a> #</a> </h2> </p> Humankind</a> is a Civilization-like game from Amplitude Studios</a>, out of Early Access a few weeks ago. While the game itself isn’t written in Rust, its gorgeous encyclopedia</a> and persona sharing service are written using rocket.rs</a>.</p> Since the encyclopedia has a big constraint of being used inside an embedded in-game browser that has a bit of performance issues with full JS frameworks the team opted for server-side rendering with the Tera</a> template framework.</p> I had people working on that without any prior rust experience, and they were ready to code in no time thanks to good language documentation & useful compiler messages.</p> We didn’t do anything particularly complex, but the safety of Rust combined with performance enabled us to make this run for way less $$. You don’t have to do complex system programming to profit from Rust’s benefits.</p> </blockquote> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-the-box features. A video</a> was released with updates from version 0.22. Another video</a> about the engine made by @GameFromScratch</a>, with the accompanying article that can be found here</a>.</p> </a></p> Lots has been happening with recent rg3d engine development. Physically-based rendering (PBR) was added. High dynamic range rendering is now supported, along with tone mapping, color grading, and gamma correction. Manual and auto-exposure functionality was added for cameras. There is now a widget for editing curves, and it supports custom curves. Lots of usability improvements were made, such as begin able to change the path of resources, UI performance gains, and better ways to manage assets.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Rewriting my mobile game in Rust targeting WASM</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @lucamoller</a> published a blog post</a> describing his experience trying to learn Rust by working on a hobby project to migrate his mobile game from a native C++ implementation to a Rust-based one targetting WASM.</p> The post is written in a storytelling manner going through the author’s motivations to work on this project and the main challenges they faced while learning Rust and implementing a game using WASM.</p> The resulting game, Panda Doodle</a>, runs smoothly on mobile device browsers, and the source code</a> was open sourced to help inspire other developers that wish to venture into implementing WASM-based games in Rust.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> Graphite Alpha - Coming very soon</figcaption> </figure> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-development vector and raster graphics editor built on a non-destructive node-based workflow.</p> Work has progressed on features for the imminent Alpha release. A project website has been designed and will launch this month. Crucial user-facing features have been added: saving/opening documents; a bug report dialog for panics; an auto-generated list of dependency license notices; and a new undo/redo system.</p> The new Path Tool shows Bézier anchor/control points (soon to be draggable). Rendering performance is much better and scrollbars now work with the infinite canvas. There’s a new bounding box around selected shapes that are transformable with Blender-inspired [G]/[R]/[S] keys.</p> Try it right now in your browser.</a> Graphite is making rapid progress towards becoming a non-destructive, procedural graphics editor suitable for replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. The public alpha release is coming very soon. Join the Discord</a> and get involved!</p> rx</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rx</a> (website</a>, code</a>, community</a>) by @cloudhead</a> is a modern and minimalist pixel editor written in Rust.</p> Rx is a pixel art editor/animator written in Rust in about 12K LOC, which combines a vim-like modal interface with a cursor-based editor.</p> Release v0.5 was just published. There are several new commands that help with color palettes. A flood fill tool has been added. You can now move between frames with the h</code> and l</code> keys. The command key :</code> has been fixed to help with non-ANSI layouts. Compatability was added for non x86_64 systems. Support was added for pasting from the clipboard into the command line. Animation rendering is now a lot smoother.</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> GGRS</a> #</a> </h3> </p> GGRS</a> by @g_schup</a> is a reimagination of the GGPO</a> P2P rollback network SDK written in 100% safe Rust.</p> Since the last update, GGRS has released version 0.4.4 and received performance updates and fixes, such as a sparse saving feature</a>. The authors also proudly present bevy_GGRS</a>!</p> bevy_GGRS is a plugin to integrate GGRS easily into the popular game engine bevy</a>. It features automatic saving and loading of components and resources defined by the user through bevy’s reflection tools. The plugin is currently in development and uses features that have not been released in bevy 0.5. With bevy 0.6 on the horizon, bevy_GGRS is planning to publish to crates.io</a>, as well.</p> If you are interested in developing with GGRS, check the following resources:</p> quick start guide</a></li> GGRS examples</a></li> bevy_GGRS examples</a></li> </ul> wgpu</a>-0.10 #</a> </h3> unannounced engine on wgpu-0.10</figcaption> </figure> The team has released wgpu-0.10 with a fully rewritten graphics abstraction (“wgpu-hal” instead of “gfx-hal”), as well as naga</a> version 0.6. Read more in Release of a Pure-Rust v0.10 and a Call For Testing</a>.</p> There were a few issues spotted, but overall it went smooth for such a big change. User libraries were quick to update: iced#1000</a>, kas#241</a>, pixels#187</a>, and others.</p> On the shader side, in addition to improved validation, hundreds of fixes to the produced outputs, the atomic operations are now supported when using WGSL</a> sources.</p> The release comes at a cost of DX11 backend, which isn’t there comparing to wgpu-0.9. On the plus side, the new GL backend performs much better. It runs most of the examples, and has been successfully tested on Raspberry Pi-3. Still, more work ahead to make it solid, and to support WebGL2 properly.</p> godot-egui</a>-0.1.8 #</a> </h3> You can now use egui to make Godot editor extensions!</figcaption> </figure> The egui</a> backend for godot-rust</a> is improving fast. Some bugs have been ironed out during this past month, and the integration has got several features:</p> The repository now includes an example of how to setup egui to create Godot editor plugins</a>. Contribution by @jacobsky.</li> Custom font support by drag & dropping font files right from Godot editor.</li> Updated crate to match latest egui 0.14.2</li> Configurable texture filtering.</li> Several bugfixes and improvements.</li> </ul> Additionally, a new theme editor</a> is in the works, which hopefully will be helpful to other egui backends as well!</p> Dimforge</a> #</a> </h2> </a></p> Dimforge</a> creates open-source Rust crates for numerical simulation. Some of the recent updates</a>:</p> New user-guide for Rapier’s JS bindings</a>.</li> nalgebra</a> v0.29 brings better soundness and non-Copy types support.</li> Rapier</a> 0.11 brings a full set of joint limits.</li> The work on unbreakable reduced-coordinates joints for Rapier is also in progress.</li> </ul> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> Site fails to build #758</a></li> Better solution for hosting images #636</a></li> Netlify preview for PRs #174</a></li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all the news for last month, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or the /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news and updates about the ecosystem every day!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #24 - July 2021 Unknown — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 24th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The seventh Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in July. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>, and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on at the next meetup on August 14th</a>, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Out for a llama ride</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In July, work focused on larger tasks that tend to come up between versions. Optimizations were made for networking with compression, and message queue improvements (devblog #127</a>). Modular weapons are in the works, which will allow for much more dynamic ways to choose what you fight with. The project also hit 300k lines of code.</p> Many contributors are working on the art and asset front, with lots of new SFX, models, and UI elements making their way into the game. Caves are also getting a lot of love, and a bloom feature is being integrated. Some members broke down what they plan to have done by the 0.11 release at the beginning of September, and you can read about that in devblog #130</a>.</p> July’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #127</a>, #128</a>, #129</a>, #130</a>.</p> Zemeroth</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Zemeroth</a> is a turn-based hexagonal tactics game, developed by @ozkriff</a>.</p> This month, an early access version of the game was released as a free download on Google Play</a> - if you have an Android device, give it a try!</p> Harvest Hero Origins</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Harvest Hero Origins is an arcade wave defense game by Gemdrop Games</a>, built in Rust on top of Emerald</a>. A Steam</a> page has recently been made and the game is set to release sometime at the end of this summer.</p> Battle the oncoming waves of enemies with a friend in local co-op, unlock new playable characters and skins, and make your way to the top of the leaderboard!</p> Additionally, HHO will be at PAXWest</a> this year, so come check out their booth if you’ll be there!</p> Shroom Kingdom</a> #</a> </h3> Extracting the game assets</figcaption> </figure> Shroom Kingdom (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an upcoming play-to-earn video game built with web technologies running on the NEAR Blockchain</a>. In a recent blog post</a> you can read the motivation behind this.</p> You can play with your favorite plumber brothers. Build your own levels or play levels from others. Every level built on Shroom Kingdom is stored on the blockchain as an NFT.</p> By playing the game you can either actively earn SHRM tokens via participating in game activities or earn them passively, if other people play or like your levels. The SHRM token will be used to acquire in-game purchases such as unlocking new building blocks or increasing level upload limits.</p> You can either extract existing assets from Super Mario Maker 2 or use compatible game mod files from e.g. Gamebanana</a>. The asset extractor is already working, but support for more file types needs to be added.</p> The game will likely be built with Bevy</a> and Rapier</a> compiled to WebAssembly. Next steps include developing a Proof of Concept.</p> Wicked Potions</a> #</a> </h3> Match ingredients to brew wicked potions</figcaption> </figure> Wicked Potions</a> is a match-three game developed by @nikl_me</a> and jennifervphan</a> for the Bored Pixels Jam 8</a>. They wrote the game using the Bevy game engine</a> and created all of the textures and audio.</p> The main focus of the game during the one-week jam period were the assets. After the voting period, the developers plan to extend the game mechanics and story a bit more.</p> The code for the game is available on GitHub</a>.</p> The Process</a> #</a> </h3> The godot_egui backend powering a new inventory UI for The Process</figcaption> </figure> The Process</a> by @setzer22 is an upcoming game about factory building, process management, and carrot production, built with Rust using the Godot game engine!</p> Continuing with last month’s migration of old GDScript code to ECS in Rust, this month’s main focus has been on porting the GUI code. This has resulted in the birth of a Godot integration for egui</a> that now powers the game’s interface.</p> This month has seen the following changes and improvements:</p> Finished migration of character controller code to ECS style. Now with 300% more jumps!</a></li> Implemented better ambient lighting</a> and enable using different skies for radiance and display. This required a forked godot version</a>.</li> Implement a new inventory and toolbar</a> interface using egui.</li> Integrated the puffin profiler</a> into the game using the godot_egui integration.</li> </ul> Robo Instructus: 2 Years Old</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Two years ago Alex Butler</a> released the “Robo Instructus</a>” puzzle game on Steam</a> & itch.io</a>.</p> This month Alex released a devlog post “Robo Instructus: 2 Years Old”</a> about how well the game did in the last year: Sales by platform/country/OS, player feedback & reviews, etc.</p> The game also continues to receive updates, the latest 1.33 version</a> includes full 简体中文 & Español language support.</p> Fish Fight</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fish Fight (Twitter</a>) is a continuation of the demo project known as Fish Game - made by the same team of people (@fedor_games</a> and @erlend_sh</a>), now operating as independents. Their goal is to make a published game, written entirely in Rust and developed as openly as possible. They are hoping to go public with the open source repo within a month or so.</p> Changes and improvements from the last month:</p> Pre-alpha trailer released!</a></li> Loads of new weapons added: Mind-controlled Jellyfish</li> Kick-bombs (bomberman-style)</li> Cursed Skull</li> Handcannon</li> Gatling gun</li> Sproingers</li> Pirate Boots</li> ..and more!</li> </ul> </li> Whole new Environmentals system added for map-wide events (mass-shark attack incoming!)</li> Physics doc & improvements</li> </ul> Theta Wave</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Left: Theta Wave with Amethyst, Right: Theta Wave with Bevy (so far)</figcaption> </figure> Theta Wave</a> is an open-source space shooter game by developers @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a>. It is one of the showcase games for the Amethyst Engine</a>. In the past month, they finished the “Organization”</a> update and made the decision to start working on porting the game to the Bevy engine. You can find the Bevy version of Theta Wave here</a>.</p> Progress on this port is going strong - you can find the GitHub issue for the port here</a>.</p> Bounty Bros.</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to play the game in your browser!</figcaption> </figure> Bounty Bros.</a> is a prototype, top-down adventure game, developed by Katharos Technology</a> as a testing ground for a future commercial game.</p> The last two months of development added lots of new features:</p> Integrated a new physics system and character controller that allows for smoother character movement.</li> Added a new damage system and made cactuses hurt the player.</li> Added a life bar and a game over screen.</li> Added a pause menu and a fullscreen button.</li> Started work on enemy pathfinding.</li> </ul> All the new features can be tested in the latest web demo</a>, and the blog post</a> has the full details of what’s new and what’s coming next!</p> Flesh</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Flesh</a> is a 2D horizontal SHMUP by @Im_Oab</a>, with a hand-drawn animation style and an organic/fleshy theme.</p> This month, a Steam page</a> was published for the game - it can now be wishlisted, ahead of a planned release later this year!</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> ggez</a> #</a> </h3> </p> ggez</code> 0.6 has been released! ggez</code> is a lightweight cross-platform game framework for making 2D games with minimum friction, with an API inspired by Love2D.</p> This release includes many additions, improvements, and bug fixes, including a MeshBatch</code> type for drawing many instances of the same geometry, improvements to canvas drawing, updated winit</code> dependencies that function more smoothly on Linux under Wayland, better error handling, and more. The whole changelog is available here</a>.</p> More importantly, ggez</code> is now maintained by a group of volunteers, with the original maintainer stepping down from active development after over four years. The new maintainers are mostly responsible for the 0.6 release, and will hopefully be bringing good ideas and tech to the library for years to come. For details, see this github issue</a>.</p> Macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> A Macroquad game (Zemeroth</a>) running on Android!</figcaption> </figure> Macroquad</a> is a cross-platform game framework, inspired heavily by Raylib.</p> This month, a new tutorial</a> was published on the Macroquad website, showing how a game written with the framework can be ported to Android. It details all of the steps, from building to packaging for a release on Google Play.</p> In other news, Macroquad used to depend on rodio+cpal for audio on native platforms and a custom WebAudio implementation for web, with a custom abstraction on top of both. This month, Macroquad’s audio system was reimplemented on top of raw OS APIs - ALSA, OpenSLES, CoreAudio and WASAPI. This functionality has now been extracted into a crate: quad-snd</a>.</p> Emerald</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Emerald</a> is a 2D portable game engine aiming to export to every possible target: Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch.</p> In addition to being portable, Emerald</a> aims to be easy to use while providing quality features like built-in physics and Aseprite integration.</p> If any of this sounds good to you, and you’d like to be a part of it, Emerald</a> welcomes all contributors to help make an extremely portable game engine! Join them on their Discord server</a>.</p> Starframe</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Starframe</a> by @molentum</a> is a work-in-progress game engine for physics-y sidescrolling 2D games.</p> This month’s noteworthy development was particle-based ropes</a> capable of full two-way coupling with rigid bodies, demonstrated above. Capsule-shaped colliders were also added.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Hands-on Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> “Hands-on Rust: Effective Learning through 2D Game Development and Play”</a> by Herbert Wolverson is now in print, as a full color paperback and ebook. The book teaches Rust through game development examples, and is targeted at readers who have some experience with writing code in other languages. It teaches beginner to intermediate-level Rust. Hands-on Rust also teaches high-level game development concepts, notably Entity-Component System (ECS) theory.</p> After walking you through installing Rust, a few simple examples teach the language basics. Then you put these together to make “Flappy Dragon” - a simple Flappy Bird clone. The book then changes gear and begins to build a dungeon crawler (roguelike) with tile graphics.</p> Outside of the USA, Hands-on Rust is available through Amazon</a>.</p> Herbert also published the first “Hands-on Rust bonus content”</a>. The bonus content extends Flappy Dragon to include smooth movement and animated sprites.</p> Writing an RPG using rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click here</a> to see a video of the character controller in action!</figcaption> </figure> Dimitry Stepanov (aka @mrDIMAS) published a tutorial series</a> about making an RPG in Rust using the rg3d game engine. In part one of the series, he builds a character controller from scratch. While that may not sound very exciting, it’s still a great way to learn the basics of rg3d and Rust gamedev in general!</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> {{ image_figure( alt=“Graphite logo” src=“graphite_scream.png” caption=“A recreation of “The Scream” in Graphite by Norgate“) }}</p> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-development vector and raster graphics editor built on a non-destructive node-based workflow.</p> In the past month, the editor has gained numerous vector editing features, including moving layers with the keyboard or mouse, filling and copying colors, flipping and aligning selected layers, and setting blend modes and layer opacity.</p> Scrollbars, rulers, and thumbnails are now functional. Full screen support has been added, along with a hotkey to center the artwork. An options bar with tool-specific settings and actions has been implemented, currently allowing the number of sides of a polygon to be selected. The order of layers can now be changed using hotkeys.</p> Try it right now in your browser.</a> Graphite is making rapid progress towards becoming a non-destructive, procedural graphics editor suitable of replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. The release of Graphite 0.1 is anticipated in the coming month; come join the Discord</a> to help make it happen!</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> discord-sdk</a> #</a> </h3> discord-sdk</a> is an open source implementation of the Discord Game SDK</a> by Embark Studios</a>.</p> This month saw the release of the initial 0.1.0</code></a> (and 0.1.1</code></a>) version of the crate, which implements initial support for:</p> Activities</a></li> Lobbies</a></li> Overlay</a></li> Relationships</a></li> Users</a></li> Application registration (so your game can be launched by Discord)</li> </ul> The API is still rough, but should be in a good enough state to try out!</p> rkyv</a> #</a> </h3> rkyv</a> is a zero-copy deserialization framework for Rust. It’s an alternative to serde that makes it easy to quickly and safely load data into memory.</p> This month, rkyv 0.7 was released with many new features:</p> Endian-agnostic serialization</a></li> Greatly improved performance</a></li> Enhanced no_std</code> support</li> Wrapper types</a></li> A new BTreeMap</code> implementation</a></li> Reduced dependencies</li> Support for some common external crates</li> </ul> The full changelog can be found on the release page</a>.</p> Throne</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Throne</a> is a new scripting language for game prototyping and story logic. The language is rule-based, which allows certain types of logic to be expressed more concisely than using an object-based language, while remaining fast to execute and easy to embed in an existing engine. Throne can be experimented with in the web playground</a>.</p> godot_egui</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot_egui</a> is an integration of the egui</a> crate for the Godot engine using Rust, enabling highly dynamic and performant user interfaces in an immediate-mode style in Godot.</p> Godot has a great GUI system, so why use godot_egui</code> instead? A more in-depth rationale can be found in the crate’s README, but the main reason is to provide a GUI system for godot-rust games that is closer to Rust’s data driven philosophy.</p> Unlike other egui integrations, godot_egui</code> has the special feature of being embedded as a custom Godot scene tree node. This effectively allows combining Godot’s retained mode UI and container-based placement with the simplicity of immediate-mode style GUI code of egui</code>, getting the best of both worlds.</p> The github repository</a> has an example project and usage instructions to get you started with immediate-mode GUI programming with Godot and Rust!</p> wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Following the Family Reunion</a> initiative, wgpu</a> team has been busy rebuilding the graphics infrastructure. The new D3D12 backend has been merged, which concludes the trip of moving (or rewriting?) all of the implementation into Rust. In addition to a “lean and mean” implementation of the host API side, which turned out to match the WebGPU API very well, the new backend works with naga</a> exclusively for generation of HLSL shaders. This is in contrast with gfx-backend-dx12, which only supported SPIRV-Cross.</p> The team also wrote the blog post Release of v0.9 and the Future of wgpu</a>. One of the interesting bits is gfx</code> repository switching to maintenance mode.</p> Last but not the least, Francesco Cattoglio described their adventure with rewriting Franzplot</a> on a new blog hosted by the wgpu team. This blog will accumulate stories of wgpu users and their interesting projects.</p> GGRS</a> #</a> </h3> </p> GGRS</a> by @g_schup</a> is a reimagination of the GGPO</a> P2P rollback network SDK written in 100% safe Rust.</p> The freshly released version 0.4 comes with tons of fixes for P2P sessions with up to four players and any number of spectators. More importantly, the repository now features a tutorial</a> and full game examples</a> for every type of session.</p> Bevy Retrograde</a> #</a> </h3> Bevy Retrograde Physics Map example</figcaption> </figure> Bevy Retrograde</a> (formerly Bevy Retro) is a Bevy</a> plugin designed for making pixel-perfect games as easily as possible.</p> This project was released under the Katharos License</a>. This license has moral and ethical implications that you may or may not agree with, so please read it before making use of this project.</p> In the last two months, Bevy Retrograde has gotten a major update and is also on crates.io for the first time!</p> The transform system was migrated to use Bevy’s own transform system.</li> The pixel-perfect alignment restriction can now be optionally disabled on a per-sprite basis. This makes it possible to do smooth character and projectile movement if desired.</li> The Heron</a> physics engine ( which is powered by Rapier ) was integrated, with a custom extension for automatically creating collision shapes from sprite outlines.</li> It was decided to start work on migrating Bevy Retrograde to use Bevy’s own rendering abstraction, making it compatible with the larger Bevy rendering ecosystem. This will hopefully be finished in the next release.</li> </ul> More information can be found in the Bevy Retrograde release notes</a>.</p> You can ask questions or give feedback for Bevy Retrograde on GitHub</a>.</p> Quilkin</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Quilkin</a> is a non-transparent UDP proxy specifically designed for use with large scale multiplayer dedicated game server deployments, to ensure security, access control, telemetry data, metrics and more.</p> This month saw the initial 0.1.0</a> release of the project, as well as announcement blog posts from project co-founders Embark Studios</a> and Google Cloud</a>:</p> Embark Studios: Say hi to Quilkin, an open-source UDP proxy</a></li> Google Cloud: Introducing Quilkin: open-source UDP proxies built for game server communication</a></li> </ul> Quilkin is being actively developed and would love contributors and feedback. Please join the Discord</a>, mailing list</a> or follow the project on Twitter</a>.</p> bevy_asset_loader</a> #</a> </h3> @nikl_me</a> wrote a blog post</a> about creating bevy_asset_loader</a>, a plugin to simplify asset handling in Bevy</a> applications. The post outlines how bevy_asset_loader can be used and discusses future improvements to the crate.</p> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #23 - June 2021 Unknown — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The sixth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in June. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>, and are also streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on in a future meetup, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> taileater #</a> </h3> </p> taileater (itch.io</a>, GitHub</a>) is a open source puzzle game in which you eat your own tail to win.</p> The game is programmed in Rust using the Bevy engine.</p> Egregoria</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Egregoria</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by @Uriopass</a> is a simulation oriented city builder that tries to replicate modern society as well as possible.</p> It recently upgraded from a 2D top-down view to a 3D third-person camera as seen in the screenshot above.</p> Elevated roads and bridges are now possible, allowing to build complex highway interchanges</a>.</p> Some technical details around the renderer with more screenshots, along with an architectural overview of the project can be read in the 9th devlog</a>.</p> Open Combat</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Open Combat</a> (/r/OpenCombatGame</a>, Discord</a>, Forum</a>) is a real time tactical game directly inspired by Close Combat Series</a>. The player takes control of soldier units and orders them to win the battles from a top down 2D view.</p> The project recently started with Rust language after a Python language proof of concept in 2017. More info is available at opencombat.bux.fr</a>, and you can find a presentation</a> video and a game making of video</a> on YouTube.</p> Battleship.rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Battleship.rs</a> by Deepu</a> is an open source Battleship game for the terminal built in Rust using the tui-rs</a> crate.</p> The game uses different ship shapes, unlike the traditional vertical/horizontal shapes, and has multiple game rules to choose from. There are two difficulty levels as well. The game is supported in Linux, Mac and Docker.</p> If you have docker installed, you can play the game instantly by running</p> docker</span> run</span> --rm -it</span> deepu105/battleship:main </span></code></pre> The next iteration would be to support a WebAssembly version of the same.</p> Blightmud</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Blightmud</a> (Discord</a>) is a mud client for the terminal inspired by tintin++</a> and tinyfugue</a> allowing users to connect and get immersed in the worlds offered by text based online multi user dungeons known as muds.</p> The project was birthed in April of 2020 and has come a long way since. It now offers granular scripting access using lua</a>, plugin handling, built in text-to-speech (via Speech dispatcher</a>), split view scrolling, modern telnet protocols, and TLS connections to name a few.</p> The Hat Chooses the Wizard</a> #</a> </h3> Runs on real hardware!</figcaption> </figure> The Hat Chooses the Wizard is a 2D platformer for the Game Boy Advance.</p> It was made for this year’s Game Maker’s Toolkit (GMTK) game jam with the theme joined together and came in the top 25% of over 5800 entries. The game plays over 12 levels with the core mechanic being to throw your hat and then accelerate towards it. You can play it on a web-based emulator embedded on the itch</a> page.</p> The game is written in pure Rust and uses agb</a> to interface with the hardware. The library is designed to allow you to write games without needing a detailed understanding of the hardware while still giving full access to all of its capabilities. It is under active development with plenty more features on the way.</p> You can find the source code for the game here</a> and all feedback is welcome.</p> Themengi</a> #</a> </h3> Demonstration of natural language parser with temporary words and grammar.</figcaption> </figure> Themengi</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a puzzle adventure game where you learn an alien language, with completely unknown words and grammar, to navigate the world and find your way home.</p> This month the first devlog</a> for Themengi was published, discussing its natural language parser using Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, the choice to use Bevy, a texture upscaling technique for faithful pixel art rendering, and implementing an outline shader in the Bevy render pipeline.</p> Dango</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Cute rice dumplings</figcaption> </figure> Dango</a> (GitHub</a>) is a little multiplayer blob physics sandbox made by @ErnWong</a> as a tribute to the Dango Daikazoku</a> from Clannad</a>. It was made using various libraries from the Rust community, including the Bevy</a> game engine, the NPhysics</a> physics engine, and the CrystalOrb</a> networking library. To avoid the costs of running a server, Dango currently runs the server in the browser and generates a unique URL that lets other players to join using WebRTC.</p> FishGame</a> #</a> </h3> </p> FishGame</a> is a multiplayer brawler game made in macroquad</a>.</p> FishGame started as a nakama-rs</a> showcase, but now it’s getting more life as an independent game. To make a transition from a tech demo to a real game, lots of playtesting and fine-tuning happened this month. Most noticeable improvements: a new physics system with throwable everything and a new zoom-to-fit camera system.</p> Hyper Farmer</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The dubiously named Hyper Farmer</a> was made for the GMTK Game Jam using the Bevy engine. For some reason, the player has to pick up all the hay from their fields using a giant laser slung between two tractors. Apart from the bevy_game_template</a>, all the artwork, music, and code was made over about 24 hours. The game can be played in the browser</a>, and native builds are available on github releases</a>.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a picturesque puzzle platformer-without the platforming. Solve mind-bending color puzzles, unlock new areas of a vibrant hub world, and talk to NPCs to unravel the mysteries of a world you left behind!</p> Way of Rhea is being produced by @masonremaley</a>. Latest Way of Rhea developments:</p> Most biomes now have narrative arcs, experienced in part through the new dialogue system</a>.</li> @masonremaley</a> published a blog post, When to Rewrite</em></a> outlining how he views the rewrite vs improve tradeoff in the Way of Rhea engine.</li> Controller support was added, controls glyphs shown in game automatically reflect the most recently used input device.</li> Fixes a player reported bug where undo/redo resulted in a temporary slowdown due to a lack of communication with the sleep system.</li> More puzzles!</li> </ul> Weegames</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Weegames</a> is a fast-paced minigame collection. The web version now has a counter which tells you how many of the 41 minigames you’ve played. Also, the game shows a newly-added loading screen while downloading the initial assets.</p> Note: These updates have not yet been rolled out to the downloadable Windows version.</p> Flesh #</a> </h3> demo build</figcaption> </figure> Flesh by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. This month, an internal demo build was released, with a development journal available on Google Drive</a>.</p> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Turns out the cave wasn’t empty</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In June, Veloren released 0.10. During the release party, some of the developers joined a voice call to stream the game and answer some questions about development. You can watch that stream here</a>. A lot of metrics were recorded during the launch, and you can read about them in blog #124</a>. At peak, 118 players were playing at the same time during the launch.</p> The plugins system received a tutorial about how to get started. Caves were overhauled with lots of new content. Veloren has officially moved fully over to wgpu, which you can read all about in blog #125</a>. Work has been done on hot reloading for easier access of assets in game. Lots of new models were added to the game, and bosses in dungeons are being overhauled with more skills to diversify combat.</p> June’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #123</a>, #124</a>, #125</a>, #126</a>.</p> Projectris</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Projectris</a> is like Tetris, but in 2D and 3D at the same time. As the 3D piece falls, you can manipulate it, but all that matters are the shadows it casts on the 2D game boards on either side, each of which is played independently.</p> While the full concept is already prototyped, there are still many features to implement before this is a real game: scoreboard, increasing fall speed, game over, JUICE.</p> @bonsairobo</a> is not actively working on this, but is happy to accept PRs</a>.</p> The Process</a> #</a> </h3> Building the world, one voxel at a time</figcaption> </figure> The Process</a> by @setzer22 is an upcoming game about factory building, process management, and carrot production, built with Rust using the Godot game engine!</p> In this month, the main focus has been towards the addition of a new terrain editor to speed up the creation of game levels. Terrain meshes are built using smooth voxels using the implementation in the building blocks</a> crate.</p> This month has seen the following changes and improvements:</p> The new terrain editor</a>, with a minimalistic GUI built in Godot itself.</li> A new island</a>, fully made and procedurally textured with the new editor</li> Implemented random factory maintenance events</a>.</li> Migration of several old GDScript code into Rust, using the ECS pattern, like the system for character movement</a>.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Not Snake</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Not Snake</a> is a snake game in 3D with a twist: you’re the snake’s food!</p> Check out the web version on the game’s itch.io page</a>.</p> Space:CAKES</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Space:CAKES</a> is a sliding, repeating and funky puzzler about reaching the delicious cupcake across your spaceship. Made for the GMTK Game Jam.</p> You play as a cute alien, who has a limited amount of steps. He turns green when he can walk freely, but once he runs out of steps, he becomes red and can only push on crates. Luckily, some crates contain +1 or +2 steps for him, as long as he can push one into a laser.</p> </blockquote> sokoban-sokoban</a> #</a> </h3> </p> sokoban-sokoban</a> (source code</a>) by @trouv</a> is a sokoban-like puzzle game made in 48 hours for the GMTK 2021 game jam.</p> Somebody messed up the graveyard! You can fix it, but your movements are joined together. More specifically, the location of the gravestones in the level’s movement table determines which movements are joined to which. When two movements are “joined”, the associated input performs BOTH movements!</p> </blockquote> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> thRustEngine - with simple shooter game demo #</a> </h3> </p> This is a simple descent/quake style shooter written to demo thRustEngine</a>. The current repo is a placeholder.</p> It loads wavefront.OBJ, and Quake1/Quake3 BSP worlds, converted to an internal format for collision and rendering. It uses clustered forward+ dynamic lighting and normal maps, and loads textures asynchronously.</p> The future direction depends on community feedback (a public shared crate is planned). The current intention is to find a few close collaborators.</p> Demo videos: free quake map demo</a>, custom map demo</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent engine updates:</p> Initial support for custom rendering techniques.</li> Word-based wrapping for FormattedText.</li> Ability to specify material search options when loading a model.</li> Render sky box in a single draw call.</li> Fix for resource management issues.</li> Fix for FBX loader in case of invalid mappings.</li> Fix for triangulator.</li> Physics for terrains.</li> Heightfield visualization.</li> Ability to pause sound contexts.</li> editable</code> flag for text boxes.</li> Various bug fixes and small improvements.</li> </ul> rusty-editor updates:</p> Ability to add/remove/edit sound sources</li> Model import dialog window.</li> Embed and fonts icons in the binary, which makes package distribution easier.</li> .deb</code> and .rpm</code> packages for Linux</li> Camera fix + ability to preview scene cameras</li> Icons for “shapeless” (lights, sound sources) objects in the scene.</li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> A Trig-less Line of Sight Algorithm for 2D Games</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @basstabs</a> published a tutorial that explains how to write a line of sight algorithm for 2D games in Rust without using trigonometry or square roots. It includes vector diagrams and typeset math to explain the ideas behind each stage of the algorithm, source code for each step, tests to verify the accuracy of the methods, and suggestions for further improvements. Additionally, the repository</a> contains benchmarks and a sample application written in ggez</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> When to Rewrite</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @masonremaley</a> wrote a blog post</a> offering an opinion on rewrites vs incremental migrations informed by his work on the Way of Rhea</a> engine.</p> A working system is a valuable asset. It works. It lets you test new ideas cheaply. Don’t take that for granted.</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Writing the Bevy Retro Renderer</a> #</a> </h3> @katharostech</a> published an article about their experiences writing the render for Bevy Retro</a>. They walk through the different strategies and APIs they tried and explain why they wrote their own renderer in the first place.</p> Game Development with Rust</a> #</a> </h3> @thebracket</a> published an article on the current state of Rust Game Development. It covers a few games and engines made in Rust, links to some resources for integrating Rust into major game engines (Unity and Unreal). The article then links to some tutorials and resources for learning Rust game development at different skill and experience levels.</p> How to make plugins system with Rust and WebAssembly</a> #</a> </h3> @zakarumych</a> published an article about their experience creating a fully safe plugins system using plugins compiled to WebAssembly. It provides reasoning for choosing WASM in specific scenario and contains strategies for interacting with WASM modules embedded into an application, including dealing with dynamic memory of the module, string and array operations, function pointers, etc.</p> Getting Started with ECS using Planck ECS</a> #</a> </h3> </p> planck_ecs</a> by @jojolepro</a> is a minimalist and safe ECS library.</p> This month @jojolepro</a> released a tutorial</a> that describes how to use ECSes in general and planck_ecs</a> specifically.</p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Sugarcubes</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Sugarcubes</a> by @henryksloan</a> is a tool for designing and testing automata.</p> Sugarcubes allows for easy creation of models used in the theory of computing. It is designed to be a more intuitive and useful alternative to JFLAP, the most popular tool for designing automata and formal languages. It uses macroquad for the editor, and egui for the toolbars. Sugarcubes currently features a fully functional finite automaton editor and simulator, and many other models, editing features and simulations are planned.</p> You can check out a live WASM demo here</a>, or the source code on GitHub</a>.</p> Rusty Slider</a> #</a> </h3> Supports syntax highlighting of code blocks</figcaption> </figure> Rusty Slider</a> by @ollej</a> is a markdown slideshow viewer written with macroquad.</p> The game engine Macroquad can be used for more than just games. It’s also a great way to quickly build multi-platform tools with graphics.</p> It’s possible to write presentations in plain text using Markdown. The application runs natively on all major platforms, and can also be used within a browser.</p> Supports headers, bold/italic, blockquotes, lists, and code blocks with syntax highlighting.</li> Automatically change slides.</li> Themes separated from content.</li> Toggle a CRT shader.</li> </ul> The latest feature added was to execute bash code blocks. The output of the execution will be shown below the code block. This is meant to be used for demo purposes, to show actual results of commands.</p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> Geometric cherry tree artwork by BillyDM, winner of last month’s first Graphite art contest</figcaption> </figure> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-development vector and raster graphics editor built on a non-destructive node-based workflow.</p> Since last newsletter, the editor has received the ability to select layers via the layer panel and by clicking or dragging a box selection in the viewport. Selected layers can be deleted, duplicated, and copy/pasted.</p> It is now possible to create, edit, and close multiple documents in their own editor tabs. Additional frontend cleanup and polish has also improved many parts of the editor experience.</p> Lastly, support for transforms was added to the layers and document, paving the way for moving/scaling/rotating layers and the whole document within the viewport.</p> Try it right now in your browser.</a> Graphite is making rapid progress towards becoming a non-destructive, procedural graphics editor suitable of replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. Please join the Discord</a> - and consider asking for a tour of the code and how you can help!</p> texture_generator</a> v0.5 #</a> </h3> An depth image example</figcaption> </figure> texture_generator</a> by Orchaldir</a> is a library to generate textures, and a library to use those textures to render tilemaps.</p> This month the v0.5 version was released. Some of the updates:</p> The editor was switched to Iced</a>.</li> Layered textures.</li> Door handles.</li> More options for depth calculation: depth gradient along X or Y and barrel shape.</li> Furniture can now have a fixed size or fill the selected area</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> backroll-rs</a> and GGRS</a> #</a> </h3> backroll-rs</a> (Discord</a>, crates.io</a>) by @james7132</a> and GGRS</a> by @g_schup</a> are pure Rust implementations of the GGPO</a> rollback networking library.</p> Evo Moment 37</a>: Only offline or with rollback!</figcaption> </figure> Rollback networking is a peer-to-peer network technique designed to hide network latency in fast-paced games with precise inputs. Traditional techniques account for network transmission time by delaying the game execution, resulting in a sluggish game-feel. Rollback uses input prediction and speculative execution instead. Upon receiving inputs from remote clients, resimulation of incorrect game states occurs. This allows for gameplay that “feels just like offline”. The open source standard for rollback netcode GGPO</a> is used in successful games like Skullgirls, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R or Fightcade. For further explanation about rollback, click here</a>.</p> Two projects in Rust were independently created to provide a working implementation as well as helpful resources for developers. backroll-rs features an added abstraction for the transportation layer and also provides a bevy plugin, bevy-backroll</a>. GGRS replaces the C-style callback API of GGPO with a simpler, more understandable control flow. The authors of both libraries recommend backroll-rs for development, as it is currently more actively collaborated on. GGRS is recommended as a learning resource and entry point, with a plethora of internal documentation and explanation.</p> The main requirement to make use of both presented libraries is determinism in your game execution. Resimulation requires that the result of progressing the game state depending on the given inputs yield the exact same results every time. Additionally, you need to be able to load, save and progress your gamestate without rendering the outcome.</p> If you are interested in integrating rollback networking into your game or just want to chat with other rollback developers (not limited to Rust), check out the GGPO Developers Discord</a>!</p> CrystalOrb</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Interactive demo</a> that uses the Rapier</a> physics engine.</figcaption> </figure> CrystalOrb</a> by @ErnWong</a> is a new networking library that aims to help fast-paced client-server games synchronize their game state across multiple clients. Just like backroll-rs</a> and GGRS</a>, each CrystalOrb client predicts the next game state without waiting for other remote players’ inputs to arrive. Unlike backroll-rs’s and GGRS’s peer-to-peer approach which only send input data between its peers, CrystalOrb relies on having a server to send authoritative snapshots of the entire game state to each client. In response, each client unconditionally rolls-back to that snapshot. Although this may lead to higher network and memory usage, it means that CrystalOrb clients can join and leave at any time, and games that cannot guarantee full-determinism can still work with CrystalOrb.</p> This library was written as a learning exercise for the author, and as such, the author warns that this library may not be suitable for serious games.</p> There is an interactive demo</a> of CrystalOrb that features the Rapier</a> physics engine.</p> glutin</a> (and winit</a>) #</a> </h3> This cursor may be waiting [in vain], but your patience shall be rewarded.</figcaption> </figure> glutin</a> is a low-level library for OpenGL context creation, written in pure Rust. glutin</a> uses and re-exports winit</a>, which handles window creation and management, as well as various input devices.</p> This month, glutin 0.27.0 was released, which makes glutin use the latest version of winit (0.25.0), which was released around a month prior to glutin 0.27.0. Usually, we try to keep glutin synced with winit, but we couldn’t quite manage to do it this time since the person who’d usually take responsibility for releasing a new version of glutin was unavailable, and no-one had the role of “back-up releaser”. @maroider</a> has offered to fill this role for now.</p> The upgrade to winit 0.25.0 brings with it a slew of bugfixes, a couple of new features, and a single breaking change to WindowBuilderExtMacOS::with_activation_policy</a>, which has been replaced by EventLoopExtMacOS::set_activation_policy</a>. For a full list of changes, refer to winit’s changelog</a>.</p> The departure and disappearance of a couple of maintainers has left winit in need of someone knowledgeable with X11 in order to review pull requests and address various issues. Other backends also need some more love, but X11 is the most pressing.</p> The project could also use more helping hands in general, in anything from mapping out platform differences and triaging bugs to reviewing PRs and tackling outstanding issues. The current maintainers would also be happy to have you even if all you do is answer platform-specific questions for them. If you’re interested, come say hi in their matrix</a> channel or on any of the other services</a> bridged with matrix.</p> egui</a> #</a> </h3> </p> egui</a> by @emilk</a> is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI library in pure Rust.</p> This month version 0.13</a> of egui was released, with a new visual style, resizable panels, more powerful plots, and more.</p> You can try out egui in the online demo</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> erupt</a> #</a> </h3> </p> erupt</a> by @Friz64</a> provides bindings to the Vulkan API.</p> Since being last mentioned in the newsletter shortly after its release, erupt has undergone significant development. The generator, erupt’s heart, has been rewritten from scratch with the aim to improve maintainability. On top of that, many bugs were fixed, the function loader was rewritten and usability was improved while always keeping up to date with the latest Vulkan Headers as best as possible.</p> The ecosystem has gained traction, with many people using the crate for their projects. Pure Rust Vulkan allocators with support for erupt have been released.</p> smooth-bevy-cameras</a> #</a> </h3> smooth-bevy-cameras</a> by @bonsairobo</a> is a small plugin for Bevy Engine that makes it simple to have exponentially smoothed</a> camera transforms in your game. Just add a new bundle to your camera entity, and rather than updating a Transform</code> directly, you can just update the eye</code> and target</code> values of a LookTransform</code>, which will be automatically synchronized to the Transform</code>.</p> Several example controllers are provided as well:</p> First Person</li> Orbit</li> Unreal Engine Viewport</li> </ul> wgpu</a> family re-union #</a> </h3> </p> wgpu</a> is a WebGPU</a> implementation in Rust. It is safe, efficient, and portable: it can target both native and the Web.</p> Family reunion</a> is by far the biggest change in wgpu project since the inception. First, the Rust API of wgpu-rs</a> was moved to the main wgpu</a> repository. Second, the whole base was relicensed under MIT/Apache2.</p> gfx-hal</a> - the Vulkan Portability-like graphics API abstraction - was detached from the project. Instead, wgpu got its own in-house unsafe abstraction called “wgpu-hal” developed within the wgpu</a> repository.</p> The team released wgpu-0.9</a> right before this transition, to give the new graphics infrastructure more time to take shape. At the time of writing, supported backends on the new HAL include Vulkan, Metal, and OpenGL ES3.</p> Finally, the testing infrastructure received a major upgrade. It started rendering the examples on the available adapters and comparing the results with reference images. This includes automatic testing using software adapters on CI.</p> rafx</a> #</a> </h3> </a> A scene exported via blender with animated camera motion, watch the demo on youtube</a>!</figcaption> </figure> Rafx</a> is a multi-backend renderer that optionally integrates with the distill</a> asset pipeline.</p> This month, the asset pipeline received almost all the attention. A custom blender add-on was prototyped, and several project layouts were tested to decide on “best practices” to recommend for anyone that wants to use rafx</code> with 3d assets.</p> Using a custom add-on will enable a workflow that supports large scenes with many assets. The add-on currently exports textures, materials, meshes, models (a collection of meshes of varying LOD levels), and prefabs (a list of lights, meshes, etc. to place in the world).</p> Some commercial art packs with varying art styles and complexity have been ported to this pipeline, and one of them was loaded into the demo. A fly-through camera was animated and exported out as json to demonstrate the scene.</p> After prototyping is complete, details and lessons learned will be shared in hopes that it will be helpful to other projects in the rust community, even if they do not use rafx directly.</p> egui-tetra</a> #</a> </h3> egui-tetra</a> (GitHub</a>) by @tesselode</a> is a library that integrates egui</a>, an immediate mode GUI library, with Tetra</a>, a 2D game framework.</p> egui-tetra provides helpers for integrating egui with Tetra’s event loop and rendering the GUI.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> bevy_midi</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_midi</a> by @BlackPhlox</a> is a new bevy plugin that uses midir</a> to interact with the bevy game engine.</p> It started out with bevy_osc</a> as a proof-of-concept interfacing with nannou_osc</a> and using other osc software to communicate with bevy. Soon, realizing that nannou_osc is not that different from how you interface with midi, bevy_midi was born.</p> Here is one of the examples which you can use a midi controller to play piano with demo_audio</a>.</p> The plugin is still in its infancy. So it still has some performance issues, so any feedback and contributions are highly appreciated.</p> bevy_config_cam</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_config_cam</a> by @BlackPhlox</a> is an all-in-one purpose camera/player controller for bevy.</p> With focus on plug-and-play, flexibility and ease of use, this bevy plugin is for anyone who is prototyping in 3D and doesn’t want the hassle of programming a player-controller from scratch. Instantly switch between camera modes such as Tracking to Topdown, Follow Behind, FPS and Free and more.</p> The plugin is very new. So any feedback and contributions are highly appreciated.</p> assets_manager</a> #</a> </h3> assets_manager</a> provides easy file loading and caching, with a focus on hot-reloading.</p> In June was released version 0.5.0, which came with many new features. assets_manager</code> has now built-in support for loading sounds and images, and Zip archive were added as a new source to load assets from. Additionally, the API around directories was reworked to be more powerful, and performances were improved a bit.</p> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> winit’s “difficulty: easy” issues</a>.</li> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> wgpu-rs’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #22 - May 2021 Unknown — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 22nd issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Tooling Updates</a></li> Library Updates</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The fifth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in May. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>. The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>, and can also be streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on in a future meetup, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Flesh #</a> </h3> a new enemy</figcaption> </figure> Flesh by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using Tetra</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> Add (internal use) level editor.</li> Add new enemy types.</li> Prepare to release a short demo next month for collecting feedback.</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> The beginning of an exciting journey</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> Veloren’s 3rd birthday was at the end of May, on the 25th! During the month, lots of systems were overhauled. Music changes were made to only play certain tracks in certain areas. Econsim was optimized, and many bugs were fixed. The minimap was overhauled, with many quality-of-life and visual improvements. Terrain compression speed was worked on, with many trials of different compression techniques.</p> The large physics overhaul was merged, and lots of patches are being added to issues that popped up from it. You can see a small flight in action here</a>. Dungeons have been balanced, and many weapons have also seen changes. In June, 0.10 will be released.</p> May’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #118</a>, #119</a>, #120</a>, #121</a>, #122</a>.</p> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> by @dabreegster</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers, with support for any city with OpenStreetMap coverage. The project aims to engage more citizens with transportation planning, letting people advocate for real changes they want to see.</p> In May, travel time stopped being the only “score” for how well road changes work. Risk exposure of cyclists crossing dangerous intersections or travelling in front of high-speed traffic is now measured, with lots of data visualization work by Michael. Trevor also revived the 15-minute isochrone tool, finding areas of a city without easy access to education, hospitals, or other facilities. We also moved the map import process, with over 100 supported maps, to the cloud from a single poor laptop. OpenStreetMap importing now handles multiple turn lanes, U-turns, and stop signs much better.</p> The Process</a> #</a> </h3> This factory has never looked livelier!</figcaption> </figure> The Process</a> by @setzer22 is an upcoming game about factory building, process management and carrot production, built with Rust using the Godot game engine!</p> This month has been focused on improving the game’s UI and extending the machine logistics system, but there was also room for a few cosmetic improvements:</p> Improved visualization of connections in the logistic network</a>.</li> Implemented configurable filters for machines to build a sorting machine</a>!</li> New materials and terrain shader</a>.</li> Trees and dynamically updating grass</a> using instanced rendering.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> pGLOWrpg</a> #</a> </h3> </p> pGLOWrpg</a> by @Roal_Yr</a> is a Procedurally Generated Living Open World RPG, a long-term project in development, which aims to be a narrative text-based game with maximum portability and accessibility.</p> Recent updates include:</p> Implemented dev features test arena.</li> Implemented entity system draft.</li> Sanitized coordinate systems everywhere (ooof!)</li> Much refactoring.</li> Resumed river generation development.</li> </ul> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Project YAWC #</a> </h3> </p> Project YAWC (Twitter</a>) is a turn-based strategy game built in GGEZ, being developed by junkmail.</p> May saw the release of Alpha 5.4, including interface improvements, balance changes, new units, new maps, and netcode improvements.</p> An alpha access request form</a> is available, if you want to try it out.</p> Bounty Bros.</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to play the game in your browser!</figcaption> </figure> Bounty Bros.</a> is a prototype game, similar to the old Legend of Zelda® games, developed by Katharos Technology</a> as a testing ground for a future commercial game.</p> The last two months of development was primarily focused on sound and user interface:</p> Music will play in different areas of the map and fade in when walking into an area with different music.</li> In-game UI is now functional including a new start menu and a simple settings menu to toggle the CRT filter and pixel aspect ratio.</li> The web player now has a simple loading icon instead of a solid black screen.</li> </ul> The web version was re-built and published under a new link so you can try it in your browser</a>.</p> You can read the full update in the Blog Post</a>.</p> Harvest Hero & Harvest Hero Origins #</a> </h3> </p> Harvest Hero is currently on hold for now. After Gemdrop Games</a> was formed, it was decided that Emerald</a> needed to be tested to ensure it can withstand cross publishing. This means creating a smaller game in the engine in order to figure out the publishing process for Steam, Itch, Nintendo Switch, and guarantee its viability.</p> This resulted in the birth of Harvest Hero Origins</a>, a small wave defense arcade game with local co-op! Join the Gemdrop Games Discord</a> to stay up to date with these games.</p> Features:</p> Story Mode</li> Survival Mode (with local co-op) Unlockable skins</li> 2 unlockable playable characters</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Outer Wonders</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Outer Wonders</a> is a colorful, pixel art, puzzle-based adventure game developed by Utopixel</a> where you play as Bibi, a cute round monkey who enjoys rolling in straight lines. Explore a whimsical nature where altering the environment is key to progress, and solve puzzles to protect its wonders.</p> Outer Wonders can be downloaded for Linux and Windows from itch.io</a>.</p> May was mostly dedicated to code cleaning, small improvements, as well as blogging and community building. Updates of the month include:</p> Refactored UI code to streamline menu stacking and ease the implementation of an upcoming options menu.</li> Added support for menu navigation using the D-Pad alongside the existing analog stick support.</li> Published a blog post about building Outer Wonders for Linux/itch.io (english</a>, french</a>).</li> Posted weekly puzzles #16</a>, #17</a>, #18</a> and #19</a> on social media for players wishing to give puzzles a try prior to downloading the game.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Hacker News</a></em></p> rpg-cli</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rpg-cli</a> by @facundoolano</a> is a bare-bones JRPG-inspired terminal game. It can work as an alternative to cd where you randomly encounter enemies as you change directories. The game features:</p> Character stats and leveling system.</li> Automatic turn-based combat.</li> Item and equipment support.</li> 15+ enemy classes.</li> Permadeath with item recovering.</li> Run and bribe to escape battles.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Theta Wave</a> #</a> </h3> </a> The Blast Repeller item pushes blasts away from the player</figcaption> </figure> Theta Wave</a> is an open-source space shooter game by developers @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a>. It is one of the showcase games for the Amethyst Engine</a>. In the past month, the “Loot”</a> update was released which enhanced how loot drops are rolled, spawned, and how their effects are applied to the game. The Loot Update also added an attraction system that allows for entities to repel or attract other entities.</p> Now an “Organization”</a> update is in progress for Theta Wave. This update will divide Theta Wave into two workspaces; a library and a binary. This update will also add documentation comments for all of the library’s features.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. This month, versions 0.6.4 and 0.6.5 were released, featuring:</p> Stencil buffers</li> Basic instanced mesh rendering</li> Methods for reading textures back to the CPU (e.g. for screenshots)</li> Support for passing slices/arrays as shader uniforms</li> More utility methods for working with high-DPI displays</li> Various bug fixes and docs improvements</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Rustcraft</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Rustcraft</a> by @dskart is a simple Minecraft engine written in Rust using wgpu.</p> It handles infinite world generation using gradient noise as well as placing and breaking blocks.</p> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent engine updates:</p> Initial 2D support (with lighting and physics)</li> Multi-layer terrains (check this video</a>)</li> Load balancer for texture uploader</li> Customizable vertex format</li> Instanced rendering fixes</li> Menu items now can work without backing Menu widget</li> Shadows fix for spotlights</li> Selection improvements for Tree widget</li> Continuous integration</li> Basic Framework that hides engine initialization and game loop</li> Performance improvements</li> “Save” mode for FileSelector and FileBrowser widgets</li> Various bug fixes and small improvements.</li> </ul> rusty-editor updates:</p> Context menu for world outliner items</li> Terrain editor</li> Grid snapping for Move interaction mode</li> Fixes for Move interaction mode in case of complex hierarchies</li> Continuous integration</li> Settings window refactoring + improvements</li> Box selection mode bug fixes</li> </ul> Nestadia</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Nestadia</a> by @zer0x64, @junior-n30 and @CBenoit is a server-based NES emulator.</p> Nestadia was written as a reverse engineering and memory exploitation challenge for NorthSec CTF 2021, a cybersecurity competition. Contestants were required to reverse-engineer the emulator and ultimately write a Tool Assisted Speedrun to run arbitrary code inside a provided ROM.</p> After the competition, the code was open-sourced and cleaned up to remove references to the competition. The developers intend on fixing more bugs and adding more features in the near future.</p> Some interesting features of this emulator are its server-based nature, and the no_std core which means that the emulator can be built and ran pretty much anywhere without much work.</p> Incoming improvements include online multiplayer, sound, a WASM port, porting to a libretro core, and using wgpu instead of sdl for the native GUI and debugger.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Learn WGPU Updated to wgpu 0.8 and WGSL</a> #</a> </h3> After some GLSL issues trying to update the “Learn WGPU”</a> tutorial to version WGPU 0.8, @sotrh</a> decided to migrate to WGSL. This update was a lot of work, but relatively painless. As a result, shaderc</code> is no longer a dependency.</p> Checkout more at here</a>.</p> Voxel Engine with Rust and wgpu-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @TanTanDev</a> published a video</a> about how he made a voxel engine written in Rust using wgpu.</p> Currently voxel rendering, chunk management, flying camera, and simple lightning is implemented. The source code is released on github</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> 1 Year of Rust Game Development</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Another video</a> by @TanTanDev</a> is about the projects he made during his first year of learning Rust. He also talks about why he likes the Rust programming language and community.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> LD48: Rusty MMO in 48 Hours</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @kuviman wrote a devlog about his experience writing a video game in Rust.</p> He needed to make a game in just 48 hours for the Ludum Dare 48 (LD48) game jam, so he chose a simple theme: digging.</p> 20 hours later, he had a full-fledged MMO - complete with hackers!</p> Discussion: r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> State of Rust in Unreal Engine</a> #</a> </h3> This Reddit post</a> discusses the current state of using Rust in the Unreal Engine. It concludes that although there are several ways that Rust could interact with the engine, all are still forced to use C++ to bootstrap these operations.</p> 2048: Using an event system to reset the game</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @chrisbiscardi</a> published a video</a> about using Bevy’s event readers and writers to implement a reset game button for a 2048 clone.</p> The video walks through implementing a “reset game” UI button in Bevy 0.5 by taking advantage of Bevy’s event system for reading and writing a ResetGameEvent. It also covers recursively despawning entities and sprites.</p> Discussion: Twitter</a></em></p> Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> Piet Mondrian’s artwork replicated in Graphite using the new color picker</figcaption> </figure> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-development vector and raster graphics editor built on a nondestructive node-based workflow.</p> In the past month, new frontend features have mostly closed the gap for a visually complete UI while a major Rust backend refactor took place.</p> A new frontend system for floating menus was added to draw menus over the UI, like dropdown menu input widgets and popovers to display the new color picker. Also, the application menu bar was built with working buttons for the new Undo and Export SVG actions.</p> A large refactor in the Rust backend created a simpler communication strategy between all components in the software stack and a standard method of handling user inputs.</p> Try it right now in your browser.</a> Graphite is making rapid progress towards becoming a non-destructive, procedural graphics editor suitable for replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. Please join the Discord</a> - and consider asking for a tour of the code and how you can help!</p> Library Updates #</a> </h2> Dimforge</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Dimforge</a> creates open-source Rust crates for numerical simulation. Some of the recent updates</a>:</p> Rapier</a> v0.9 brings user-defined storages, colliders not attached to any rigid-body, velocity-based kinematic bodies, and a lot of other improvements</a>.</li> bevy_rapier v0.10 was completely rewritten using the new user-defined storages to become significantly more ergonomic and “bevy-native” feel.</li> New exhaustive user-guides for Rapier</a> and bevy_rapier</a> were written. They cover all the available features of Rapier, excepted details about implementing your own custom storage for colliders and rigid-bodies.</li> The JS bindings for Rapier</a> have been updated to use Rapier 0.9.</li> nalgebra v0.26 and v0.27 got const-generics support</a> and macros for constructing matrices/vectors/points in a convenient way.</li> </ul> egui</a> #</a> </h3> </p> egui</a> by @emilk</a> is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI library in pure Rust.</p> This month version 0.12</a> of egui was released, with improved plots, multitouch, user memory stores, window pivots, and more.</p> You can try out egui in the online demo</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> naga</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Naga is a shader translation library in pure Rust, aiming to replace glsl-to-spirv and SPIRV-Cross.</p> In April the gfx-rs team shared a glimpse of the performance difference with SPIRV-Cross on a single pipeline creation. In May, they did a full-fledged Dota2 run on gfx-portability</a> without SPIRV-Cross. All shader translation was done by naga</a>, roughly 4x as fast as the C++ alternative (with no pipeline caching involved). Read more on gfx-naga-blog</a>.</p> rafx</a> #</a> </h3> Demo with wireframes enabled</figcaption> </figure> Rafx is a multi-backend renderer that optionally integrates with the distill</a> asset pipeline.</p> This month, @dvd</a> completed work on the new job system. It implements three steps: extract, prepare, and write. These jobs are now more structured, making them easier to implement while supporting concurrent execution and reducing dynamic allocation. They also integrate with a visibility system to ensure that off-screen objects are not processed.</p> @aclysma</a> continued work on OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 backends and documented implementation details</a> of currently available rendering backends.</p> Additionally, some rendering features were improved and added: mesh rendering now uses an instance-rate vertex buffer instead of per-object uniforms, improving performance. Rendering features now support wireframe and untextured rendering modes. An egui render feature was added, and the demo now uses egui instead of imgui.</p> Bevy Retro</a> #</a> </h3> Bevy Retro UI example</figcaption> </figure> Bevy Retro</a> is a Bevy</a> plugin designed for making pixel-perfect games as easily as possible.</p> This project was released under the Katharos License</a>. This license has moral and ethical implications that you may or may not agree with, so please read it before making use of this project.</p> In the last two months, Bevy Retro has gained a few new features, the biggest of which is an integration with the RAUI</a> UI library ( also featured in this newsletter ), allowing you to design a fully-fledged user interface for Bevy Retro games. Additional features added were:</p> A simple sound playing API</li> Text rendering for the BDF font format</li> Custom render hook support allowing you to use raw Luminance</a> API calls to render anything you want into the low-resolution framebuffer</li> </ul> You can ask questions or give feedback for Bevy Retro on GitHub</a>.</p> Texture Generator</a> #</a> </h3> A preview to version 0.5 with furniture</figcaption> </figure> Texture Generator</a> by Orchaldir</a> is a library to generate textures, and a library to use those textures to render tilemaps. Both libraries can generate color & depth images and support post-processing effects like lighting & ambient occlusion. For randomness, the instance id (e.g. the 145th brick) and/or the tile id are hashed.</p> The current release</a> focuses on furniture.</p> bevy_asset_loader</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_asset_loader</code> by @nikl_me</a> is a plugin for Bevy</a> apps aiming to improve a common pattern for asset-loading. The boilerplate required to load assets during a “loading state” is reduced to a minimum. At the same time, the plugin brings together the internal names of assets and their filepath, making it easier to add new assets and to keep an overview over already existing ones.</p> The library introduces the AssetCollection</code> trait that can be derived. Any number of asset collections can be loaded by a single AssetLoader</code> during a configured app state. When all assets are loaded, the collections will be inserted into Bevy’s ECS as resources. Afterwards, the AssetLoader</code> will switch into a second configurable app state. At this point, your app can use the asset collections that now contain loaded asset handles.</p> Currently, a single file always corresponds to one asset, and more complex assets like e.g. TextureAtlas</code> are not yet supported. There are plans to extend the asset</code> attribute to allow loading more complex assets. Stay tuned!</p> tobj</a> #</a> </h3> tobj</code> by @Twinklebear</a> and @virtualritz</a> is a simple and lightweight option for loading OBJ files. tobj</code> was originally written inspired by @syoyo</a>’s tinyobjloader, to provide a similar lightweight and easy to integrate API for loading OBJ files in Rust.</p> While initially targeted at realtime rendering applications, tobj</code> has gained more advanced importer functionality required for offline rendering, simulation, and modeling applications, through recent work by @virtualritz</a>. These features provide support for merging vertices to avoid discontinuities in simulation packages and reordering vertices to allow omitting the index buffer. These features have been added while preserving the original lightweight API design goal of tobj</code>, making it a useful crate for a range of applications loading with OBJ files.</p> Libfive</a> #</a> </h3> </p> libfive</code> by @virtualritz</a> is a safe, oxidized wrapper around Matt Keeter</a>’s libfive</code></a> – a “library and set of tools for solid modeling especially suited for parametric and procedural design”.</p> libfive</code> is based on functional representation</a> (f-rep). F-reps can be evaluated as 3D meshes with aribitrary precision.</p> One could e.g. use this for a compact definition of a game’s levels and mesh them adaptively, on the fly, during loading. With a density suitable for the machine/GPU running the game.</p> F-reps can also be sliced into polylines/vectors or bitmaps – e.g. for deriving level sets</a> or for SLA/DLP 3D printing.</p> nvtx-rs</a> #</a> </h3> Watching the profile in NVIDIA NSight Systems</figcaption> </figure> NVIDIA® Tools Extension SDK (NVTX) is a C-based API for annotating events, code ranges, and resources in your applications. nvtx-rs</a> by @simbleau</a> is a safe rust wrapper for it.</p> The intent is to safely wrap the NVTX library in rusty fashion to provide a proper cross-platform library for GPU and CPU profiling. Ideally this library would be used in benchmarking rust applications and performing research on rust projects such as a GPU analysis with zero-cost abstraction.</p> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Backroll-rs, a new networking library</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #21 - April 2021 Unknown — Sun, 09 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 21st issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> gamedev.rs</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The fourth Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in April. It was an opportunity for developers to show off what Rust projects they’ve been working on in the game ecosystem. This month, we heard a talk about threading in WASM, profiling, getting a game ready for release, and much more. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The meetups take place on the second Saturday every month via the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>, and can also be streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on in a future meetup, fill out this form</a>.</p> gamedev.rs #</a> </h2> As you may have noticed, rust-gamedev.github.io</a> (this site) got an awesome custom domain: gamedev.rs</a>! We’ve been looking for a good & available domain a long time</a>. Huge thanks to Juratech Systems for donating their domain to the Rust GameDev WG! ❤️</p> We’ve also switched to a more compact URL scheme</a> with separate categories for the newsletter</a> and other posts</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> LD48: Micronaut</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Micronaut features a deep recursive level layout</figcaption> </figure> Micronaut is a small puzzle platformer by @Healthire</a> made in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare 48 Compo. Run and jump your way through a recursive level layout to reach the end. Cross platform for native and web, with source available on GitHub</a>.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a>, ldjam.com</a></em></p> LD48: The Submariner</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> The Submariner</a> is a minimalist action game made by @kettlecorn</a> for the Ludum Dare 48 Compo. Dive deep into the murky depths, defend yourself with torpedoes, and try to find a way home!</p> The Submariner was made with the Macroquad</a> game engine and hecs</a> was used as the Entity-Component-System (ECS) data structure.</p> Click here to play the Submariner in your browser.</a></p> Discussions: ldjam.com</a></em></p> LD48: Depth-First Search</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Depth-First Search</a> by @LPGhatguy</a> and @evaeraevaera</a> is a space dogfighting game made in 72 hours for the Ludum Dare 48 Jam. Travel alone to the center of the galaxy, battling space pirates, alien eyeballs, and more.</p> The game was made possible by wgpu</a>, egui</a>, rapier</a>, hecs</a>, and many more Rust community libraries!</p> Discussions: ldjam.com</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> MineWars</a> #</a> </h3> </p> MineWars</a> (Twitter</a>, Reddit</a>) by @jamadazi is Minesweeper reimagined as a Multiplayer Real Time Strategy!</p> First announced publicly last month, the project is working towards an alpha release for public playtesting. This month’s progress has been mostly internal refactoring to be able to support networked multiplayer fully. The next steps are to implement the remaining core game mechanics. The client implementation may be changed to use the new bevy_ecs_tilemap</code> crate.</p> Made in the Bevy Game Engine</a>.</p> Fish game</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Fish game</a> is an online multiplayer game, created in a collaboration between Nakama</a>, an open-source scalable game server, and the Macroquad</a> game engine.</p> This month:</p> Fish game tutorial</a> got published. The tutorial breaks down the game codebase into steps, from setting up an empty macroquad project into building a platformer game, and then turning it into a multiplayer game with Nakama.</p> </li> Web build</a> went live on itch.io</p> </li> </ul> Project YAWC #</a> </h3> </p> Project YAWC (Twitter</a>) is a turn-based strategy game built in GGEZ, being developed by junkmail.</p> April saw the release of Alpha 5, including the integrated map editor, alongside balance changes and unit additions.</p> An alpha access request form</a> is available, if you want to try it out.</p> The Process</a> #</a> </h3> The new test map in The Process</figcaption> </figure> The Process</a> by @setzer22 is an upcoming game about factory building, process management and carrot production, built with Rust using the Godot game engine!</p> Some of the main highlights of the game:</p> Automate complex processes by combining machines and programmable workers.</li> Obtain materials from a wide variety of natural resources: Even chicken!</li> An upbeat, wholesome aesthetic: Factories don’t need to be depressing.</li> </ul> This last month was focused on implementing the following features:</p> A test map</a> to ensure all corners of the codebase are working</li> Improved player mobility by introducing a grappling hook</a></li> </ul> The game has been in active development for over a year and is now approaching its first initial playable alpha version. Stayed tuned to the official twitter for updates!</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> pGLOWrpg</a> #</a> </h3> </p> pGLOWrpg (GitHub</a>, Twitter</a>) by @Roal_Yr</a> is a Procedurally Generated Living Open World RPG, a long-term project in development, which aims to be a narrative text-based game with maximum portability and accessibility.</p> Recent updates include:</p> Finished implementing new printing interface.</li> Different types of text: normal, announcement, banner, etc.</li> Text color scheme in separate .ron preset file.</li> Text wrap implemented.</li> Fallback modes for text printing implemented.</li> </ul> Taipo</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to play the game in your desktop browser!</figcaption> </figure> Taipo (itch.io</a>, GitHub</a>) by @rparrett</a> is a Tower Defense game that’s controlled solely by typing words and phrases.</p> Taipo is intended to be a thin veneer of a game over a tool for practicing Japanese, but there’s an English mode as well. Gameplay sessions are short and the game is playable in a desktop web browser.</p> Taipo was built with Bevy 0.5</a> with web builds made possible by bevy_webgl2</a> and bevy_kira_audio</a>. Taipo is also supported by these great projects: bevy_tiled</a>, bevy_asset_ron</a>.</p> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> by @dabreegster</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers, with support for any city with OpenStreetMap coverage.</p> In April, a new road editor was prototyped, letting the number and width of lanes be changed. Initial installation and downloading new maps is now simpler. Slowly, complex intersections are being handled better. The team also completed four usability study sessions and adjusted the UI accordingly.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a picturesque puzzle platformer—without the platforming. Solve mind bending color puzzles, unlock new areas of a vibrant hub world, and talk to NPCs to unravel the mysteries of a world you left behind!</p> Way of Rhea is being produced by @masonremaley</a>. Latest Way of Rhea developments:</p> A hierarchy tree view</a> was added to the editor to make getting art into the game easier.</li> Work is wrapping up getting art into the first snow crab level!</a></li> @masonremaley</a> wrote up an article walking through how the Way of Rhea crash reporter works</a>.</li> @masonremaley</a> is mixing signed distance fields, bézier curves, and art by Carolyn Whitmeyer</a> to create procedural vines</a>.</li> Carolyn Whitmeyer</a>, the game’s artist, released a demo real including some content from Way of Rhea</a>.</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A mist rolling over the land</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In April, work started on 0.10. Work is being done on combat, with new models being created for enemies, animations being refined, and new player gear being added. The trading and economic systems have continued progress at a good pace. The music system was expanded to support combat music.</p> Veloren’s financial state was overhauled to examine previous expenses, and prepare for provisioning the dedicated server. Functionality was added to switch between server-authoritative and client-authoritative physics. Skeletons for big-winged creatures were added. Data being sent over the network is being optimized to reduce the amount of bandwidth players have to use.</p> April’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #114</a>, #115</a>, #116</a>. #117</a>.</p> Outer Wonders</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Outer Wonders</a> is a colorful, pixel art, puzzle-based adventure game developed by Utopixel</a> where you play as Bibi, a cute round monkey who enjoys rolling in straight lines. Explore a whimsical nature where altering the environment is key to progress, and solve puzzles to protect its wonders.</p> In April, Utopixel</a> released the first playable demo of Outer Wonders</a> for Windows and Linux on itch.io</a>! In order to achieve this, the Utopixel</a> team:</p> Added a cutscene and a tutorial level at the beginning of the demo campaign.</li> Integrated sound effects for interaction with the environment and the UI.</li> Finished implementing full support for Linux on itch.io</a> through a portable build of the game.</li> Polished the menus by adding a “Press any key to continue</em>” prompt on game startup, as well as a confirmation prompt for all quit buttons.</li> Tested the demo thoroughly on both Windows and Linux to fix all bugs and level design issues.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Theta Wave</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Mobs may now be spawned in predefined formations</figcaption> </figure> Theta Wave</a> is an open-source space shooter game by developers @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a>. It is one of the showcase games for the Amethyst Engine</a>. In the past month, the “Formations”</a> update was released which organized how mobs are spawned in different phases of the level.</p> They are now working on the “Loot”</a> update which will enhance how loot drops are rolled, spawned, and how their effects are applied to the game.</p> Station Iapetus</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Station Iapetus</a> by @mrDIMAS</a> is a 3rd person shooter on the prison Iapetus near Saturn. This month’s updates include:</p> New level (lab)</li> More assets</li> Performance improvements</li> Bots now able to use weapons</li> Melee attacks are much harder to avoid now</li> Bots drop items</li> Journal</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> macroquad</a> is a cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS/WASM) game framework built on top of miniquad</a>.</p> This month macroquad finally got out of alpha and 0.3</code> got released! All the examples with both sources and interactive wasm versions may be found on the new macroquad website</a>.</p> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. This month, version 0.6.3 was released, featuring:</p> BMFont support</li> An ImageData</code> type for loading and manipulating images on the CPU</li> More color utilities, including shortcuts for premultiplied alpha</li> Bugfixes and docs improvements</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Additionally, Tetra’s website</a> has been updated to make it easier to read and contribute to. The site features tutorials, guides and FAQs on how to use Tetra effectively, as well as a showcase of cool projects made using the framework - additions are welcomed!</p> Oxygengine v0.19.1</a> #</a> </h3> Making splash screens in Oxygengine with RAUI</figcaption> </figure> Oxygengine</a> by @PsichiX</a> is the hottest HTML5 + WASM game engine for games written in Rust with web-sys. The goal of this project is to combine professional game development tools under one highly modular toolset.</p> This month’s changes include:</p> Fixed bugs with rendering images on Firefox browser.</li> Added support for filters.</li> Updated RAUI</a> dependency to improve UI.</li> Added support for image smoothing render command.</li> Added puzzle game demo WIP</a> that shows how to use RAUI to make for example fancy splash screens with RAUI.</li> </ul> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent engine updates:</p> WebAssembly support (check online demo</a>)</li> Proc-macro for Visit trait</li> On-demand texture compression</li> Performance improvements</li> Various bug fixes and small improvements.</li> </ul> Arcana</a> #</a> </h3> A demo Arcana game</figcaption> </figure> Arcana</a> is a new game engine built with focus on ease of use without compromising on level of control. The engine is aimed to support a wide variety of games, from pixel-art to fully ray-traced, from single-player puzzles to online strategies.</p> It is at a very early stage, not all necessary subsystems are done and code is in flux.</p> The demo shown above was coded in a single evening, together with sprite sheet loading and sprite animations which will be integrated into the engine later.</p> The default 2D renderer renders sprites with auto-batching, so all sprites are rendered in single instanced draw call, allowing rendering millions of sprites in one frame. Rendering is done with sierra</code></a> - a Vulkan-like graphics API with batteries included. The engine also uses hecs</code></a> as its ECS, and rolls its own simplistic System</code> trait to define and run systems, once per frame or with fixed steps. rapier</code></a> physics is integrated for 2D cases, but this system is kept opt-in.</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Bevy Cheatbook</a> #</a> </h3> The Unofficial Bevy Cheatbook by @jamadazi is a practical book for learning the Bevy Game Engine</a>.</p> The book recently got an assortment of improvements and new content, including a detailed page about input handling</a> and a chapter about browser games using WASM</a> (written with help from @Zaszi).</p> The author now has a GitHub Sponsors</a>, support them!</p> Shooting Gallery Game in Rust and Bevy in 5 Hours</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @camsjams</a> released a video</a> about developing a shooting gallery using Bevy to demonstrate 2D games with multiple layers of depth. Some of the features covered in the video:</p> Basic UI with score and countdown clock.</li> 2D shooting with moving set pieces - clouds, grass, water.</li> Tracking of target hits, each target having their own unique movement speed and points.</li> Game over state when clock runs out.</li> </ul> The full source is available here</a>.</p> Learning OpenGL in 7 days using Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> TanTan</a> released a video</a> about making a water shader, loading 3D models, creating a beautiful transition shader using glium and macroquad. The water & transition shader is open source and can be found here</a>.</p> Rust Linz: Learning Rust with Game Development</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click on the image to watch the talk</figcaption> </figure> As part of April’s Rust Linz meetup, Herbert Wolverson</a> gave a talk about using game development as a means of learning Rust, stepping through the creation of Flappy Dragon - a simple game used in his book ‘Hands-On Rust’ to teach the language basics.</p> ‘Hands-On Rust’ is currently available for 50% off, via a coupon posted on the author’s twitter</a>.</p> Rust LA Meetup: Happiness in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click on the image to watch the talk</figcaption> </figure> As part of April’s Rust LA meetup, Andrea Pessino</a> from Ready at Dawn</a> gave a talk examining how to increase Rust adoption among game developers and performance-centric developers, giving practical, actionable advice to those who hit early bumps in their Rust discovery.</p> How To Write a Crash Reporter</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @masonremaley</a> wrote an article</a> walking through Way of Rhea’s</a> crash reporter implementation.</p> The article covers how to detect a crash, how to report a crash via chat services like Discord or Slack, and how to implement a robust native UI on Windows to handle requesting user consent to file the report, as well as some design considerations.</p> awesome-quads</a> #</a> </h3> </p> awesome-quads</a> is a curated list of links to miniquad</a>/macroquad</a>-related code & resources: libraries & plugins, games, examples, apps, docs, etc. The list has more than 40 links atm: feel free to write a PR if something isn’t mentioned yet.</p> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> wgpu</a>-0.8 #</a> </h3> </p> wgpu</a> is a WebGPU</a> implementation in Rust. It is safe, efficient, and portable: can target both native (Vulkan/D3D/Metal) and the Web.</p> The team has rolled out gfx-hal-0.8 and wgpu-0.8 updates on crates! Read gfx-release-blog</a> for more details.</p> In April, the team implemented more validation on both the host and the shader sides. Naga</a>’s coverage of SPIR-V and MSL features is also greatly improved.</p> On the infrastructure side, wgpu</a> integrated profiling</a> and got the first naga performance</a> numbers, which looked promising.</p> nalgebra</a> #</a> </h3> </p> nalgebra</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by Dimforge</a> is a general-purpose linear-algebra library.</p> With its version 0.26, nalgebra</a> replaced the use of generic-arrays</a> by regular Rust arrays using const-generics. See the blog-post</a> to get all the details! In particular, this results in significant benefits:</p> Simpler generic programming with statically-sized vectors/matrices.</li> Much simpler debugging: inspect the content of vectors/matrices more easily.</li> Vectors and matrices with dimensions known at compile-time can be constructed in a const-fn context.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> opensubdiv-petite</a> #</a> </h3> Low poly car with three levels of Catmull-Clark subdivision applied.</figcaption> </figure> Opensubdiv-petite</a> is a high level, selective, oxidized wrapper around Pixar’s OpenSubdiv</a> sudivison surface</a> meshing and evaluation library. OpenSubdiv allows for real time updates of the subdivided mesh if the topology of the control mesh is stable (e.g. a deforming character in a game).</p> The crate comes with a trait for converting into a bevy::Mesh</code> and a bevy</code> example</a>.</p> This is an early release. None of the GPU acceleration backends are yet exposed on the Rust side. Contact @virtualritz</a> is you want to help out with that.</p> His tobj</code> fork</a> also has a bunch new features that help loading OBJ files for use with opensubdiv-petite. E.g. merging disconnected vertices during import.</p> The car model above was borrowed from @quaternius</a> low poly car collection on itch.io</a>.</p> profiling</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> This month, version 1.0 of profiling</a> was released on crates.io. 🎉 🎉</p> This crate provides a very thin abstraction over instrumented profiling crates like puffin</code>, optick</code>, tracing</code>, tracy</code>, and superluminal-perf</code>.</p> Profiling is used by multiple projects including gfx-hal</code>, rafx</code>, and wgpu</code>.</p> simple-async-local-executor</a> #</a> </h3> let</span> executor = Executor::default(); </span>let</span> events = [executor.</span>create_event_handle</span>(), executor.</span>create_event_handle</span>()]; </span> </span>async </span>fn </span>wait_event</span>(</span>events</span>: [EventHandle; 2], </span>executor</span>: Executor) { </span> executor.</span>event</span>(&events[</span>0</span>]).await; </span> executor.</span>event</span>(&events[</span>1</span>]).await; </span>} </span> </span>executor.</span>spawn</span>(</span>wait_event</span>(events.</span>clone</span>(), executor.</span>clone</span>())); </span>assert_eq!(executor.</span>step</span>(), </span>true</span>); </span>assert_eq!(executor.</span>step</span>(), </span>true</span>); </span>executor.</span>notify_event</span>(&events[</span>0</span>]); </span>assert_eq!(executor.</span>step</span>(), </span>true</span>); </span>executor.</span>notify_event</span>(&events[</span>1</span>]); </span>assert_eq!(executor.</span>step</span>(), </span>false</span>); </span></code></pre> simple-async-local-executor</a> by Enlightware</a> is a single-threaded polling-based executor suitable for use in games, embedded systems or WASM.</p> This executor can be useful when the number of tasks is small or if a small percentage is blocked. Being polling-based, in the general case it trades off efficiency for simplicity and does not require any concurrency primitives such as Arc</code>, etc.</p> wasm_plugin</a> #</a> </h3> wasm_plugin</a> by @alec-deason is a low-ish level tool for easily hosting WASM based plugins for modding or scripting.</p> The latest version now supports calling host functions from the plugin and more flexible serialization which allows plugins to be written in languages other than Rust.</p> It consists of two crates:</p> wasm_plugin_host</a> which wraps a wasmer instance with methods for calling functions on the guest plugin.</li> wasm_plugin_guest</a> which provides an attribute macro to easily import and</li> export functions to the host.</li> </ul> egui</a> #</a> </h3> egui</a> by @emilk</a> is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI library in pure Rust.</p> This month version 0.11</a> of egui was released, with many improvements, including optimized to run almost twice as fast!</p> You can try out egui in the online demo</a>.</p> bevy_egui</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> bevy_egui</a> provides an Egui</a> integration for the Bevy</a> game engine. It supports bevy_webgl2</a> and implements the full set of Egui features (such as clipboard and opening URLs).</p> In April, version 0.4</a> was released, providing an integration with Egui 0.11 and implementing multiple windows support.</p> Try out the online demo</a>.</p> puffin_egui</a> #</a> </h3> </p> puffin_egui</a> by @emilk</a> is an easy-to-use integration of the puffin</a> profiler for the egui</a> GUI library.</p> It has never been easier to add an in-game flamegraph profiler to your game!</p> rafx</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Rafx WebGL 1.0 support, click for live demo</a>!</figcaption> </figure> Rafx is a multi-backend renderer that optionally integrates with the distill</a> asset pipeline. This month, frustum culling and a new OpenGL ES 2.0/WebGL 1.0 backend were added.</p> @dvd</a> revived the rafx-visibility</code> crate and implemented frustum culling. Frustum culling greatly reduces draw call counts, improving frame rate in certain scenes. The changes also improve consistency between various rendering feature implementations (i.e. meshes, text etc.) and avoids running the extract-prepare-submit pipeline on entities that are not visible.</p> @aclysma</a> implemented an OpenGL ES 2.0 backend. While ES2 cannot support all functionality in rafx-api</code>, it provides very broad compatibility. This means the core functionality of rafx-api can be used with almost any mobile device or browser (~98% web coverage</a>.)</p> RAUI v0.34.0</a> #</a> </h3> RAUI Scroll Box</figcaption> </figure> RAUI</a> by @PsichiX</a> is a Renderer Agnostic User Interface crate that is based on declarative mode UI composition similar to React.js and UE4 Slate system.</p> This month’s changes include:</p> Moved from widget_hooks!</code> and widget_component!</code> to #[pre_hooks]</code>and #[post_hooks]</code> macros.</li> Added PropsData</code> and MessageData</code> derive macros.</li> Improved support for Scroll Box widgets to allow frictionless usage.</li> Added use of Scroll Box in TODO demo app</a> to demonstrate how to use it.</li> </ul> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> Ferris drawn in Graphite using the new drawing tools - Art credit: Uriopass</figcaption> </figure> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-progress vector and raster graphics editor built on a nondestructive node-based workflow.</p> The team size has doubled in the past month — thank you to the new contributors! Since then, systems related to editor tools and data flow were added. The editor now has proper input behavior on the existing Rectangle and Ellipse Tools plus the new Shape and Line Tools while holding modifier keys. Pen Tool implementation has begun, supporting polylines. Shapes are now drawn with live previews.</p> Additional work has gone into improving render performance, building the color system in the Rust backend, and adding initial support for displaying shapes in the Layer Tree panel. Try it right now in your browser.</a></p> Graphite is making rapid progress towards becoming a nondestructive, procedural graphics editor suitable of replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. Please join the Discord</a> - and consider asking for a tour of the code and how you can help!</p> KindNES</a> #</a> </h3> </p> KindNES</a> by @henryksloan</a> is a new NES emulator that supports sound, controllers, and much of the NES library.</p> KindNES is designed to strike a balance between performance, hardware accuracy, and code clarity. It directly emulates the CPU, graphics, and sound of the NES with minimal approximation. The code is intended to pair well with the NESdev wiki as a resource for learning about the NES.</p> KindNES is in a playable state, and is approaching a release version. Features planned before release include saving and an improved cross-platform GUI.</p> chip-8-rs</a> #</a> </h3> Debugging Pong</figcaption> </figure> Chip-8-rs</a> by @jonathanmurray is a CHIP-8 emulator with some basic debugging functionality.</p> When running a game through the emulator, CHIP-8 instructions are listed next to the main display, with the currently executed one highlighted. By running at a very low clock-frequency (and pausing/resuming) you can step through a program one instruction at a time, to better understand how it works (or doesn’t work!).</p> See it in action on YouTube</a>.</p> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> femtovg is looking for help with the wgpu backend</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #20 - March 2021 Unknown — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 20th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The third Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in March. It was an opportunity for developers to show off what Rust projects they’ve been working on in the game ecosystem. Developers showed off game engine demos, in-game playthroughs, tooling, and more. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The next meetup will take place on the 10th of April at 16:00 GMT on the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>, and can also be streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> MineWars</a> #</a> </h3> </p> MineWars</a> (Twitter</a>, Reddit</a>) by @jamadazi is Minesweeper reimagined as a Multiplayer Real Time Strategy!</p> Capture mines. Move them around. Cause explosion chains. Take out enemy mines. Defend your Cities. Fight for territory. Eliminate other players. Play on a procedurally-generated map.</p> The game has been privately in development for many months and was just announced publicly. The project is currently working towards an alpha release for public playtesting. Read the announcement on the website</a> for more information.</p> Made in the Bevy Game Engine</a>.</p> sm64js</a> #</a> </h3> </p> sm64js</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) is a rewrite of the decompilation project of Super Mario 64 in JavaScript with a strong focus on massive multiplayer online. The backend</a> recently has been rewritten in Rust by @marior</a> and is now live.</p> You can find more information about it in this recent blog post</a>, where the developers of a similar mod called Net64 are talking about several decompilation projects.</p> Some of the most recent additions are:</p> Karts and gliders.</li> Health meters.</li> More visuals with butterflies and fish.</li> </ul> A stress test is scheduled for 2021-04-17 17:30 UTC and everyone is invited to join.</p> Outer Wonders</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Outer Wonders</a> by the Utopixel Studio</a> is a pixelart puzzle-based adventure game built using SDL2.</p> Explore a world of fantasy in Outer Wonders. Play as Bibi, the cute round monkey, unveil the natural wonders surrounding your native village, and unravel their mysteries in this ecological puzzle-based adventure game.</p> </blockquote> March was mostly about various preparations for the upcoming playable demo release. Some of the recent updates:</p> More lively in-game environments.</li> Scripted cutscenes.</li> Translations.</li> Linux support progress</a>.</li> Lot’s of level and technical testing</a>.</li> The playable demo will be released on April 16</a>.</li> </ul> You can read the full March devlogs here</a>.</p> Aladin Lite</a> #</a> </h3> Mars heightmap with a RdBu colormap rendered with Aladin Lite v3</figcaption> </figure> Aladin Lite</a> is a spatial image survey visualizer developed by the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg</a> in France. Since its first release in 2013, Aladin Lite</a> has been used by astronomers as well as amateurs that are curious about exploring the sky.</p> Originally developed using 2D Javascript canvas, its core has been fully rewritten in Rust and WebGL2 using wasm-bindgen</a>. New features include:</p> The support of multiple allsky projections (mercator, aitoff, …).</li> The blending of multiple surveys.</li> The support of FITS file images.</li> </ul> For more information, see a talk</a> done at the ADASS 2020 conference. A web page is also available here</a> for you to test. You are also very welcolme to contribute to the project by e.g. posting issues on the project’s github.</p> Portal Explorer</a> #</a> </h3> “Portal in portal” scene</figcaption> </figure> Portal Explorer</a> by @optozorax</a> is a web visualizator of mind-blowing portals.</p> In Portal Explorer you can view how interesting portals are constructed, and visually explore their properties by moving and rotating them. This program doesn’t work well on mobile, better opened from PC. The most interesting scene is portal in portal</a>.</p> Created using ray-tracing in shaders, engine is macroquad</a>, interface is egui</a>.</p> Name Needed</a> #</a> </h3> Agents wandering around, hauling items and digging blocks</figcaption> </figure> Name Needed</a> by @DomWilliams0</a> is a one man effort to produce an open source, intuitive and high performance Dwarf Fortress-esque game.</p> The engine is custom, built with SDL2 and OpenGL. It’s still early days, but steady progress has been made over the last 18 months. The developer aims to release occasional technical devlogs about interesting parts of the engine, which so far include:</p> Long term vision and goals</a></li> High level engine architecture</a></li> Intelligent entity behaviors</a></li> </ul> Orbital Decay</a> #</a> </h3> Orbital Decay gameplay</figcaption> </figure> Orbital Decay</a> by @stevebob</a> is an open-source</a> turn-based tactical roguelike with a focus on ranged combat. Deal enough damage to enemies to get through their armour without breaching the hull of the station, or risk being pulled into the void. It was made for the 7 Day Roguelike 2021</a> game jam.</p> Traverse a procedurally-generated space station to reach the fuel bay on the 5th floor. Choose your weapons and upgrades wisely to make it past the station’s former crew - now a horde of ravenous undead.</p> Read more about Orbital Decay on its development blog</a>.</p> Disguiser</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Disguiser</a> (itch.io</a>, source code</a>) by @mcneja</a> is a coffee-break turn-based stealth game inspired by Thief that was made for the 7 Day Roguelike 2021</a> game jam. The randomly-generated mansions are loosely based on Chinese courtyard houses, with symmetry, enclosed gardens, and a public-to-private gradient from the entrance northward.</p> The development process is documented in a bunch of devlog posts</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> secbot</a> #</a> </h3> </p> secbot</a> (web version</a>, souce code</a>) by Herbert Wolverson</a> is another 7DRL submission:</p> The idea behind SecBot is that an outpost has ceased communications, so the morally dubious Bracket Corporation dispatch a security bot to find out what happened. Upon arrival, it becomes clear that things aren’t going well for the colony - so the player rushes around collecting colonists and shepherding them back to the spaceship. I tried to bake some narrative/flavor into the game, and create a fun game you can enjoy over a coffee-break.</p> </blockquote> Btw, Herbert is going to give a “Learning Rust With Game Development” talk at Rust Meetup Linz on April 22</a>.</p> Bounty Bros.</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click the image to play the game in your browser!</figcaption> </figure> Bounty Bros.</a> is a prototype game similar to the old Legend of Zelda® games developed by Katharos Technology</a> as a testing ground for a future commercial game.</p> In the last 2 months Bounty Bros. has gotten a lot of updates. Now you can play the game</a> right inside of your browser on desktop or mobile devices!</p> You can no longer walk through walls or objects.</li> You can now walk into buildings.</li> The camera follows the player without passing beyond the map borders.</li> Rendering is now scaled pixel-perfect.</li> Mobile touch controls were added.</li> There is a new retro mode</a> that tries to make it look like the game is running on an old CRT television.</li> </ul> All of the source code, excluding assets and artwork, was also made available and split into two independent projects.</p> These projects were released under the Katharos License</a>. This license has moral and ethical implications that you may or may not agree with, so please read it before making use of these projects:</p> Bevy Retro</a> (forum</a>) - a Bevy plugin for pixel-perfect games.</li> Skip’n Go</a> (forum</a>) - a simple game engine for making top-down pixel games.</li> </ul> You can read the full update in the Blog Post</a>.</p> pGLOWrpg</a> #</a> </h3> </p> pGLOWrpg</a> (Twitter</a>) by @Roal_Yr</a> is a Procedurally Generated Living Open World RPG, a long-term project in development, which aims to be a narrative text-based game with maximum portability and accessibility.</p> Recent updates include:</p> Reformatting a print interface, making it very easy to link text UI and code.</li> Switching to .ron file format for storing configs and strings.</li> Implementing individual strings coloring for better visual perception.</li> </ul> rusty-bomber</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rusty-bomber</a> (source code</a>) by @rgripper</a> and @Cupnfish</a> is a BomberMan clone written using Bevy & Rapier that works on desktop and web.</p> Check out the devlog</a> for more details about the project’s internals.</p> Stellary 2 #</a> </h3> </a> ▶️ Click to watch the full video</a></figcaption> </figure> Stellary 2 by @CoffeJunkStudio</a> is a 3D real-time space shooter in which the player has to control his spaceship to colonize each planet in the solar system.</p> In the last month, the game concept has been overhauled. Most importantly:</p> Planets become inhabitable over time, starting with the outermost one in order to bring head-to-head matches to an end eventually.</li> Full focus on multiplayer, including AIs.</li> Players can’t die mid-game anymore. When defeated, they re-spawn and lose a colony for it (if they have one) instead of dying. This prevents long waiting times when playing against friends.</li> </ul> You can follow the development of Stellary 2 on Twitter</a>.</p> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> by @dabreegster</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers, with support for any city with OpenStreetMap coverage.</p> In March, elevation data courtesy of Eldan</a> was imported, letting cycling speeds uphill be adjusted. Importing any area from OpenStreetMap can now be done from the UI with no command-line experience, and custom travel demand models based on UK-wide census data can now be generated. Some important simulation fixes for roundabouts improve gridlock, and Michael</a> and Yuwen</a> helped adjust the UI panel layout for smaller screens.</p> Egregoria</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Egregoria</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>) by @Uriopass</a> is a simulation oriented city builder that tries to replicate modern society as well as possible.</p> The 8th devlog</a> was published. Updates include:</p> Multiplayer based on deterministic lockstep</li> Economy revamp inspired by Anno 1800</li> Infinite world using procedural generation</li> Many more QoL features</li> </ul> See also the YouTube summary video</a> of the past 6 months of development.</p> Gargoyle’s Quest</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Gargoyle’s Quest</a> by @ShamylZakariya</a> is an implementation of level one of the 1990 Gameboy platformer</a> built using wgpu</a>.</p> Fishgame</a> #</a> </h3> Game footage with the new weapon.</figcaption> </figure> Fishgame</a> (web build)</a> is an online multiplayer game, created in a collaboration between Nakama</a>, an open-source scalable game server, and the Macroquad</a> game engine.</p> This month:</p> fishgame migrated to nakama-rs</a> (featured in this newsletter as well).</li> Also a second weapon, the sword, was added to the game.</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Waiting for the airship to land</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In March, Veloren released 0.9. Lots of work throughout the month was put towards preparing for this. NPC merchants and trading was merged. Many changes were made to combat, including buffs and combat. Player-to-player trading was also implemented. Lots of work was done in optimizing Veloren. This included significantly improving how long physics was talking, and network improvements. Metrics tracking was also overhauled to better track the different systems in Veloren. Pathfinding is also working through an overhaul. A large feature implemented in March was Airships being merged into the game. This prompted a redo of how physics in the game is handled.</p> A survey was sent out in preparation for the release. A lot of information was gathered about how players experience Veloren, and the items they like or don’t like. These can all be ready in devblog #112</a>. This was followed up by the 0.9 release, which turned out to be the largest yet. At peak, 133 players joined the main server. There were problems throughout the release party relating to networking, as well as our tick performance.</p> March’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #109</a>, #110</a>, #111</a>, #112</a>. #113</a>.</p> Theta Wave</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Enemies can now be easily spawned in formations</figcaption> </figure> Theta Wave</a> is an open-source space shooter game by developers @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a>. It is one of the showcase games for the Amethyst Engine</a>. In the past month, the “Foundations”</a> update was released which included numerous refactors that improved the accessibility of contributing to the game.</p> They are now working on the “Formations”</a> update which will organize how waves of enemies are spawned into the game.</p> Notable changes:</p> Formations can be defined in a data file</li> New InvasionFormation</code> phase where formations of enemies are spawned from a pool of formations</li> </ul> Harvest Hero</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Harvest Hero</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) by @bombfuse</a> is an arcade/roguelite where you whack Groobles. Built on top of Emerald</a>.</p> Harvest Hero has undergone a large change, migrating from semi-randomly generated levels to handcrafted levels that are randomly selected throughout your playthrough.</p> This means using Ogmo</a> to design levels, and using nano-ogmo</a> to import them.</p> Updates:</p> General UI update</li> Importing ogmo levels via nano-ogmo</li> April Fools demo</a></li> </ul> Station Iapetus</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click on the iamge to see the gameplay video on YouTube</figcaption> </figure> Station Iapetus</a> by @mrDIMAS</a> is a 3rd person shooter on the prison Iapetus near the Saturn. This month’s updates include:</p> Inventory fixes and improvements</li> Splash damage for grenades</li> Weapon recoil</li> More items</li> Bots now hear player</li> More assets</li> First level improvements</li> Procedural animation of impact for bots</li> More sounds</li> Separate scene for menu with music</li> Pause game when in menu</li> More switches in options menu</li> Turrets</li> </ul> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a picturesque puzzle platformer—without the platforming. Solve mind bending color puzzles, unlock new areas of a vibrant hub world, and talk to NPCs to unravel the mysteries of a world you left behind!</p> Way of Rhea is being produced by @masonremaley</a>. Latest Way of Rhea developments:</p> A free demo was distributed as part of Indie Maker Syndicate</a>’s online event</li> The demo included a number of minor visual improvements aimed at better communicating the game’s mechanics</a></li> Progress is being made adding new artwork</a> to the game</li> Tools for laying out artwork in game were improved</a></li> A crash reporter was implemented to give players the option to report issues directly to Way of Rhea’s Discord</a>. A writeup will be posted explaining how it works soon!</li> Work has begun on a dialog system for chatting w/ NPCs!</li> </ul> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. This month, versions 0.6.1 and 0.6.2 were released, featuring:</p> Support for blend modes and premultiplied alpha</li> Scissor rectangles (useful for UI rendering)</li> Word wrapping for text</li> More events and methods for tracking/controlling the window’s state</li> Bugfixes and docs improvements</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Additionally, a template repository</a> has been created, demonstrating some useful patterns for structuring a Tetra project.</p> Starframe</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Starframe</a> by @molentum</a> is a work-in-progress game engine for physics-y sidescrolling 2D games.</p> This month, its physics engine was revamped once more</a> (for the last time, hopefully), implementing a modern solver method called Extended Position-Based Dynamics. Also, a blog post</a> was published, covering the development of the physics engine so far in a great deal of mathematical detail.</p> Emerald #</a> </h3> </p> Emerald</a> by @bombfuse</a> is a 2D game engine focused on being as portable as possible.</p> The ultimate goal of Emerald is to be a fully featured engine that you can slap onto any device with relative ease. It’s currently able to run on WASM, Raspberry Pi, Mac, Windows, and Linux thanks to miniquad</a>.</p> Features include physics via rapier2d</a>, ECS via hecs</a>, and font rendering via fontdue</a>.</p> Recent updates:</p> Rendering to textures was added (example</a>).</li> WASM game sample</a>.</li> </ul> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent engine updates:</p> Context menus and tooltips (huge thanks to MinusGix</a>).</li> Performance improvements for UI.</li> Parallax Mapping.</li> Ability to enable/disable scenes.</li> Expansion strategies for TreeView.</li> LOD system fixes.</li> Graphical fixes.</li> First version of engine’s architecture overview.</li> Various bug fixes and small improvements.</li> </ul> Editor</a> updates:</p> Ability to edit collision groups and mask for colliders.</li> Ability to clear command stack.</li> Ability to change render path for meshes.</li> LOD editor.</li> “Collapse All”, “Expand All”, “Locate Selection” buttons for world outliner.</li> “Fit Collider” feature fixes.</li> Picking fixes.</li> Change selection when paste from clipboard.</li> “Slow” and “Fast” camera movement modifiers.</li> Navmesh selection fixes.</li> Simple TBN visualizer.</li> Parallax mapping switch in settings.</li> </ul> Oxygengine v0.16.0</a> #</a> </h3> Integration of RAUI (UI/UX) crate with Oxygengine game engine</figcaption> </figure> Oxygengine</a> by @PsichiX</a> is the hottest HTML5 + WASM game engine for games written in Rust with web-sys. The goal of this project is to combine professional game development tools under one highly modular toolset.</p> Version 0.16.0 was focused on integration of RAUI</a> crate into the engine to allow building rich UI/UX experience for your games using declarative mode UI composition (which now makes currently used simple UI Elements feature deprecated and it’s gonna be removed at some point in the near future).</li> In addition to that basic web game demo</a> and pokemon-like RPG demo</a> were enhanced with new UI showing how to build UI/UX with RAUI.</li> Next months will be focused on making RPG showing full potential of what you can do with RAUI in Oxygengine, as well as remaking Visual Novel module to be entirely based on RAUI in a way similar to how RenPy is made!</li> </ul> Bevy v0.5</a> #</a> </h3> Material grid with varying PBR properties</figcaption> </figure> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> Bevy 0.5 was a massive community effort. You can check out the full release blog post here</a>, but here are some highlights:</p> Physically Based Rendering (PBR).</li> GLTF Improvements, such as support for PBR textures and a new top-level GLTF asset type.</li> Bevy ECS V2: a complete rewrite of the Bevy ECS core with a hybrid component storage model, Archetype Graphs, stateful queries, and across-the-board performance improvements.</li> A brand new Parallel System Executor packed with features: explicit system dependencies, system labels, system sets, improved run criteria, and increased parallelism.</li> Reliable change detection: efficiently query changes to any component or resource at any point in time (even across frames).</li> State System Rewrite: a new stack-based state system that makes running systems for different states (ex: menus vs in-game) much easier.</li> Rich text: style text “spans” with different colors / fonts while still respecting layout.</li> HIDPI text: render crisp text at any resolution.</li> 2D world space text, world to screen space conversions, 2d/3d orthographic camera improvements, render layers, sprite flipping, improved color space handling, wireframes, timer improvements, and more!</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Robo Instructus Is a Coding Game Built Entirely in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </p> This month Tammy Xu published an article about Alex Butler</a>’s two-year journey of creating Robo Instructus</a>. The article touches lots of topics like: why a custom game engine in Rust was choosen, design of the custom scripting language, and game design of programming puzzles.</p> Bevy Cheatbook: Major Overhaul for Bevy 0.5</a> #</a> </h3> The Unofficial Bevy Cheatbook by @jamadazi is a practical reference book for the Bevy Game Engine</a>. It teaches programming patterns, features, and solutions to common problems. Written to be concise and easy to learn from.</p> The book recently got a major overhaul for the big new Bevy 0.5 release. Many pages were expanded or rewritten, new content added, and community feedback addressed.</p> If you are interested in Bevy, this book is now one of the most detailed learning resources. Have fun making cool things with Bevy!</p> Bevy Game Template</a> #</a> </h3> Bevy game template</a> by @nikl_me</a> is a template repository for a Bevy game.</p> The goal is to present a possible structure for Bevy games and at the same time reduce the amount of copy paste when starting a new project. The repository includes a GitHub workflow for Linux, MacOS, and Windows builds (WASM will be supported soon) and comes with a small, opinionated example game.</p> Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop</a> #</a> </h3> NES Tetris with Hard Drop and Ghost Piece</figcaption> </figure> A blog post</a> describing the process of reverse-engineering the rendering and input-handling logic in the NES version of Tetris, and using a rust embedded domain-specific language</a> to make a patching tool</a> that generates code (6502 machine code) to add hard drop (instantly dropping the current piece) and to render a ghost piece (the dotted outline showing where the current piece will land).</p> The patching tool uses the crate mos6502_assembler</a> to specify 6502 assembly in rust and generate machine code. Many of the reverse-engineering experiments were done using this rust NES emulator</a>. The result is available as an IPS Patch</a>.</p> Discussions: Hacker News</a>, /r/rust</a></em></p> Tutorial: Writing a tiny Entity Component System in Rust</a> #</a> </h3> @kettlecorn</a> wrote a beginner-friendly tutorial</a> that dives into the inner workings of the Entity-Component-System pattern. The tutorial walks through a minimalist ECS implementation to illustrate how the pattern works, and why it’s useful.</p> Discussion: /r/rust</a></em></p> Writing a 3D Shooter Using rg3d #</a> </h3> </a></p> @mrDIMAS</a> started a tutorial series about making a 3D shooter using the rg3d</a> game engine. So far three parts were released:</p> “Character Controller”</a> - engine & editor basics, simple character controller.</li> “Weapons”</a> - player weapon with recoil and simple impact effect.</li> “Bots, AI”</a> - bots, actor animations, and a simple AI.</li> </ul> Using Tests to Speed Up Your Feedback Loop</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @philipk</a> shared a blog post</a> about using tests not only for verifying correctness, but also for faster feedback loops in some circumstances. RobotCards</a> - a WIP game that uses the Legion ECS - is used as a practical example.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> genesis</a> #</a> </h3> genesis</a> by @StygianLightning</a> is a library for generating statically-typed ECS worlds by using a procedural macro.</p> Unlike other ECS libraries and frameworks, which do dynamic borrow-checking at runtime, you define all your components upfront and generate a completely statically typed ECS, with borrow checking done at compile time. Gone are the days of passing a World between functions, only to encounter a dynamic borrow checking problem!</p> genesis is a lightweight ECS library that doesn’t provide any scheduling capabilities. Instead, you can query the storage for each component type directly.</p> Shipyard v0.5</a> #</a> </h3> Shipyard</a> by @leudz</a> is an ECS library built on top of sparse sets and focused on usability and speed.</p> Main changes of the latest version</a>:</p> The system!</code> macro, packs, and Shiperator</code> trait were removed.</li> Bulk add entity - faster way than adding entities one by one.</li> Accurate modification tracking by default.</li> No more try_*</code> - now all functions that can fail because of storage access return a Result while almost all others panic.</li> More flexible workload building and debugging.</li> Customizable views and storages.</li> Significant performance improvements.</li> </ul> Planck ECS</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Planck ECS</a> (GitHub</a>, Blog</a>, Patreon</a>) by @jojolepro</a> is a brand new minimalist and safe ECS library.</p> The 1.0 release happened in the past month, featuring: various fixes, quality of life improvements, removal of unsafe code and completion of tests and documentation.</p> The library is currently considered completed, which means that all planned features are implemented, tested and benchmarked. Future updates will focus on performance improvements and usability improvements.</p> Planck ECS</a> is also used in Shotcaller</a> which is featured in this newsletter too.</p> You can read more about the library on the Blog</a> and on GitHub</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> hecs</a> v0.5 #</a> </h3> hecs</a> is a fast, lightweight, and unopinionated archetypal ECS library.</p> Version 0.5 introduces a column-major serialization mode. This imitates the in-memory data layout, enabling higher performance than the already-fast row-major serialization mode. Because columnar layout places similar data nearby, it also improves the effectiveness of compression.</p> Other changes include major optimizations to spawning entities and adding/removing components, inspired by the archetype graph model recently adopted by bevy.</p> rkyv</a> v0.5 #</a> </h3> rkyv</a> is a zero-copy deserialization framework for Rust. It’s similar to FlatBuffers and Cap’n Proto and can be used for data storage and messaging.</p> A benchmark</a> was put together to compare rkyv against other leading serialization solutions and gather feedback and use cases for development. A summary and analysis</a> of the results is also available.</p> Version 0.5 is hot off the presses and rolls up features from the 0.4 development cycle:</p> Derive macros can now implement PartialEq</code> and PartialOrd</code> between archived and unarchived types.</li> Custom type bounds for serialization and deserialization can be added with derive attributes.</li> Helper types like AlignedVec</a> and Infallible</a> were introduced to improve ergonomics.</li> const_generics</code> are now enabled by default.</li> Helper functions have been added to make getting root objects easier.</li> Several bugfixes and performance improvements.</li> </ul> A feedback issue</a> is still open for providing feedback on further development.</p> gba</a> v0.4 #</a> </h3> gba</a> is a crate for making GBA games with Rust. This month it was updated to 0.4! It’s using the new thumbv4-none-eabi</code> target, and has an overall simpler build process than before.</p> The project is still a work in progress, but if you’ve wanted to try an embedded experience this is an easy way to test the waters. No hardware required! Compiled binaries can be run in a GBA emulator just fine.</p> kira</a> #</a> </h3> kira</a> by @tesselode</a> is a game audio library tailored to composers and other people who need expressive audio.</p> v0.5.0 was released with mixer send tracks, new effects, and playback position tracking for instances, as well as a variety of smaller improvements.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Quinn</a> v0.7 #</a> </h3> Quinn</a> is an async-friendly implementation of the state-of-the-art QUIC transport protocol soon to be standardized by the IETF.</p> QUIC is a uniquely versatile foundation for building application protocols. Its support for low-latency communication, multiplexing, fine-grained reliability, and security make an excellent basis for real-time game networking, providing an array of powerful primitives unavailable on UDP or TCP.</p> Quinn 0.7</a> introduces support for Tokio 1.0 and many optimizations and bug fixes, and updates to draft 32</a> of the proposed standard. With last call underway in the IETF, the devs expect to release an implementation of the final standard soon with no major changes.</p> nakama-rs</a> #</a> </h3> nakama-rs</a> is a pure Rust implementation of the Nakama</a> protocol.</p> Nakama</a> is an open-source server designed to power modern games and apps. Features include user accounts, chat, social, matchmaker, realtime multiplayer, and much more</a>.</p> Being pure Rust, nakama-rs</a> brings the full API and socket options to any platform Rust works on.</p> smaa-rs</a> #</a> </h3> The smaa-rs</a> library provides fast and high quality post-process anti-aliaising using the SMAA algorithm</a>. It is designed to be easy to integrate into other wgpu</a> applications with only a few added lines of code.</p> The 0.2 series released this month includes a steamlined API which makes it easier to enable/disable anti-aliasing via a configuration setting. Currently SMAA 1x is supported with SMAA S2x likely to be added depending on interest.</p> wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> Voxel Bunny rendering with conservative rasterization</figcaption> </figure> wgpu</a> is a WebGPU</a> implementation in Rust. It is safe, efficient, and portable: can target both native (Vulkan/D3D/Metal) and the Web.</p> Most progress in March was focused around WGSL</a> shaders and validation. naga</a> has seen a lot of improvements in the SPIR-V and WGSL parsing, as well as backend code generation. Most importantly, it now fully validates both statements and expressions. No more accidental foot shots from adding vec2 and vec3 in the shaders!</p> The last and the biggest (in terms of shader complexity) example - “water” has been successfully ported to WGSL 🎉.</p> A small addition to our native-only features - conservative rasterization feature - was added by @wumpf</a> and demonstrated on a voxel bunny 🐇</p> Finally, there is a blog post on Mozilla graphics team blog</a> about the progress using wgpu</a> in Gecko.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> rust-gpu v0.3</a> #</a> </h3> The Khronos Sci-Fi helmet model in a glTF model viewer</a> created by @msiglreith</a> using rust-gpu</figcaption> </figure> rust-gpu</a> is a new codegen backend by Embark Studios for Rust, aimed at making Rust a first class language for writing GPU shaders! This past month was the release of rust-gpu v0.3</a>. Some of the highlights:</p> A lot of technical debt that was visible to users (such as #[allow(unused_attributes)]</code>) was removed.</li> rust-gpu now also supports basic ADT enums and has a whole inference pass for storage class variables.</li> All Embark’s shaders for their internal engine are now written in Rust</a> - no more GLSL/HLSL, just Rust for all CPU & GPU code!</li> </ul> Full release notes are available here</a>.</p> For more information on how to get started with using rust-gpu in your projects, check out the Rust-GPU Dev Guide</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> rafx</a> #</a> </h3> Rafx rendering an example tilemap from LDTK level editor</a></figcaption> </figure> Rafx is a multi-backend renderer that optionally integrates with the distill</a> asset pipeline. This month, a fourth layer was introduced to the library, rafx-renderer</code>. It provides a plugin system, simplifying framework setup in a project.</p> The demo now includes a tilemap renderer that integrates with the LDTK level editor</a>. The distill</code> integration processes the level files offline for very efficient loading/rendering at runtime.</p> Sprite rendering in general is also much faster now. Scenes with 40k-100k sprites can render at 60fps (measured on M1 mini) depending on transparency/distinct Z values in the scene. New examples demonstrate tilemap and sprite rendering.</p> Early work was also done to reuse descriptor sets across frames and reduce dynamic memory allocation when working with descriptor sets. Rafx also includes more options for HDR tonemapping.</p> FemtoVG</a> #</a> </h3> </p> FemtoVG is a 2D canvas like vector graphics library based on nanovg that has been previously featured in this newsletter.</p> This month, the FemtoVG team has implemented a new rendering backend based on the wgpu</code> library. This work is being done in this fork</a> of FemtoVG and will be merged into the main repo soon. The team is currently looking for users to try out the new backend and provide feedback.</p> Join the FemtoVG Discord channel</a>.</p> Kajiya #</a> </h3> </p> Kajiya by @h3r2tic</a> is a real-time global illumination renderer.</p> It utilizes Vulkan Ray Tracing via ash</a> and hassle-rs</a> to implement multi-bounce light transport in fully dynamic scenes. By shooting only two rays per pixel on average, it keeps performance high; thanks to a voxel-based light cache and extensive spatio-temporal filtering, it keeps noise low. It supports physically-based rendering of GLTF</a> scenes, and achieves a close match to reference path-tracing.</p> Kajiya is still in its infancy, and not yet available to the public, but you can get glimpses of its development by following the author on Twitter</a>.</p> Bevy Retro</a> #</a> </h3> Pixel-perfect collision example</a></figcaption> </figure> Bevy Retro</a> is a new Bevy</a> plugin designed for making pixel-perfect games.</p> This project was released under the Katharos License</a>. This license has moral and ethical implications that you may or may not agree with, so please read it before making use of this project.</p> Bevy Retro features:</p> Web and desktop support out of the box - it even runs in Safari on iOS!</li> Integer pixel coordinates - no need to round floats to keep pixels aligned!</li> Support for sprites, sprite sheets and animations.</li> A super simple hierarchy system.</li> A custom, scaled, pixel-perfect renderer with three camera modes: fixed width, fixed height, and letter-boxed.</li> An LDtk</a> map loading plugin.</li> Pixel-perfect collision detection.</li> Support for post-processing effects using custom shaders or the built-in CRT filter.</li> Support for custom pixel aspect ratios.</li> </ul> Feel free to discuss the project and provide feedback on GitHub</a>.</p> RAUI v0.28.1</a> #</a> </h3> RAUI + Tetra TODO app demo</figcaption> </figure> RAUI</a> by @PsichiX</a> is a Renderer Agnostic User Interface crate that is based on declarative mode UI composition similar to React.js and UE4 Slate system.</p> This month’s updates:</p> Advanced navigation system mainly for the use in Oxygengine</a> game engine.</li> Tesselation renderer</a> module to allow buildings Vertex + Index + Batch buffers for backends that allows to render meshes.</li> Tetra integration</a> crate that allows use of RAUI with Tetra</a> game framework.</li> Porting demos</a> to Tetra which became one of two mainly supported backends for RAUI.</li> </ul> egui-macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> Code example of usage of this library.</figcaption> </figure> egui-macroquad</a> is a small library to use egui</a> inside of macroquad</a>. It consists only of two functions.</p> Used in Portal Explorer</a>, see the section above.</p> building-blocks</a> v0.6.0 #</a> </h3> </p> In v0.6.0, the building-blocks</a> voxel library brings a couple important features for scaling up to large maps:</p> pyramids for level of detail</li> multichannel arrays</li> </ul> There is still much work to be done to optimize the voxel mesh LOD at large scales and improve the cosmetics of LOD transitions, but the preliminary work has allowed us to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with a new demo that you can view here</a>.</p> Full release notes are available on here</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> WhatTheFrame</a> #</a> </h3> </p> WhatTheFrame</a> by @JMS55</a> is a frame-based cpu profiler crate along with a GTK</a> (gtk4-rs</a>) based GUI.</p> This project aims to answer the question: Which frames of my game are slow, and why?</p> It aims to be simple to use, consisting of only 3 functions: Call let _r = Profiler::new_frame()</code> at the start of each frame, let _r = Profiler::new_task("task_name")</code> whenever you want to profile a task, and finally Profiler::end_profiling()</code> once at the end.</p> You can then open the resulting .wtf</code> profile in the GUI and analyze the results.</p> This month was spent designing and implementing both the GUI and profiler crate. The core functionality of both programs are complete, and all that remains is cleanup, tweaks, optimization, and finally packaging the GUI up.</p> Bitmapflow</a> #</a> </h3> Bitmapflow interpolating a walking mech animation</figcaption> </figure> Bitmapflow (GitHub</a>) by @bauxitedev</a> is a tool to help you generate inbetweens</a> for animated sprites. In other words, it makes your animations smoother. It uses optical flow</a> to try to guess how the pixels move between frames, and blends them accordingly. The results are far from perfect, and probably require some editing by hand afterwards, but it can produce decent results.</p> It supports loading and saving animated gifs, spritesheets and individual frames.</p> The tool is written using godot-rust and executables are available for Windows, although Linux support will be coming soon. (If you compile the program from source, it already works on Linux.)</p> A full demonstration and walkthrough of the program is available on YouTube</a>.</p> You can try it out yourself on itch.io</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> “Graphite” drawn using the circles and rectangles of the new tool drawing system</figcaption> </figure> Graphite (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-progress vector and raster graphics editor built on a nondestructive node-based workflow.</p> The team has grown from 1 to 5 in the past month and major progress was made building core architectural Rust code. A large accomplishment was designing the software architecture diagram</a>.</p> The current editor now has functional Select, Rectangle, and Ellipse tools thanks to the newly-added tool state machine and SVG viewport drawing. The UI now also implements tool-related icons and buttons, bringing it closer to parity with the design mockup. The team also set up a Web/Rust-WASM build system, GitHub CI to confirm PRs compile, and put together starter documentation</a> for the codebase, UX design, and manual.</p> Graphite is making rapid progress towards becoming a nondestructive, procedural graphics editor suitable of replacing traditional 2D DCC applications. Please join the Discord</a> - and consider asking for a tour of the code and how you can help!</p> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> femtovg is looking for help with the wgpu backend</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #19 - February 2021 Unknown — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 19th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Table of contents:</p> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The second Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in February. It was an opportunity for developers to show off what Rust projects they’ve been working on in the game ecosystem. Developers showed off game engine demos, in-game playthroughs, tooling, and more. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The next meetup will take place on the 13th of March at 16:00 GMT on the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>, and can also be streamed on Twitch</a>. If you would like to show off what you’ve been working on, fill out this form</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Flesh #</a> </h3> Title screen + gameplay</figcaption> </figure> Flesh by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and organic/fleshy theme. It is implemented using tetra</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> Added title screen</li> Support gamepad</li> Add new enemy types for first level include mid-boss</li> </ul> Fishgame</a> #</a> </h3> Fish game UI.</figcaption> </figure> Fishgame</a> (web build)</a> is an online multiplayer game, created in a collaboration between Nakama</a>, an open-source scalable game server, and the Macroquad</a> game engine.</p> This month fishgame utilized macroquad’s new UI system to add a title screen and improve the login screen.</p> Teki (敵)</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Teki</a> is a free and open-source fangame of the Tōhō</a> series using SDL2</a> and Legion</a> for ECS. It is aimed to be a shoot ’em up game with “lots of bullets” a.k.a danmaku 弾幕 - literally “barrage” or “bullet curtain” in Japanese.</p> The project is still at a “very” early stage of development (Dec. 2020).</p> This month’s updates include:</p> New enemy type: big fairy</li> New special card: Stellar Vortex</li> Add yin yang orbs</li> </ul> Harvest Hero</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Harvest Hero</a> is undergoing a shop system rework. However, new abilities are still being implemented. You can now use Zhebnog’s Hourglass to stop time and get weird.</p> Built on top of Emerald</a> by Bombfuse</a>.</p> This month’s updates include:</p> Added “Flame Guard” enchantment</li> Added “Zhebnog’s Hourglass” ability</li> Began work on a new main menu</li> Implemented a functional shop system</li> </ul> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> by @dabreegster</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers, with support for any city with OpenStreetMap coverage.</p> In February, Bruce</a> implemented lagging green traffic signals, Michael</a> and Yuwen</a> released the new day UI theme. More cycle paths and service roads were imported for all maps, and we added loads of maps, a new per-country picker UI, and dynamic font loading. Try out Taipei</a> in the web browser to see all of this in action!</p> Paddlers</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Paddlers</a> (GitHub</a>, Online Demo</a>) by @jakmeier</a> is an experimental MMORTS with the backend and the web client all written in Rust.</p> February gave birth to Paddlers release 0.2.1 and a ton of new game mechanics. It features a skill map, quests, and a refreshed take on the tower defense aspect of the game. On top of that, the rendering engine (part of the Paddle</a> framework) has been reworked and now allows for custom shaders. Read all about this month’s changes in this article</a> released on the developer’s private website.</p> Stellary 2 #</a> </h3> </a> ▶️ Click to watch the full video</a></figcaption> </figure> Stellary 2 by @CoffeJunkStudio</a> is a 3D real-time space shooter in which the player has to prevail against enemy space ships.</p> The latest updates include:</p> Players’ space ships</li> Prediction of the rocket trajectory</li> Energy budget</a></li> Weapon enhancements (trident laser</a> & missile splitting</a>)</li> </ul> Theta Wave</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Homing missiles periodically spawn from missile launcher enemies</figcaption> </figure> Theta Wave</a> is a space shooter game by developers @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a>. It is one of the showcase games for the Amethyst Engine</a>. In the past month, they have been focusing on refactoring the motion system to make the code more approachable to other contributors.</p> Notable changes:</p> Missiles now spawn from missile launcher enemies</li> Cursed background slowly fades in over the course of the level</li> </ul> SeniorSKY</a> #</a> </h3> Rising sun</figcaption> </figure> SeniorSKY</a> is a flight simulator that uses the Vulkan API, developed by @pmathia0</a>. As an aerospace engineering student, Peter has always been interested in how a flight simulator works under the hood. The development of SeniorSKY started as a hobby project during university studies.</p> SeniorSKY uses real-world elevation data with 1 arc second precision and can render the whole globe in real dimensions. During the flight, the terrain tiles are loaded dynamically based on real GPS coordinates of airplane, with a decreasing level of detail further from the camera. This is achieved using a combination of a terrain-quad-tree and GPU tessellation.</p> Notable changes since last month:</p> Atmospheric scattering</li> Improved fog</li> FXAA + HDR tone mapping</li> Terrain data preprocessing using compute shaders</li> Performance optimizations</li> </ul> Short-term plans:</p> replace imgui-rs by egui</li> implement sun position based on datetime</li> add terrain bump-maps to visualize gravel</li> </ul> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Way of Rhea is a picturesque puzzle game that lets you correct your mistakes. Change your color, teleport past the colored gates, master the color-powered circuits, and befriend the crabs-but don’t let them out!</p> This month’s major updates include:</p> New puzzles</li> Support for standard video settings (see here</a>)</li> The new promotional art shown above</li> </ul> Station Iapetus</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Check gameplay video</a> on YouTube</figcaption> </figure> Station Iapetus</a> by @mrDIMAS</a> is a 3rd person shooter on the space prison Iapetus near the Saturn.</p> New inventory (check the video)</li> Ability to throw grenades</li> Splash damage</li> More textures and materials</li> Hitboxes for bots and player</li> Better bots navigation</li> Laser sight improvements</li> Weapon display now shows bullet and grenades count</li> Lots of other small fixes and improvements</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A lush forest to explore</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In February, lots of work has been done on worldsim, with travelling merchants being worked on. Some experiments have been happening on procedurally generating giant trees. Lots is being done on the combat end, with dual wielding and modular weapons being a big focus. Player trading was also implemented, which allows items to be shared on the server. A large internal shift is being made from diesel to rusqlite.</p> A rework of attacks was done to allow their effects to be more dynamic. Lots of work has been done on the art team, with new weapon models, new mobs like fish. Some quality of life improvements were added, like humanoids automatically deploying gliders while falling to avoid fall damage. CI changes were made to finally have the GitHub mirror update periodically without error from LFS storage. In March, Veloren will release 0.9.</p> February’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #105</a>, #106</a>, #107</a>, #108</a>.</p> Project YAWC</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Project YAWC</a> is a turn-based strategy game in development by junkmail. February saw the release of Alpha 4, bringing special units and auctions to determine ownership of special units, as well as changes to netcode, balance, and UI.</p> Those interested in participating in the alpha test should fill out this form</a>. To learn more, you can follow the new @projectyawc</a> Twitter or send an e-mail to projectyawc@gmail.com.</p> Antorum Online</a> #</a> </h3> Challenging Kroob</figcaption> </figure> Antorum Online</a> is a micro-multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game server is written in Rust, and the official client is being developed in Unity.</p> The Armorcrafting, Weaponcrafting, and Salvaging skills were implemented this month! Players can now craft gear in town using materials gathered out in the world. They can also break down old or unwanted gear to recycle it.</p> #30: Crafting And Salvaging</a>;</li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Fullscreen Exclusive Is A Lie (…sort of)</a> #</a> </h3> Way of Rhea</a>’s video settings</figcaption> </figure> Anthropic Studios</a> has shared an article</a> walking through what they learned from implementing fullscreen exclusivity in their Rust game engine and testing the fullscreen exclusive implementation of existing games on a variety of hardware.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Rhythm game in Rust using Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> Rhythm game demo</figcaption> </figure> Rhythm game in Rust using Bevy</a> is an introductory tutorial for Bevy made by @guimcaballero</a>. It guides through how to use Bevy to develop a Rhythm game, including how to play audio, use GLSL shaders, and make a simple menu screen.</p> godot-vs-rapier</a> #</a> </h3> </p> godot-vs-rapier</a> by @extrawurst</a> is a project that compares Godot</a>’s built-in physics against Rapier</a>.</p> Discussions: r/godot</a></em></p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> Macroquad-UI runtime GUI skins configuration.</figcaption> </figure> macroquad</a> is a cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS/WASM) game framework built on top of miniquad</a>.</p> This month biggest update: Macroquad got its own fully skinnable and customizable immediate mode UI system 🎉. The new system took its origins from a heavily refactored megaui</a> and supports custom font sizes, fonts and skins for each UI element. While work is still in progress, all important decisions were made and implementation PR</a> got merged.</p> Minor updates:</p> Textures support</a> for macroquad materials</li> Experimental 2D pan/zoom camera implementation</a></li> </ul> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra's demo game</figcaption> </figure> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA, Love2D, and Raylib. This month, version 0.6 was released, with some big changes and features:</p> A simpler drawing API</li> Less global state for mesh drawing</li> Multisampled canvases</li> Better font rendering</li> </ul> For more details, see the changelog</a>, or 17cupsofcoffee’s twitter thread</a> about the release.</p> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Check navmesh agent navigation</a> on YouTube</figcaption> </figure> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide a large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent updates:</p> Ability to render UI instances in a texture</li> FBX name validator</li> Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA)</li> Integrity checks for resource inheritance</li> Nodes now can be tagged</li> Animation blending machine now has BlendAnimationsByIndex node</li> Multi-directional binding between physics and graph</li> SceneDrawingContext improvements: draw_capsule, draw_capsule segment</li> Performance statistics for scenes</li> ColorGradient improvements</li> Path smoothing for navmesh agent</a></li> Lots of other small fixes and improvements.</li> </ul> Dotrix</a> #</a> </h3> Demo application demonstrating light rendering</figcaption> </figure> Dotrix</a> (YouTube</a>, Discord</a>) by @lowenware</a> is an ECS based 3D game engine with renderer built around the wgpu-rs</a>.</p> This month Dotrix</a> 0.3 was released on crates.io</a> with the complete API documentation</a>, major light components update, wireframes, and mouse ray modules.</p> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Rafx</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Rafx is a multi-backend renderer that optionally integrates with the distill</a> asset pipeline. Rafx is divided into three tiers of functionality:</p> rafx-api</code> provides a custom GPU API abstraction layer that currently supports Vulkan and metal. (API in rust psuedocode</a>)</p> rafx-framework</code> builds on the API layer using ideas found in modern shipping AAA titles. Rendering is pipelined in a separate thread in three phases, using jobs to extract data from the main thread, process the data on the render thread, and write the draw calls to command buffers. [Tatarchuk 2015</a>] A render graph ensures correct synchronization. [O’Donnell 2017</a>] The framework also provides a material abstraction and shader pipeline.</p> rafx-assets</code> adds integration with the distill</a> asset pipeline. This ensures that when an asset like a mesh is loaded, other related assets like textures/material/vertex data are loaded. By integrating with Distill, rafx provides advanced features like streaming live asset updates to remote devices.</p> More information about rafx:</p> GitHub</a></li> Documentation</a></li> Why Rafx?</a> (includes similarities/differences with other rust and non-rust alternatives)</li> </ul> egui</a> #</a> </h3> </p> egui</a> by @emilk</a> is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI library in pure Rust.</p> This month versions 0.9 and 0.10</a> of egui were released with many improvements big and small, including a 2D plot, more text styles, disabling widgets and improved documentation.</p> You can try out egui in the online demo</a>.</p> This Month in Mun</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Mun</a> is a scripting language for gamedev focused on quick iteration times that is written in Rust.</p> It’s been a long time coming, but the Mun Core Team is closing in on the finish line for Mun v0.3. They are only a couple of pull requests away from locking the build for bug fixes and documentation. The February updates</a> include:</p> use</code> statements language support;</li> Incremental file updates for the language server;</li> LLVM 11 support;</li> Bug fixes and other improvements.</li> </ul> Graphite</a> #</a> </h3> Progress on the GUI</figcaption> </figure> Graphite</a> (GitHub</a>, Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is an in-progress vector and raster graphics editor built on a nondestructive node-based workflow.</p> Since February’s Rust Gamedev Meetup which announced</a> the Graphite vision has attracted tremendous interest, community advice has shifted the development strategy to focus on a 0.1 MVP release ASAP:</p> The past year’s in-development custom GUI has been shelved in lieu of an interim web GUI. Graphite intends to natively support Windows, Mac, Linux, and Web. This change unblocks core application development but means Graphite is Web-only until the Rust GUI ecosystem matures. Good progress this month has been made building the web GUI with Vue</a>.</li> Graphite 0.1 will now support only vector editing. This defers the large complexity of the graph render engine required for node-based raster editing. It should be less difficult to first focus on building a vector editor that improves upon the UX of Illustrator and Inkscape.</li> </ul> wgpu-rs</a> #</a> </h3> wgpu-rs is a WebGPU implementation and API in Rust.</p> “wgpu-core”-0.7.1 was published with fixes</li> API updated for blending states, cull faces, vertex formats</li> Zero-initialization of buffers upon use</li> Validation of texture bindings, index formats for strip topologies</li> Binding tracker was rewritten with test-ability in mind, bugs fixed</li> The player learned to resize the window properly. API traces can now be replayed on Linux even when swapchain recreation events are present</li> SPIRV-Cross was made optional, which was useful for Deno in order to work around the linking conflict with “rusty_v8”</li> </ul> gfx-rs</a> #</a> </h3> gfx-rs is a portable low-level graphics abstraction layer.</p> API got PhysicalDeviceProperties</code> containing limits and properties of physical devices that are not opt-in.</li> SPIRV-Cross dependency was made optional, while Naga is required.</li> Vulkan backend learned to target Vulkan 1.1 and 1.2 internally.</li> DX12 understood more limits.</li> GL backend fixed WebGL initialization and EGL library discovery.</li> </ul> naga</a> #</a> </h3> naga is the shader translation library/tool.</p> Versions 0.3.1 and 0.3.2 were published with fixes</li> API: function calls turned into statements, image queries , and stores, understanding of push constants.</li> Validation: type validation was re-written and improved, new control flow analysis was added to check for uniformity requirements. In addition, this step now collects the image-sampler pairs used by the module.</li> Backends: lots of fixes and filling of the gaps</li> Infrastructure: convert</code> example was removed in favor of the default binary target. The native shaders (produced by the snapshot tests) got validated on CI using platform tools.</li> </ul> Distill</a> #</a> </h3> Distill is an asset pipeline for games, reading artist-friendly formats from disk, processing them into your engine-ready formats, and delivering them to your game runtime. Distill handles dependencies between assets, import & build caching, cross-device hot reloading during development, packing assets for a shippable game build, and more.</p> Distill’s design is inspired by Unity’s asset system and Frostbite’s Scaling the Pipeline</a>. Distill leverages purity in the functional-programming sense to deliver a robust and scalable experience for the asset processing pipeline. With LMDB</a> backing storage of metadata, Distill is able to avoid blocking asset loading while assets are being imported which eliminates the most common frustration with existing commercial offerings. Additionally, Distill is able to provide fully consistent snapshots of asset metadata to readers over capnp-rpc</a>.</p> basis-universal-rs</a> #</a> </h3> basis-universal</code> provides bindings for Binomial LLC</a>’s Basis Universal texture codec</a>.</p> Basis Universal is a state-of-the-art supercompressed</a> texture codec that was recently open-sourced</a> by Binomial in partnership with Google. It was contributed</a> to the Khronos glTF 3D Transmission Open Standard.</p> The library has two primary uses:</p> Compresses and encode textures “offline” to a custom format</li> Transcoding: Unpack the custom format directly to GPU-friendly compressed formats. The final format can be chosen at game runtime to be compatible with available GPU hardware.</li> </ul> Basis universal format can also store mipmapped textures and cubemaps, neither of which is possible with “normal” file formats. Mipmaps can be generated by the library during compression.</p> Compression is very slow (around 7-10s for a 2k texture) but transcoding is relatively fast (around 5-40ms for a 2k texture depending on quality). Memory savings at runtime are generally >= 75% (depending on the transcode format and quality)</p> bevy_egui</a> #</a> </h3> bevy_egui</a> provides a Egui</a> integration for the Bevy</a> game engine. It supports bevy_webgl2</a> and implements the full set of Egui features (such as clipboard and opening URLs).</p> This month versions 0.2 and 0.3 were released, providing an integration with Egui 0.9 and 0.10 respectively.</p> Try out the online demo</a>.</p> rkyv</a> #</a> </h3> rkyv</a> is a zero-copy deserialization framework for Rust. It’s similar to FlatBuffers and Cap’n Proto and can be used for data storage and messaging.</p> Version 0.4</a> was released this month and brought some big changes and improvements:</p> Major traits have been refactored and renamed to clarify their roles</li> Shared pointers (Rc</code>, Arc</code>, Weak</code>) can now be serialized, deserialized, and validated with correct ownership semantics</li> Serialization, deserialization, and validation all now support custom contexts</li> Greatly improved support for 32- and 64-bit archives by implementing Archive for usize</code> and isize</code></li> More comprehensive documentation in the book</a></li> </ul> This release completes the project’s initial feature set, and a request for feedback</a> has been opened to help with future project planning.</p> wasm_plugin</a> #</a> </h3> wasm_plugin</a> is a new low-ish level tool for easily hosting WASM based plugins for modding or scripting.</p> It consists of two crates:</p> wasm_plugin_host</a> which wraps a wasmer instance with methods for calling functions on the guest plugin.</li> wasm_plugin_guest</a> which provides an attribute macro to easily export functions to the host.</li> </ul> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/rust-gamedev.github.io</a>: #406 “Separate category for engines vs libraries/tools”</a>;</li> #454 “Newsletter: new format and more delegation”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #98 “Monthly Rust Gamedev Meetup”</a>;</li> #100 “Physiology simulation”</a>;</li> #101 “[Proposal] Abstract plane geometry library for GUI projects”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discuss this post on</strong>: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a>, Discord</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #18 - January 2021 Unknown — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 18th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Table of contents:</p> Rust GameDev Podcast</a></li> Rust GameDev Meetup</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Engine Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Podcast #5</a> #</a> </h2> </p> The 5th podcast episode</a> is an interview with Alex Ene</a> creator of an upcoming dwarven simulation game, Dwarf World</a>.</p> In this week’s episode, Richard and Forest chat to Alex Ene, creator of the dwarven simulation game, Dwarf World. We cover writing custom engines, unit testing, build systems, and picking the right frameworks for your game.</p> </blockquote> Listen and subscribe from the following platforms: Rust GameDev Podcast (simplecast)</a>, Apple Podcasts</a>, Spotify</a>, RSS Feed</a>, Google Podcasts</a>.</p> Rust GameDev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The first iteration of the Rust Gamedev Meetup happened in January. It was an opportunity for developers to show of what Rust projects they’ve been working on in the game ecosystem. Developers showed off physics engines, custom build tools, renderers, and more. You can watch the recording of the meetup here on Youtube</a>.</p> The next meetup will take place 13th of February at 16:00 GMT on the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>, and can also be streamed on Twitch</a>.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Teki (敵)</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Teki</a> is a free and open-source fangame of the Tōhō</a> series using SDL2</a> and Legion</a> for ECS. Thanks to WebAssembly - via wasm-pack</a> -, teki can be played online</a>.</p> It is aimed to be a shoot ’em up game with “lots of bullets” a.k.a danmaku 弾幕 - literally “barrage” or “bullet curtain” in japanese.</p> The project is still at a “very” early stage of development (Dec. 2020).</p> Fishgame</a> #</a> </h3> Fish game gameplay footage.</figcaption> </figure> Fishgame</a> is an online multiplayer game, created in a collaboration between Nakama</a>, an open-source scalable game server, and the Macroquad</a> game engine.</p> The game is going to showcase nakama multiplayer capabilities for the rust language world.</p> This month the game got a public, multiplayer HTML5 build. Play it online!</a></p> Station Iapetus</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Check gameplay video</a> on YouTube</figcaption> </figure> Station Iapetus</a> by @mrDIMAS</a> is a 3rd person shooter on the space prison Iapetus near the Saturn.</p> The game is based on the rg3d</a> game engine and is meant to be the proof that rg3d is ready for commercial production. The game is a commercial project which will be released in Steam.</p> SeniorSKY</a> #</a> </h3> Over the mountains in Slovakia</figcaption> </figure> SeniorSKY</a> is a flight simulator which uses Vulkan API, developed by @pmathia0</a>. As an aerospace engineering student, Peter has always been interested how a flight simulator works under the hood. The development of SeniorSKY started as a hobby project during university studies.</p> SeniorSKY uses real-world elevation data with 1 arc second precision and can render the whole globe in real dimensions. During the flight, the terrain tiles are loaded dynamically based on real GPS coordinates of airplane, with a decreasing level of detail further from the camera. This is achieved using a combination of a terrain-quad-tree and GPU tessellation.</p> SeniorSKY also implements basic rendering of sky, atmosphere and fog.</p> To be able to simulate a flight, the application temporarily integrates 3rd party flight dynamics engine called JSBSim. Meanwhile, development of own, custom flight dynamics is already in progress.</p> Oicana</a> #</a> </h3> Solving puzzles to build towers</figcaption> </figure> Oicana</a> is a tower defense game with puzzle aspects submitted to Mini jam 71 on itch</a> by M1nd0fRafa3l</a> and @nikl_me</a>. The game was written using the Rust game engine Bevy</a>.</p> Colorless puzzle pieces try to reach your base. Your towers have to shoot at the pieces to uncover their color. After defeating a piece, it will try to run away and you should catch it to upgrade your towers or build new ones.</p> Following the game jam the tower upgrades where improved and game audio was changed to use Kira</a> via an experimental bevy plugin</a>.</p> Bounty Bros.</a> #</a> </h3> </a> First pass character controller video</figcaption> </figure> Bounty Bros.</a> is a prototype dungeon crawler game in the spirit of “Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past”. The game is being developed by Katharos Technology</a> as a playground for a future commercial game, along with a custom 2D engine built on top of Bevy</a>.</p> The engine, which is unnamed so far, will be Open Sourced soon and will be designed to make it very easy to make games with a similar gameplay and style, primarily by simply writing YAML configuration files and integrating with LDtk</a>.</p> Flesh #</a> </h3> Inside flesh</figcaption> </figure> Flesh by @im_oab</a> is a 2D-horizontal shmup game with hand-drawn animation and implement using tetra. It still in the development stage but have a release date set in October 2021.</p> This game takes place inside the flesh of mysterious organisms that players will fight through multiple levels to get out.</p> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> by @dabreegster</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers, with suppot for any city with OpenStreetMap coverage.</p> In January, Bruce</a> implemented variable traffic signal timing, dedicated cycle-paths and pedestrian plazas were imported, Michael</a> and Yuwen</a> overhauled the UI buttons, and we finished day/night toggling. Loading on the web</a> and starting scenarios is also much faster!</p> Paddlers #</a> </h3> </p> Paddlers</a> (GitHub</a>, Online Demo</a>) by @jakmeier</a> is an MMORTS for the browser, developed as an experimental hobby project.</p> This month, version 0.2.0 has been released, which removes all dependencies to Stdweb</a> and Quicksilver</a> while keeping the game itself virtually unchanged. In the process, a part of the code of Paddlers moved to Paddle</a>, a new framework for 2D browser games running on desktop and mobile phones. More details on that are available here</a>.</p> Many new features for Paddle and Paddlers are already in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more exciting updates in the next monthly newsletter!</p> Antorum</a> #</a> </h3> Hanging out by the vault</figcaption> </figure> Antorum</a> is a micro-multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game server is written in Rust, and the official client is being developed in Unity.</p> Banking was implemented this month! Players can now store their items and wealth in a safe place. Additionally, the concept of “item combinations” was implemented, bringing more interesting crafting scenarios into the game.</p> #28: Banking</a>;</li> #29: Item Combinations</a>;</li> </ul> Harvest Hero #</a> </h3> </p> Harvest Hero (Discord</a>) by @bombfuse_dev</a> is an arcade/roguelike game built on top of Emerald</a>. This month’s updates include:</p> Art update thanks to @ddooby</a>.</li> Map templates for better designed maps.</li> A shop system for buying abilities/enchantments.</li> SFX were added to bring some more life to the game.</li> </ul> Dwarf World</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Dwarf World</a> (Discord</a>) by Alex Ene</a> has added a couple of updates and improvements:</p> Dynamic lights and light propagation so deeper caves are darker.</li> An in-game feedback button that people can use to report bugs or just give general feedback.</li> All random numbers are from seeded generators so it makes bugs easier to reproduce.</li> A big chunk of a replay system is finished. This should help a lot with reproducing issues. Plus, it’s really fun to watch.</li> Bug fixes and performance improvements, mostly related to rendering and culling systems.</li> </ul> If you’re interested in keeping a closer eye on the project and monitor it’s progress, you can join the game’s discord channel</a>. That’s where the pre-alpha builds will drop there once they are ready to be seen by a wider audience.</p> Stellary 2 #</a> </h3> </p> Stellary 2 by @CoffeJunkStudio</a> is a 3D real-time artillery game in which the player has to destroy all enemy planets in order to defend his own from extinction.</p> Based on the SimJam 2020</a> game “Stellary</a>”, the studio is now working on this sequel with their self-developed “Sphere Engine”. It will feature an underlying physically based gravity simulation, powering the space battles in different solar systems. You can find regular updates on Twitter</a>.</p> By the way: “Stellary 2” is just a working title, feel free to drop them a PM on Twitter if you have a flash of inspiration!</p> Theta Wave</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Homing missiles pursue the closest player entity</figcaption> </figure> A real name was finally chosen for space_shooter_rs! Theta Wave</a> is a space shooter game by developers @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a>. It is one of the showcase games for the Amethyst Engine</a>. In the past month, they have been focused on improving the motion system for the game. The improvements allowed them to begin adding more interesting behavior for moving entities. Missiles were changed to home to the player.</p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Way of Rhea is a picturesque puzzle game that lets you correct your mistakes. Change your color, teleport past the colored gates, master the color powered circuits, and befriend the color changing crabs-but don’t let them out!</p> This month’s major updates include:</p> Autosave support.</li> Steam cloud support.</li> A free demo was released as part of Boston FIG (no longer available).</li> In game audio options.</li> A new level featuring a new puzzle mechanic.</li> An updated trailer</a>.</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Let it snow!</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In January, lots of work was done on new models that make the world feel more alive. Work was done on economic simulation, and many of the blog posts highlight this progress. This includes trading between sites, and professions. Skill trees were completed, and are now in the game.</p> Large changes are being implemented to the CI system to reduce build times. Work has been ongoing on improving the Veloren wiki, with many contributors adding to it. In February, a meeting will be held to discuss the 0.9 release, with does not yet have a release date.</p> January’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #101</a>, #102</a>, #103</a>, #104</a>.</p> Shotcaller</a> #</a> </h3> An art mockup of some Shotcaller action.</figcaption> </figure> Shotcaller</a> (Discord</a>) is a minimalistic MOBA that focuses strictly on macro-play with few actions-per-minute, leaving only room for grand strategy decisions. The game is made with bracket-lib</a>, a custom game engine</a> and Plank ECS</a>.</p> Recent updates include:</p> Version v0.4.0 was released</a>.</li> First batch of custom art assets completed; will be implemented in the month to come.</li> New leaders: Alchemist</a>, Axe</a>, Rubick</a>, Centaur</a>, Bristleback</a>, Shadow Fiend</a>.</li> Gold system</a>.</li> Headless option</a> (in preparation for AI/ML experimenting).</li> Fog of War</a>.</li> Mouse support</a>.</li> </ul> Zemeroth</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click to watch a footage with sound</a> 🔊</figcaption> </figure> Zemeroth</a> by @ozkriff</a> is a minimalistic 2D turn-based tactical game. Some of the recent updates:</p> The game was migrated from good-web-game to macroquad</a> and converted to explicit async assets loading.</li> Proper sound effects & music were added</a> using the quad-snd</a> library (more details</a>).</li> </ul> The final preparations for v0.7 are wrapping up!</p> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Hands-on Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> “Hands-on Rust: Effective Learning through 2D Game Development and Play”</a> is a book by Herbert Wolverson</a> (the author of bracket-lib</a> and the Rust Roguelike Tutorial</a>): make fun games as you learn Rust through a series of hands-on gamedev tutorials and real-world use of core language skills.</p> Recent beta releases</a> added the following chapters:</p> #10: Fields of View;</li> #11: More Interesting Dungeons;</li> #12: Map Themes;</li> #13: Inventory and Power Ups;</li> #14: Deeper Dungeons;</li> #15: Combat Systems and Loot;</li> #16: Final Steps and Finishing Touches.</li> </ul> Triangle from Scratch</a> #</a> </h3> Triangle from Scratch</a> (source code</a>) is a WIP tutorial series by @Lokathor</a> about drawing a triangle without using any outside crates. Two extensive chapters were added this month:</p> “Loading OpenGL with Win32 API”</a>;</li> “WebGL with bare WASM”</a>.</li> </ul> Setting a Rust Executable’s Icon in Windows</a> #</a> </h3> Way of Rhea</a>’s icon in the taskbar</figcaption> </figure> Anthropic Studios</a> has shared an article</a> about manually using rc.exe</code> and embedding the resulting .res</code> into your app to set your game’s system icon on Windows.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Exploring WebSocket with Rust and Tide</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An exploration post on how to use WebSockets with Tide</a> framework by creating a simple tic-tac-toc game. It’s focused on how to implement ws</code> to enable all time of real time apps (and games) with Rust and Tide. You can also play tic-tac-tide</a> online.</p> Engine Updates #</a> </h2> ggez</a> #</a> </h3> </p> ggez</a> is a lightweight cross-platform game framework for making 2D games with minimum friction.</p> The zero’th release candidate for version 0.6.0 has been released and there has been no particularly horrific outcry of people’s games exploding. A first release candidate with a pile of medium-sized bug fixes should be coming in early February, hopefully soon followed by a full release. Feedback is welcome</a>!</p> Special thanks to the contributors who helped hunt bugs and organize PR’s to get this version out the door: @PSteinhaus, @Manghi, @AaronM04, @Systemcluster, and @Andy-Python-Programmer!</p> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA and Raylib. This month, versions 0.5.7 and 0.5.8 were released, with various changes:</p> Basic multisampled anti-aliasing support (with further improvements to come).</li> Functions for generating primitive shape meshes.</li> A more flexible Rectangle</code> type.</li> Lots of bug fixes and docs improvements.</li> </ul> For full details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Additionally, work on version 0.6</a> has begun, with a release planned for some time in February!</p> Dotrix</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Dotrix</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) got an official egui</a> support and a new example demonstrating various engine features and controls. The next big milestone for Dotrix</a> developers is a terrain engine and editor, also made with egui</a>. Some progress you can already find on YouTube</a>.</p> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> A level made in rusty-editor</a> which is a native scene editor for the rg3d game engine.</figcaption> </figure> rg3d</a> (Discord</a>, Twitter</a>) is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent updates:</p> Animation blending state machines were improved.</li> It’s now possible to copy nodes in-place.</li> The number of draw calls for UI was reduced by 70%.</li> Fixed clipping issues and text measurement in the UI.</li> Opacity for UI widgets was added.</li> Layout of Scroll- and Wrap- panels was fixed.</li> Light scatter issues for spot lights were fixed.</li> Support for transparent meshes.</li> Migration to rapier 0.5.</li> Animation signal handling is fixed when animation playing in reverse.</li> Animation tracks now are able to filter position/scale/rotation.</li> Sprite rendering fixes.</li> Improved copy/paste in rusty-editor.</li> Lots of other small fixes and improvements.</li> </ul> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> rkyv</a> #</a> </h3> rkyv</a> is a zero-copy deserialization framework for Rust. It’s similar to FlatBuffers and Cap’n Proto and can be used for data storage and messaging.</p> Version 0.3 was released this month and brought some highly-requested features:</p> A new hashmap implementation using perfect hashing to decrease memory usage and fix portability issues.</li> The Unarchive</code> trait to enable more traditional data deserialization for archived types.</li> Improved validation performance.</li> Better error messages and API ergonomics.</li> A book</a> with more narrative documentation on architecture and internals.</li> More tests and realistic benchmarks against other popular serialization frameworks.</li> </ul> The next update will be v0.4</a> and is on the way soon with a release date around mid-February.</p> This Month in Mun</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Mun</a> is a scripting language for gamedev focused on quick iteration times that is written in Rust.</p> Revitalized from the holiday break, the Mun core team got cracking; those January updates</a> include:</p> a ton of new language server features;</li> the ability to emit IR;</li> better documentation;</li> bug fixes and other improvements.</li> </ul> GameLisp</a> v0.2 #</a> </h3> </p> GameLisp</a> (source code</a>, playground</a>) by @fleabitdev</a> is a scripting language designed specifically for Rust game development.</p> This month, version 0.2.0 has been released. Some of the updates:</p> Any 'static</code> Rust type, including types defined by external crates, can now be moved onto the garbage-collected heap and manipulated by GameLisp scripts.</li> Rust data on the garbage-collected heap can now contain pointers to other garbage-collected data, by implementing a trace()</code> method.</li> Version 0.1 could only bind non-capturing Rust closures, but closures which capture 'static</code> data are now fully supported.</li> Rust function pointers can now be passed directly to GameLisp, rather than using the rfn!</code> macro. The clunky lib!</code> and rdata!</code> macros have also been removed.</li> Updated documentation starting from the “Rust Bindings”</a> chapter.</li> </ul> For full details, see the changelog</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> LDtk-rs</a> #</a> </h3> LDtk-rs</a> is a Rust crate for reading the LDtk</a> map file format. The bindings to the LDtk format are 100% automatically generated from the LDtk JSON Schema, with the option to download the latest JSON Schema at build time for automatic updates.</p> bevy_ldtk</a> #</a> </h3> Tileset from “Cavernas”</a> by Adam Saltsman</figcaption> </figure> bevy_ldtk</a> is a Bevy plugin for loading LDtk</a> tilemaps.</p> It features:</p> An efficient renderer that only uses 4 vertices per map layer.</li> Hot reloading through the Bevy asset server integration.</li> Heavily commented code to help others who want to see how to make their own tilemap renderers.</li> </ul> kira</a> #</a> </h3> kira</a> by @tesselode</a> is a game audio library tailored to composers and other people who need expressive audio.</p> v0.4.0 was released with a new wasm32 support, a new handle-based API, improved error handling, and serde support for sequences, arrangements, and most config structs.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Dimforge</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Dimforge</a> creates open-source Rust crates for numerical simulation. Some of the January updates:</p> Parry</a> was announced, the successor of ncollide for 2D and 3D collision-detection in Rust.</li> The new version of Rapier</a> brings many new features, including the ability to use custom shapes, as well as convex polygons/polyhedrons for 2D and 3D respectively.</li> </ul> You can read about all of the changes in the January edition of “This Month In Dimforge”</a>.</p> gfx-rs</a> and wgpu-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The community managed to squeeze the v0.7 releases out at the end of the month. See the detailed notes on gfx blog post</a>.</p> The highlight of the show is about shaders. Most of wgpu-rs shaders are now written in WGSL</a>, and gfx-rs community is inviting Rust game/graphics developers to evaluate if naga</a> could fulfill their shader translation needs in the future.</p> imgui-rs</a> #</a> </h3> Drag and Drop and the new Drawing Api at Work in 0.7.0</figcaption> </figure> imgui-rs</a> is the Rust bindings for the ubiquitous immediate mode GUI library, Dear ImGui. Under new maintenance, version 0.7</a> has been released, which features a new API for raw draw calls, support for ergonomic Drag and Drop, and tons of improvements. Notably, many functions were made inline</code> and/or const</code>, including the im_str!</code> macro.</p> egui</a> #</a> </h3> Some of the supported widgets in the new grid layout.</figcaption> </figure> egui</a> is a simple, fast, and highly portable immediate mode GUI library.</p> This month version 0.8</a> of egui was released with a new grid layout, new look, and many smaller fixes and improvements. You can try out egui in the online demo</a>.</p> bevy_egui</a> #</a> </h3> </p> bevy_egui</a> provides a Egui</a> integration for the Bevy</a> game engine. It supports bevy_webgl2</a> and implements the full set of Egui features (such as clipboard and opening URLs).</p> Try out the online demo</a>.</p> chess-engine</a> #</a> </h3> Console and web clients for the chess-engine</figcaption> </figure> chess-engine</a> by @adam-mcdaniel</a> is a pure Rust, no-std, dependency-free chess engine built to run anywhere.</p> I love chess a lot. It’s definitely one of my favorite games ever. However, I’ve always been disappointed when trying to write programs that play chess digitally (particularly in a compiled language). Although several amazing engines exist, it’s near impossible to find a neat library for chess-related-programming that runs on everything.</p> chess-engine</a> is a solution to my problem. If you want a chess engine that runs on embedded devices, the terminal, the desktop (with a gui)</a>, and the web</a>, this is probably your best bet.</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> dcli</a> #</a> </h3> Example of dcliah output</figcaption> </figure> dcli</a> by Mike Chambers</a> is a library and a collection of utilities&apps that provide a command line interface (CLI) for viewing player stats and data from Destiny 2, using the Destiny 2 API</a>:</p> dclis - retrieves primary platform and membership ids for Destiny 2 players.</li> dclim - manages and syncs the remote Destiny 2 API manifest database.</li> dclias - downloads and syncs Destiny 2 Crucible activity history into a local sqlite3 database file.</li> dclic - retrieves character ids for the specified member.</li> dclims - searches the Destiny 2 manifest by hash ids (from API calls).</li> dclitime - generates date / time stamps for Destiny 2 weekly event moments.</li> dclia - displays information on player’s current activity within Destiny 2.</li> dcliah - displays Destiny 2 activity history and stats.</li> dcliad - displays Destiny 2 Crucible activity / match details.</li> </ul> Rust Support in Shader Playground</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Shader Playground</a> (source code</a>) by @tgjones</a> now allows you to try out writing shaders in Rust (using rust-gpu</a>) without downloading or building anything.</p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/rust-gamedev.github.io</a>: #406 “Separate category for engines vs libraries/tools”</a>;</li> #454 “Newsletter: new format and more delegation”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #98 “Monthly Rust Gamedev Meetup”</a>;</li> #100 “Physiology simulation”</a>;</li> #101 “[Proposal] Abstract plane geometry library for GUI projects”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discussions of this post</strong>: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #17 - December 2020 Unknown — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 17th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Table of contents:</p> Rust GameDev Podcast #4</a></li> Rust Gamedev Meetup</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust Gamedev Meetup #</a> </h2> </p> The Rust Gamedev meetup will happen on the second Saturday of every month at 16:00 GMT+0. The meetup will be an opportunity to chat with others from the Rust game development community and see what people are working on.</p> The meetup will take place on the Rust Gamedev Discord server</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Rust GameDev Podcast #4</a> #</a> </h2> </p> The 4th podcast episode</a> is an interview with Fedor Logachev</a>, creator of the macroquad</a> and miniquad</a> games libraries.</p> We discuss the libraries’ features, development, and plans for the future as well as the accompanying book and games project that will act as both an introduction to Rust games development and the Macroquad library.</p> </blockquote> Listen and subscribe from the following platforms: Rust GameDev Podcast (simplecast)</a>, Apple Podcasts</a>, Spotify</a>, RSS Feed</a>, Google Podcasts</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Way of Rhea has a Discord!</a> #</a> </h3> Updated visuals for interactive items.</figcaption> </figure> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle platformer that takes place in a world where you can only interact with objects that match your current color. The game is being developed in a custom built Rust game engine and hot swappable scripting language.</p> This month’s updates:</p> More progress has been made on the hub world! The game is no longer fully linear.</li> All interactive elements are getting a visual update, pictured above.</li> The devs have created a Discord server</a> where you can hang out, stay up to date on the latest developments, and if you’re interested, chat about the implementation (see the #tech</code> channel.)</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> A village over the river</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In December, Veloren released its 100th devblog</a>! This edition included sections about all aspects of the project from 20 contributors, making it by far the longest Veloren devblog yet:</p> A journey to implement a controller support with gilrs</a>.</li> Two sections about modelling: by @Gemu</a> and by @Snowram</a>.</li> Veloren’s database persistence and inventory improvements</a>.</li> Combat improvements: new weapon skills, better AI, and a poise system</a>.</li> Network analysis and an overview of new Network Backend</a>.</li> Overviews of the state of graphics and UI</a>, the graphical future of the game</a>, and UI progress</a>.</li> Procedural generation of unique, good looking, and fun to climb trees</a>.</li> New website design prototypes</a>.</li> And lots of other interesting sections with updates and personal contributors’ stories.</li> </ul> Other December updates include:</p> Lots of work on the economic simulation: part 1</a>, part 2</a>.</li> Reflective water was added to the level of detail system</a>, making far-off lakes look much better.</li> A plugin system is in the prototyping phase. This will eventually allow mods to be added to the game.</li> An aura system was added for radial buffs around entities, for example, being near a fireplace now allows you to heal.</li> </ul> December’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #97</a>, #98</a>, #99</a>, #100</a>.</p> </a> New glider physics</a> video</figcaption> </figure> In January, work will continue on 0.9. Work will be done on economic simulation, world simulation, and combat systems. New developers are joining the project every month, and development is moving forward quickly.</p> 15-minute Santa</a> #</a> </h3> </p> In 15-minute Santa</a>, you deliver presents around a city, occasionally stopping at a restaurant to refuel – biking uphill in the snow isn’t easy! The game uses real data from OpenStreetMap and local GIS sources to know where shops, single-family homes, and apartments are located. In places where zoning rules keep people separated from food, Santa will have a hard time.</p> 15-minute Santa was created by the A/B Street</a> team as an experiment to see how quickly we could build a simple arcade game that gets people thinking about how their city is designed. The code</a> doesn’t make use of an entity-component system or an existing engine, and animation and particle effects don’t use a custom shader. The game runs natively on Linux, Mac, and Windows, and on web browsers. There are instructions for modding the game and adding your own city!</p> A/B Street updates will return next month. In the meantime, please comment on the 2021 roadmap</a>.</p> Egregoria</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Egregoria</a>’s objective is to become a granular society simulation, filled with fully autonomous agents interacting with their world in real time. The city should evolve by itself and form interesting patterns.</p> The 7th devlog</a> was published. Celebrating the first anniversary of the project! Updates include:</p> A summary of Egregoria’s progress and ambition.</li> Music and sounds.</li> Basic economy design.</li> A specialized gridlock detection algorithm.</li> </ul> Join Egregoria’s Discord server</a>.</p> doukutsu-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> doukutsu-rs</a> is a remake of Cave Story</a> engine, meant to be a drop-in replacement for the original game executable (both freeware and commercial version), focused on being a portable modding tool (most Cave Story mods patch the executable directly, including machine code editing/assembly hacks) and adding various visual and gameplay-related enhancements.</p> Built mainly using modified ggez</a> crate, runs on desktop and Android.</p> Changes done during the last month:</p> An Android port with full touchscreen controls</a>.</li> Work has been started on Lua API, meant for building custom stuff on top of the engine.</li> Work started on pushing the project’s changes upstream and moving back to mainline versions of crates.</li> Improvements to the Organya player (a simple synthesizer that plays the in-game music using a set of 100 waves and 6 drum samples).</li> A bunch of missing NPCs, bosses, and other stuff were added.</li> The way how game loop works was redesigned, in preparation for adding networked multiplayer support.</li> Countless bug fixes.</li> </ul> Antorum</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Antorum</a> is a micro-multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game server is written in Rust, and the official client is being developed in Unity.</p> December was an important month for the game. Along with tons of little fixes and changes, major features such as NPC Dialog were finally implemented! Check out the dev logs for more info.</p> #26: Various Improvements</a>;</li> #27: The Big 2020 End-Of-Year Update</a>;</li> </ul> A Zombie Shooter Game</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Watch a video demo on YouTube</a></figcaption> </figure> A Zombie Shooter Game</a> is a work-in-progress multiplayer top-down shooter. Actually, it’s a Rust port of an old Java game with a very simple goal - to shoot zombies chasing after you. The game has several advantages, like high-quality bullet ballistics and geocentric camera rotation relative to the player.</p> This month’s updates:</p> Dummy AI.</li> Projectiles (shooting) synchronization over network.</li> Collision detection.</li> </ul> You can discuss the project at its GitHub forum</a>.</p> Akigi</a> #</a> </h3> Akigi</a> is a work-in-progress multiplayer online game world. Akigi is being developed by @chinedufn</a> for the web and desktop using a custom Rust game engine.</p> Moving while attacking. Don’t look at the shoulders.</figcaption> </figure> December updates include:</p> Support for additive animation blending</a> was added in order to be able to aim bows.</li> A somewhat operational skill progress meter</a> was added.</li> A discussion on Reddit</a> about learning art as a programmer.</li> </ul> Full December’s devlogs: #96</a>, #97</a>, #98</a>, #99</a>.</p> Swoop</a> #</a> </h3> Getting lapped by purple? - don’t worry, it happens to everyone</figcaption> </figure> Swoop</a> by @sdfgeoff</a> is a procedural racing web game written in Rust from scratch.</p> I’ve tried to make games in a variety of engines, but invariably got frustrated. So I decided to throw out the engine and find out what makes game-making so complex. It turns out that the stuff below the game engine is only slightly less friendly than the stuff above it.</p> All up this game was a large experiment: I’m not all that familiar with Rust, it was my first go at targetting WASM, I’ve never used WebGL before, and my linear algebra is worse than I thought.</p> </blockquote> The source code is available here</a> and you can also read about the process of making the game here: “WASM Games From Scratch”</a>.</p> You can also play the game’s prototype version done in shadertoy</a> and check out a prototype of the next @sdfgeoff’s project</a> that is based on raymarching giant caves.</p> Harvest Hero #</a> </h3> Harvest crops and whack those pesky Groobles!</figcaption> </figure> Harvest Hero by @bombfuse_dev</a> is an arcade/roguelike game. This month in development:</p> A new level type called “Harvest Defense” was added.</li> Some quality of life features like background music and sfx volume control were added.</li> The devs began working with some artists to provide a music and pixelart makeover.</li> </ul> FreeNukum</a> #</a> </h3> </p> FreeNukum</a> is a free software clone of the 1991 DOS game Duke Nukem 1</em> jump’n run by @silwol</a>. Development of the game started in 2007, back then it was written in C using SDL1. In 2020, the codebase was gradually migrated to Rust, after that it got updated to SDL2. The first version fully implemented in Rust was released to crates.io</a> and announced on Reddit</a> in December 2020.</p> Some of this month’s changes</a>:</p> Controller support was added.</li> Some of the actors found in the original game were added.</li> The hero can do somersaults when jumping with boots.</li> The project’s wiki now has a “FreeNukum Screenshots” page</a>.</li> A Matrix chat room</a> is now available.</li> </ul> Somersaults!</figcaption> </figure> openEtG</a> #</a> </h3> </p> openEtG</a> is an open source engine that is an HTML5 successor to the original Elements the Game</a>, featuring additional cards and balance. In December, 10k lines of JavaScript source were rewritten in Rust:</p> Overall I’ve been brainstorming this change for a couple years. So I’d already shifted from a classical OOP mess with Shield/Weapon/Pillar inheriting from Permanent to one where everything is a Thing. This also made sense because in openEtG there’s spells like Flying Weapon which convert the player’s weapon into a creature. So before I’d create a new Creature filled in with stats from original weapon, whereas now it’s mostly just moving the instance into a creature slot & updating its type tag.</p> </blockquote> You can read the full openEtG December writeup here</a>.</p> Weegames</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Weegames</a> is a fast-paced minigame collection.</p> The game now has a web demo</a> (source</a>) made with macroquad. Sound was recently added to the demo using the quad-snd library.</p> Shotcaller</a> #</a> </h3> ASCII and sprites versions of Shotcaller interface.</figcaption> </figure> Shotcaller</a> is a moddable RTS/MOBA game made with bracket-lib.</p> No new release is out yet, but several major updates happened:</p> Basic AI profiles</a> for leaders.</li> TreePerson</a> leader added.</li> Generic Leader 2</a> pending.</li> More documentation.</li> The game moved from specs to their own, heavily specs-based plank_ecs.</li> </ul> Contributions welcome: try add a new Leader</a>.</p> Cheese</a> #</a> </h3> Pew pew!</figcaption> </figure> Cheese</a> is a small Real Time Strategy game created for the GitHub Game Off 2020</a>. It was written using a ‘low-level gamedev stack’ consisting of:</p> wgpu-rs</a> for rendering,</li> gltf</a> models,</li> wgpu_glyph</a> for text rendering</li> legion</a> for ECS</li> and lyon_tessellation</a> for rendering 2D UI elements.</li> </ul> The game is in a finished state, but it would be relatively easy to add new features such as unit types and buildings.</p> Check out the source code at github.com/expenses/cheese</a>.</p> Vollmond</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Vollmond</a> is a small non-violent adventure in the style of Zelda 2. You as a player are cursed and must find 4 ingredients for the famous Moonshot</code> disenchantment potion.</p> It was initially created for the GitHub Game Off 2020 Jam to gain experience with WASM and macroquad</a>. This month a post jam version was released. It contains:</p> implementation of user feedback,</li> adding music and sound effects.</li> </ul> The source code</a> is available and includes the following technical implementations:</p> drawing and modifying multilayer tilemap,</li> tile-based animation and collision logic,</li> tweening und timer,</li> 4-way top-down and sideways player movement,</li> independent game scenes.</li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> How to Revive a Dead Rust Project</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Drawing by Carlo Gilmar</a>. Click to watch the talk.</a></figcaption> </figure> At RustFest Global 2020</a>, @micah_tigley</a> and @carlosupina</a> talked about their experiences collaborating together to revive the space_shooter_rs</a> project through effective planning, refactoring, and documentation. The video was recently released on YouTube</a> in December!</p> Since then, both developers have been working away on improving the game. Some updates include:</p> Adding debug lines for hitboxes</a></li> Creating configurations files to store player variables</a></li> </ul> Building Pikachu Volleyball</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click to watch the video on YouTube</a></figcaption> </figure> Building Pikachu Volleyball</a> by @danlogs</a> is the latest episode of a video series inspired by Shing Lyu’s book Practical Rust Projects</a>. Here, @danlogs</a> re-creates the Pikachu spin-off game from 1997 by Satoshi Takenouchi - Pikachu Volleyball.</p> Apart from being a good way for aspiring game developers to start understanding the gist of game dev with Rust, this video also displays some of the language’s hardest topics (i.e. ownership, lifetimes, modules, etc.) in a real-world application.</p> The source code is available here.</a></p> Join the danlogs’s Discord channel</a> or follow @danologue on Twitter</a>.</p> Creative Coding in Rust: Re-creating Retro Screensaver</a> #</a> </h3> </a> You can watch the recording here</a>.</figcaption> </figure> @timClicks</a> live streamed a coding session featuring Nannou</a>, an open-source creative-coding framework, which is used to recreate the Mystify screensaver that appeared in Windows 3.1.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Drawing Bezier curves with SDFs</a> #</a> </h3> The demo is available here</a></figcaption> </figure> A short note by @VladZhukov0</a> about drawing Bezier curves (strokes) with signed distance fields. Continuation of a previous note</a> about drawing lines with SDF.</p> Nannou: Creative Coding with Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </a> You can watch the recording here</a>.</figcaption> </figure> Alexis André</a> gave a talk</a> at GitHub Universe</a> about working with Rust and Nannou</a>, an open-source creative-coding framework.</p> Alexis André is an artist, researcher, and designer aiming at redefining entertainment. In this golden age of computation and data overflow, why is our entertainment still designed to be consumed in a passive way? A few media are offering interactive experiences, but none of them are designed specifically for you. In this live demo, Alexis will create a sketch from scratch for participants to experience what it’s like working with Nannou and Rust.</p> </blockquote> The code is available at GitHub</a>.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Undergrad Thesis on Game Scripting for Legion</a> #</a> </h3> In December 2020, @pablodiegoss</a> and @rodrigocam</a> presented their undergrad thesis where they created a proof-of-concept scripting system for the Legion ECS, called Legion Script</a>. Legion is being currently integrated into the Amethyst game engine</a>, and this contribution might be included in future releases.</p> With Legion Script</a>, it is possible to declare, write and read components into Legion using Python scripts. However, this project exports an API that can be evolved for other languages and interpreters.</p> Since then, both developers have been sharing their work and receiving feedback for the project while planning the next steps for the code, which is available at GitHub</a>.</p> The PDF version of the thesis could be found in this Amethyst forum thread</a>.</p> Triangle from Scratch</a> #</a> </h3> Triangle from Scratch</a> (source code</a>) is a new tutorial series by @Lokathor</a> about drawing a triangle without using any outside crates. So far there’s just one article for opening a window using the Win32 API, but more subjects and on more platforms will be added over time. From the author:</p> The point isn’t that we specifically care about drawing the triangle. That’s just a goal that’s easy to grasp. The point is that we’re doing it with no dependencies as a way to get ourselves to learn about low level OS interaction details as we go. That said, the “no crates” rule is for educational purposes only; please feel free to use crates in normal situations.</p> </blockquote> WASM Games From Scratch</a> #</a> </h3> </p> @sdfgeoff</a> published a book that describes the process of building the abovementioned web game Swoop</a> from scratch: “WASM Games From Scratch”</a>.</p> Game engines are huge behemoths, and contain algorithms for handling everything and the kitchen sink. While that’s normally good, if you want to do something small, or possibly do something outside the bounds of a normal game engine, you suddenly have to learn how to do everything yourself.</p> Or perhaps you just like the “type it and run” style of development for shadertoy shaders and want something similar that you can host on your system as (pretty much) a single file.</p> Either way, this book chronicles my adventures into creating WASM games from scratch in Rust.</p> </blockquote> Some of the topics covered by the book:</p> Building for WASM, event handling, WebGL, and shader basics.</li> Map generation using a Fourier series.</li> Camera positioning and drawing a map, ships, and engine trails.</li> Ship physics and simple AI.</li> </ul> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> Thermite SIMD</a>: Melt Your CPU #</a> </h3> Thermite is a WIP SIMD library focused on providing portable SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) acceleration of SoA (Structure of Arrays) algorithms, using consistent-length SIMD vectors for lockstep iteration and computation. Extensive research and work have gone into minimizing wasted CPU cycles and making the most out of what your CPU can do.</p> The goal of Thermite is to provide highly optimized feature-rich backends for SSE2, SSE4.2, AVX and AVX2, with planned support for AVX512, ARM/Aarch64 NEON, and WASM SIMD extensions. In addition to that, Thermite will include a highly optimized vectorized math library with many special math functions and algorithms, specialized for both single and double precision.</p> Thermite has been worked on for a little over a month now. The AVX2 backend and vectorized math library are almost fully implemented. Pre-AVX2/WASM/ARM backends are a work in progress. The latest documentation is available here</a>.</p> This Month in Mun</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Mun</a> is a scripting language for gamedev focused on quick iteration times that is written in Rust.</p> November went by without the usual monthly update from the Mun team, as they were unable to make much headway. Instead they posted a slightly different blog</a>, expressing their desire to add a third developer to the Mun Core Team, whom they are willing to fund themselves - albeit a token amount.</p> The team was able to start ramping back up during the holiday; those December updates</a> include:</p> language support for use</code> statements;</li> Rust version updates and bugfixes.</li> </ul> Kira</a> #</a> </h3> Kira</a> by @tesselode</a> is an audio library designed to help create expressive audio for games. It aims to fill the holes in many game engines’ built-in audio APIs with features for creating seamless music loops and scripting audio events.</p> Kira v0.2.0 and v0.3.0 were released recently with quite a few improvements:</p> Arrangements for stitching together multiple sounds and better seamless looping</li> Per-sequence custom event types</li> Groups for controlling multiple instances at a time</li> Audio streams for sending arbitrary audio data to the mixer</li> Lots of smaller features and workflow improvements</li> </ul> Kira v0.4.0 is in the works with an API refactor, serde support for config structs, and WASM support.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> polyhedron-ops</a> #</a> </h3> Some brutalist polyhedron; rendered with 3Delight and post processed in Darktable.</figcaption> </figure> polyhedron-ops</a> implements the Conway Polyhedron Operators</a> and their extensions by George W. Hart and others.</p> It is based on Kit Wallace’s OpenSCAD code. As OpenSCAD Language is functional it lends itself well to translation into functional Rust:</p> // Conway notation: gapcD </span>let</span> polyhedron = Polyhedron::dodecahedron() </span> .</span>chamfer</span>(None, </span>true</span>) </span> .</span>propellor</span>(None, </span>true</span>) </span> .</span>ambo</span>(None, </span>true</span>) </span> .</span>gyro</span>(None, None, </span>true</span>) </span> .</span>finalize</span>(); </span>// Export as ./polyhedron-gapcD.obj </span>polyhedron.</span>write_to_obj</span>(&Path::new("</span>.</span>"), </span>false</span>); </span></code></pre> The internal representation uses mesh buffers that need furter preprocessing before they can be sent to a GPU but are almost fine to send to an offline renderer, as-is.</p> Optionally enabled features include:</p> Converting a polyhedron into a bevy Mesh</a>.</li> Sending a polyhedron to an offline renderer via the nsi</a> crate.</li> Writing data out as Wavefront OBJ.</li> </ul> raw-gl-context</a> #</a> </h3> raw-gl-context</a> is a cross-platform library for OpenGL context creation which had its initial release in December. raw-gl-context works in any situation where a RawWindowHandle</a> is available, so it can be used with winit</a> and other windowing libraries that provide one, as well as in more diverse situations such as audio plugins. Currently supported platforms are Windows, macOS, and X11.</p> SPIR-Q</a> v0.4.10 #</a> </h3> SPIR-Q</a> is a light-weight SPIR-V query library which supports one-pass shader parsing and reflection. The latest release, version 0.4.10, introduced customized shader auditing by allowing the users to hook and to inspect the instructions SPIR-Q has worked on, while with all access to its reflection intermediates.</p> For more information, please refer to the original post</a>.</p> rust-gpu</a> #</a> </h3> Various shaders from shadertoy.com ported to Rust and built with rust-gpu.</figcaption> </figure> rust-gpu</a> is a new codegen backend by Embark Studios for Rust, aimed at making Rust a first class language for writing GPU shaders! This past month was the release of rust-gpu 0.2, including a tonne of new features and capabilities.</p> Some of the highlights include:</p> You can build and test your shaders on the web.</a> Thanks to SHADERed.</li> Support for accessing and sampling textures</a>.</li> Initial support for compute shaders</a>.</li> Rust’s new asm!</code> macro now supports writing SPIR-V</a>.</li> </ul> Egui</a> #</a> </h3> Some of the supported emojis in the online demo</a>.</figcaption> </figure> Egui</a> is an easy-to-use GUI in pure Rust. Egui can be integrated into a game engine, or used standalone with the help of eframe</a>. This month versions 0.5, 0.6 and 0.7 were released with many improvements, including custom fonts, emojis and improved layout engine (full changelog</a>).</p> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA and Raylib. This month, versions 0.5.5 and 0.5.6 were released, with various improvements:</p> Customizable Mesh</code> colors and winding orders</li> Enabling/disabling the user’s screen saver</li> Improved CPU usage on some devices</li> </ul> For full details and a list of breaking changes, see the changelog</a>.</p> ggez</a> #</a> </h3> ggez</a> is a lightweight game framework for making 2D games with minimum friction. Work has continued towards the next stable release, incorporating last-minute API changes and fixes. The intended plan is to freeze the API this month and make a release candidate for people to play with it and try it out, then fix bugs and incorporate feedback into a 0.6.0 release.</p> macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> Macroquad-profiler footage.</figcaption> </figure> macroquad</a> is a cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS/WASM) game framework built on top of miniquad</a>. This month’s updates:</p> The source code of the previously announced particles editor</a> got released</a>.</p> </li> A new telemetry</code> module was introduced exposing the frame timing data to any third-party visualisation tool. For in-game profiling data visualisation the macroquad-profiler</code> crate is available.</p> A new book chapter “Profiling” was released</a> with more information on the subject.</p> </li> physics-platformer</code> is a new optional crate based on Maddy Thorson’s “Celeste and TowerFall Physics” blogpost</a> on platformers physics: web demo</a>, source code</a>.</p> </li> Also, macroquad was featured in the episode of the Rust GameDev Podcast</a>.</p> </li> </ul> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </a> A level made in rusty-editor</a> which is a native scene editor for the rg3d game engine.</figcaption> </figure> rg3d</a> is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent updates:</p> Improved dark UI theme</a>.</li> Added verbosity levels for logger.</li> Improved lightmap quality.</li> Added proper syncing between physics and scene graph.</li> Improved examples.</li> Added cylinder emitter for particle systems.</li> Improved lots of UI widgets and added VectorImage widget.</li> rg3d-sound is now able to manage multiple contexts.</li> hrtf</a> crate now has 2 times better performance.</li> Added support for 64-bit FBX format (version 7500+).</li> rusty-editor now has navigation meshes</a> and particle systems editor.</li> Lots of other small fixes and improvements.</li> </ul> Join the rg3d’s Discord channel</a> or follow Dmitry Stepanov on Twitter</a>.</p> starframe</a> #</a> </h3> </p> starframe</a> by @molentum</a> is a work-in-progress game engine for physics-y sidescrolling 2D games. This month, a new, more versatile constraint solver was used to add friction and basic joints. Collision detection accuracy and overall stability were also improved.</p> Discussions: twitter</a></em></p> Dotrix</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Last month Dotrix</a> got a major feature boost that made the engine ready for 3D games development. To demonstrate the features, the demo example</a> was turned into an all-in-one proof-of-concept application. You can see the full version on YouTube</a>.</p> In less than 300 lines of Rust code (including comments) you can get a game prototype with an animated character, that you can control using your keyboard and mouse, run it across some flat terrain, surrounded by a skybox with a light source.</p> Join the Löwenware’s Discord channel</a> or follow @lowenware on Twitter</a>.</p> Bevy Engine v0.4</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> This month, thanks to 66 contributors, 178 pull requests, and their generous sponsors</a>, Bevy 0.4 was released. You can view the full Bevy 0.4 announcement here</a>. Here are some highlights:</p> A WebGL2 render backend.</li> Cross platform main function: #[bevy_main]</code>.</li> Live shader reloading.</li> Schedule v2 with custom stages, run criteria, fixed timestep, and typed stage builders.</li> States that allow you to enable/disable systems according to the state your app is in.</li> Scenes can now be spawned as children.</li> Dynamic linking that significantly cuts compile times.</li> A new general-purpose Rust reflection API.</li> 3D texture assets.</li> HIDPI fixes.</li> GLTF, timer, text layout, task system, logging & profiling improvements.</li> ECS improvements: flexible system parameters, improved query filter API, and system inputs/outputs/chaining.</li> Apple Silicon support!</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, hacker news</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> Community plugin updates:</p> bevy_webgl2</a>: WebGL2 renderer plugin for WASM target.</li> bevy_rapier</a>: Rapier Physics’ official Bevy plugin was updated to support Bevy 0.4.</li> bevy_megaui</a>: A plugin for megaui</a> integration into Bevy.</li> bevy_prototype_inline_assets</a>: A simple plugin for bundling assets into your binary.</li> bevy_doryen</a>: A plugin integrating Bevy ECS with doryen-rs</a> Ascii roguelike library.</li> bevy_discovery</a>: Automatically detects and registers systems for you.</li> bevy_prototype_parallax</a>: A parallax scrolling background plugin.</li> Kurinji</a>: Input Map for bevy. Converts user input from different input hardware into game specific actions, eg. keyboard “Space” or joystick “A” can be mapped to “Jump” Action. This allows decoupling of the game code from device specific input api.</li> bevy-earcutr</a>: Draw polygons.</li> bevy_stl</a>: STL mesh asset loader plugin.</li> </ul> Community tutorial updates:</p> Making Chess Clone in 3D</a>: Walkthrough on how to make a Chess Clone with 3D pieces.</li> 0.3 to 0.4 Migration Guide</a>.</li> Bevy Chinese Website(Bevy中文网)</a>: Translate official website and The Bevy Book in Chinese.</li> </ul> Community game updates:</p> Robbo</a>: Bevy port of great 8-bit Atari game, working native and in the browser.</li> SiO2</a>: A simple powder toy clone.</li> snake_bevy</a>: It’s Snake!</li> DJMcNab/life-rs</a>: Bevy reproduction of the rules of Conway’s Game of Life</a> on a randomised board. Alternative implementation: Byteron/life-rs</a>.</li> </ul> Join Bevy’s Discord</a>, /r/bevy subreddit</a>, and follow @BevyEngine on Twitter</a>.</p> rpt</a>: Rust Path Tracer #</a> </h3> Sample images rendered by path tracing.</figcaption> </figure> rpt</a> by @ekzhang</a> and @scanhex</a> is a physically based, CPU-only rendering engine written in Rust. It uses path tracing to generate realistic images of 3D scenes.</p> There’s a lot of features, including kd-tree mesh acceleration, physical material properties (microfacet BSDF with multiple importance sampling), HDRI environment maps, OBJ/MTL/STL files, depth of field, and particle physics simulation.</p> It’s also parallelized with rayon</a> and available as a library on crates.io</a>. The entire source code, including code for the above examples and more, is very short (~3K SLOC). Future directions include extending the renderer with bidirectional path tracing and other features.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Textyle</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Textyle</a> by Stefan Devai</a> is a simple web-based tilemap editor for 2D games built using React JS and Rust (WASM).</p> You can try it out now in the browser</a>.</p> Textyle aims to simplify and speed up the process of making tilemaps for your games. Running on the web means that you don’t have to download any additional tools for creating your maps, and exporting it to an easy format means that you don’t have to add additional libraries or plugins to your game.</p> React JS was used for the UI, WebGL for the rendering and Rust compiled to WASM for the tilemap logic and algorithms. Right now most of the code is JavaScript, however, most of the features in the roadmap will take advantage of Rust and WASM. The project is in its initial stages of development, expect great improvements to come!</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Rust Graphics Playground</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> The Rust Graphics Playground</a> is a small tool that allows you to create and share miniature graphics demos in Rust that will run in the browser. Here are a few examples of what you can make:</p> 3D Spinning Triangle</a></li> 3D Spinning Cube</a></li> Serpinski Triangle</a></li> Serpinski Carpet</a></li> </ul> The source code</a> is available online.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/rust-gamedev.github.io</a>: #406 “Separate category for engines vs libraries/tools”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #18 “Set up a gamedev usergroup on users.rust-lang.org”</a>;</li> #23 “A pure rust SPIRV generator”</a>;</li> #94 “raw-window-handle maintenance”</a>;</li> #97 “WG brand update proposal”</a>;</li> #98 “Monthly Rust Gamedev Meetup”</a>;</li> #99 “Official Rust Gamedev Discord”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> winit is seeking new maintainers</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discussions of this post</strong>: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #16 - November 2020 Unknown — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 16th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Table of contents:</p> Rust GameDev Podcast #3</a></li> Last Call for Rust GameDev Survey</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Rust GameDev Podcast #3</a> #</a> </h2> </p> The third episode</a> is an interview with Chris Parsons</a> about procedural history generation, custom game engines, the business of indie games development and lessons learned from shipping his first title, Sol Trader</a>.</p> Listen and Subscribe from the following platforms: Rust GameDev Podcast (simplecast)</a>, Apple Podcasts</a>, Spotify</a>, RSS Feed</a>, Google Podcasts</a>.</p> Last Call for Rust GameDev Survey</a> #</a> </h2> Our annual Rust Game Development Ecosystem Survey</a> will be closed at the end of this week, 11. December 2020. It’ll only take 10 minutes, and your responses help us better understand the state of our ecosystem and where we should try to focus our collective efforts.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers. Any city with OpenStreetMap coverage can be used!</p> Some of this month’s updates:</p> A new tool to explore 15-minute neighborhoods was started.</li> Simpler process for importing new cities</a>.</li> Large internal refactoring for the GUI and initializing the simulation.</li> </ul> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Endless mountains to explore</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In November, Veloren released 0.8! This is the largest version yet, with over 50k lines of code added. GamingOnLinux wrote an article</a> about the release. You can see the full changelog here</a>. Veloren also spoke at MiniDebConf #2, you can watch the recording here</a>. In November, many improvements were made to the UI, with map and buff updates. During the 0.8 code freeze, many networking and combat bugs were fixed. The Veloren 0.8 release party took place on the 28th and saw a peak of 112 players online, doubling the previous record.</p> </a> 0.8 gameplay video</figcaption> </figure> You can read more about specific topics from November:</p> First Time Contributing</a></li> Community Spotlight</a></li> Performance Analysis</a></li> 0.8 Release Schedule</a></li> Veloren Trailer Competition</a></li> Chest of Goodies</a></li> Iced Transition</a></li> Particle Improvements</a></li> Animal Attacks and AI</a></li> Veloren 0.8 Launch</a></li> What People Are Saying About The Launch</a></li> Idea Drop</a></li> </ul> November’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #92</a>, #93</a>, #94</a>, #95</a>, #96</a>.</p> In December, work will begin on 0.9. There are some discussions about larger refactors in the codebase. Many new developers have joined and are getting up to speed on contributing. Veloren will also reach its 100th blog post!</p> The start of an adventure</figcaption> </figure> FBSim</a> #</a> </h3> FBSim running with default agents.</figcaption> </figure> FBSim</a> by Ian Tayler</a> is a football/soccer game where you program the players using Rust and try to beat a team controlled by another AI.</p> You can follow the tutorial</a> for implementing your own simple AI for FBSim, or you can look at the code directly, which can be found on the github repo</a>. FBSim is at an early stage of development so issues and comments are welcome!</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Antorum Online</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Antorum Online</a> is a micro-multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game server is written in Rust, and the official client is being developed in Unity.</p> Many important changes and new features were implemented this month. Players can now harvest plants and go fishing! There were also some tweaks to the world engine to support named zones on the map.</p> 23: Herbology</a></li> 24: Fishing</a></li> 25: Zones</a></li> </ul> Akigi</a> #</a> </h3> Akigi butcher skill</figcaption> </figure> Akigi</a> is a WIP online multiplayer game.</p> In November, focus was put on gameplay. Prototyping of a butcher skill was done, which will allow for animals to be turned into raw resources. Support for rendering shadows in the MetalRenderer was added, bringing it one step closer to the WebGlRenderer. Lots of work was put into the ability to fire a bow. This spanned a few weeks, however enough functionality was added for it to feel like a solid part of gameplay. It still requires some polish, however, which will be the focus of the beginning of December.</p> Full devlogs: #091</a>, #092</a>, #093</a>, #094</a>, #095</a>.</p> rymd</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rymd</a> by @_profan</a> is a space shooter prototype made with macroquad</a>.</p> Intended as a test platform for trying out rust for prototyping games and particularly for game AI programming purposes.</p> Recent updates include:</p> Dynamic ship debris based on slicing source sprites into chunks.</li> New hostile ship type, (ranger), which fires seeking missiles.</li> New support ship type, (tech), which repairs friendly ships.</li> Toggleable hitbox visualization.</li> Still far too many particles.</li> </ul> Shotcaller</a> #</a> </h3> ASCII and sprites versions of Shotcaller interface.</figcaption> </figure> Shotcaller</a> is a moddable RTS/MOBA game made with bracket-lib and specs.</p> This month v0.3.1</a> version was released. Some of the updates:</p> Kenney’s micro-roguelike tileset was added.</li> Leaders now have an item inventory.</li> A handling system of stats effectors for items.</li> New tutorials about creating leaders and items.</li> A fully functional web version</a>, including tileset.</li> </ul> Contributions welcome: try add a new Leader</a>.</p> Space Shooter</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Space Shooter</a> project is a game in development by Carlo Supina</a> and Micah Tigley</a>. It is a 2D “shoot-em-up” game that takes place in space and is inspired by games like Raiden</a> and Binding of Isaac</a>.</p> Exciting new additions have been made in November!</p> Micah added a “paused” text overlay</a> to provide a visual indication for when the game is paused.</li> Carlo added a new armor system</a> that gives a chance for destroyed enemies to drop armor consumables that can block a single hit from any damage source.</li> Work on a new Missile Launcher enemy</a> has begun!</li> </ul> Game Off 2020</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Game Off</a> is an annual game jam, where participants spend the month of November creating games based on a secret theme.</p> Game Off 2020 theme was “MOONSHOT”. Here are some of the games made with Rust:</p> “War of the Moons”</a> by @FrancoisMockers</a> made with bevy</a> (source code</a>).</p> Your goal is to conquer the planet, but it’s not possible until you control all the moons. The end result is not completely what I wanted, but it was a nice occasion to try rapier</a> for physics and lyon</a> to draw shapes from bevy</a>.</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> “Starlight 1961”</a> by @grzi</a> made with amethyst</a> (source code</a>).</p> A die and retry landing game where you control a spaceship, its fuel and health inside 10 different levels. Each level is made up of enemies (cannons, plasma doors, saw blades, etc.), bonuses (fuel, health) and coins.</p> </blockquote> @grzi</a> also published a devlog post: “My journey into GitHub GameOff 2020”</a>.</p> </p> </li> “Everfight”</a> by @SnoozeTime</a> made with luminance</a> (source code</a>).</p> Battle hordes of human spaceships in order to reach the moon. Wave after wave, the enemy becomes stronger. Unlock infinite mode once you finished the game and try to beat your personal record.</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> Hands-on Rust</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> “Hands-on Rust: Effective Learning through 2D Game Development and Play”</a> by Herbert Wolverson is now in beta. The book teaches Rust through game development examples, and is targeted at readers who have some experience with writing code in other languages. It teaches beginner to intermediate-level Rust. It also teaches high-level gamedev concepts, notably Entity-Component System (ECS) theory.</p> After walking you through installing Rust, a few simple examples teach the language basics. Then you put these together to make “Flappy Dragon” - a simple Flappy Bird clone. The book then changes gear and begins to build a dungeon crawler (roguelike) with tile graphics. The first beta walks you through the basics, “Flappy Dragon” and making an ECS-based dungeon crawler skeleton - focused on teaching basic Rust, ECS composition and control flow. Beta 2 added health, a heads-up display, combat and win/lose conditions - focused on making the user comfortable with Rust’s amazing iterator system. Beta 3 will add fields-of-view, more dungeon designs and map theming - focused on teaching trait use and creation.</p> Beta 1 launched November 11th, Beta 2 launched November 25th. The next beta is expected December 8th.</p> Why Rust is the Future of GameDev</a> #</a> </h3> @thefuntastic</a> published an article detailing why Rust has the potential to be significant for the future of programming in games: the origins of the language, overview of the main technical features, why Rust’s popularity grows, the state of the ecosystem, main challenges lying ahead, and links to some Rust gamedev resources and communities.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, hacker news</a></em></p> How to Build a Multiplayer Game</a> #</a> </h3> </a> You can watch the recording here</a>.</figcaption> </figure> This month, @dns2utf8</a> gave a talk</a> about how to build a multiplayer game with actix-web that people with any modern browser shipping JavaScript, Canvas Context2D and Websocket can play.</p> How coding a system with so many independently moving parts is less about the bits and bytes but more about the high-level capabilities rust offers. In this talk Stefan Schindler @dns2utf8 focused on how he designed the whole system from concept to implementation including hosting it on a CO2 neutral server.</p> </blockquote> You can play the MultiPlayer Snake game itself on mps.estada.ch</a>.</p> Also, a follow-up text note</a> was released.</p> ECS scheduler thoughts, part 1</a> #</a> </h3> @Ratys</a> wrote an article about system schedulers in ECS</a>. It contains an overview of the scheduling problem itself, covers the constraints a solution to it should consider, and dissects schedulers of Bevy</a> engine and yaks</code></a> as examples.</p> Chess game in Rust using Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> Chess gameplay</figcaption> </figure> @guimcaballero</a> published a tutorial on using Bevy 0.3 to make a Chess clone in 3d. Most of the concepts are explained along the way, from how to load meshes to how to select pieces and board squares, using bevy_mod_picking</a>.</p> Learn Wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> Development of new tutorial content has slowed down due to wgpu still being in development. @sotrh</a> has committed to continue maintaining the project through the coming version changes, and plans to add more new content when the API solidifies. He with the help of other contributors such as GitHub user @kanerogers</a> worked through a series of issues to polish the repository before the content freeze. In addition to that he added a compute pipeline showcase</a> and an imgui showcase</a>.</p> In other news @sotrh has started a Patreon</a> to help fund research and development on the Learn Wgpu site as well as other wgpu related projects.</p> You can learn more on the Learn Wgpu news page</a>.</p> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> cargo-mobile</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Bevy’s Breakout example running on an iPhone XR</figcaption> </figure> cargo-mobile</a> is a tool created by Brainium Studios</a> to simplify Rust mobile development. It generates Xcode and Android Studio projects, and provides handy commands for building and deploying apps to iOS and Android devices.</p> profiling</a> #</a> </h3> This month, profiling</a> was released on crates.io. This crate provides a very thin abstraction over instrumented profiling crates like puffin</code>, optick</code>, tracy</code>, and superluminal-perf</code>.</p> Mark up your code like this:</p> #[</span>profiling</span>::</span>function</span>] </span>fn </span>some_function</span>() { </span> </span>burn_time</span>(</span>5</span>); </span> </span> </span>for</span> i in </span>0</span>..</span>5 </span>{ </span> profiling::scope!("</span>Looped Operation</span>"); </span> </span>burn_time</span>(</span>1</span>); </span> } </span>} </span></code></pre> And get visualizations like this (optick</code> and puffin</code> shown):</p> </a></p> rkyv</a> #</a> </h3> rkyv</a> is a zero-copy deserialization framework for Rust. It’s similar to FlatBuffers and Cap’n Proto and can be used for data storage and messaging.</p> It has a handful of features that make it stand out:</p> No schema restrictions.</li> HashMap support out of the box.</li> Trait object support through the rkyv_dyn</code></a> crate.</li> Validation through the bytecheck</code></a> crate, suitable for untrusted and potentially malicious data.</li> Safe mutable archives with pinning.</li> </ul> Reddit user vlmutolo</a> also made a toy benchmark</a> comparing rkyv against serde and bincode and found that rkyv had promising initial numbers:</p> serialize (bincode): 89 ns/iter </span>serialize (rkyv): 86 ns/iter </span> </span>deserialize (bincode): 118 ns/iter </span>deserialize (rkyv): 16 ns/iter </span></code></pre> A write-up on the architecture and internals of rkyv</a> is also available.</p> Discussions: /r/rust (v0.1)</a>, /r/rust (v0.2)</a></em></p> assets_manager</a> v0.4 #</a> </h3> assets_manager</a> provides a convenient way to work with external files, making resources caching and hot-reloading easy and straightforward.</p> Version 0.4.0 was released this month, bringing loads of improvements.</p> A Source</code> trait, to load assets from anywhere. It makes the crate usable in WebAssembly.</li> Assets that can load other assets, with a transparent integration with hot-reloading. Using a manifest file has never been so easy!</li> Improved performance.</li> See the full changelog</a> for more information.</li> </ul> Terra Mach</a> #</a> </h3> Terra Mach dashboard demo</figcaption> </figure> Terra Mach</a> is a mapping frontend system to build graphical interfaces for devices. It focuses on experiences around statistical data (graphs, diagrams), mapping, and user input. When it comes to user experience, elements a user interacts with are flexible enough to build many common experiences. Terra Mach is highly inspired by Flutter. It leverages graphics library Skia to enable highly performant 2D graphics.</p> glam</a> v0.11.2 #</a> </h3> glam</a> is a simple and fast linear algebra crate for games and graphics.</p> This month version 0.11.2 was released. There were a number of important changes since the last newsletter.</p> The vector accessor methods for setting and getting individual vector elements were replaced with direct access support. This means that now instead of needing to use .x()</code>, .set_x(x)</code> or .mut_x() = x</code> the element may be accessed directly via .x = x</code> and so on.</p> The reason that this was not done originally was that some types are backed by SIMD types which do not support direct access. For these types direct access is now supported with Deref</code> and DerefMut</code> implementations.</p> The direct access support was added in version 0.10.1 along side the accessor methods. The accessor methods were deprecated in 0.10.2 and have been removed in 0.11.0.</p> winit</a> #</a> </h3> winit</a> is a cross-platform window creation and event loop management library.</p> winit is looking for a new web platform maintainer! If you’re interested, or know anyone who is, you can reach out via the tracking issue</a>.</p> Fluffl</a> #</a> </h3> Fluffl</a> is a WIP generic media layer for graphics, IO, and audio for desktop and the browser.</p> The only reason I wrote this crate at all was because I personally wanted to just have a generic interface were I can just write my OpenGL apps once and have that build to both desktop and the browser with little to no modification to source code.</p> </blockquote> Two demos are available atm:</p> Basic graphics (using raw OpenGL via the “glow” crate) and audio demo: here</a>.</li> Breakout clone demo: here</a>.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Rapier</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Rapier</a> is a set of 2D and 3D physics engines for games, animation and robotics written in Rust.</p> This month</a> the version 0.4.0 has been released with exciting new features:</p> the ability to read contact and proximity information from the narrow-phase.</li> the ability to lock some translations and/or rotations for a rigid-body without using joints.</li> </ul> The following demo shows examples of translation locking (on the blue cuboid) and rotation locking (full locking on the capsule, partial locking on the cuboid):</p> </p> A cross-platform determinism bug appearing on MacOS with the new Apple M1 ARM processor has also been fixed.</p> The bevy_rapier</a> plugin for the Bevy game engine has been updated to support all the aforementioned features. In addition, it supports:</p> the automatic removal of rigid-bodies, colliders, and joints when the entity they are attached to are removed from the Bevy ECS.</li> the ability to attach multiple colliders to a single rigid-body using Bevy Hierarchy.</li> </ul> Salva</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Salva</a> is a set of 2D and 3D particle-based fluids simulation engines for games and animation written in Rust.</p> Starting this month</a> Salva 0.5.0 no longer supports nphysics</a> for simulating rigid-bodies. Instead, it implements two-ways coupling with Rapier</a> (see the demo</a>).</p> In addition to the Rapier integration, it is now possible to query Salva to retrieve all the fluid particles located inside an AABB. This can be useful for, e.g., spawning new particles ensuring there isn’t anything there already.</p> rib</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Parsing a 3D model file and understanding the different links between bone matrices, keyframes and vertices is a task that can take a lot of time and motivation of the developer. On top of that, combining the different bone transform matrices for the current frame is often error prone.</p> rib</a> is an attempt to tackle these problems and might help you save time. Current features of rib</a> include:</p> Support of collada files coming from the latest Blender version.</li> Precomputation of the bone matrices expressed in the world space so that you just have to pass it to your shader for traditional GPU skinning.</li> Interpolation between keyframes.</li> (De)/serialization in binary thanks to bincode</a>.</li> </ul> rib</a> can be greatly extended, for example with the support of other format handling skeleton data, such as the glTF</a> format. Contributions are more than welcome.</p> Kira</a> #</a> </h3> Kira</a> by @tesselode</a> is an audio library designed to help create expressive audio for games. It aims to fill the holes in many game engines’ built-in audio APIs with features for creating seamless music loops and scripting audio events.</p> v0.2.0 is coming out soon with an Arrangements feature for creating complex pieces out of individual sounds, tween easing, panning support, and workflow improvements.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> gfx-rs</a> and wgpu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The gfx-rs team has published a post “The Big Picture”</a> providing the overview of all projects in the works, and how they are connected to each other.</p> wgpu</a> has moved from gfx-extras</a> to the new gpu-alloc</a> and gpu-descriptor</a> libraries by @zakarumych</a>. These are backend-agnostic, which allows wgpu</code> to now depend on gfx-hal</code> directly without intermediates. Patching gfx-rs</a> will now be easier, without the need to release every little change.</p> Finally, all the latest wgpu</a> code has landed into Gecko, and new features and fixes are implemented in Firefox. That allows it to run most of the updated WebGPU samples</a>.</p> Iced</a> v0.2 #</a> </h3> The new Game of Life example</a>, made with Iced</figcaption> </figure> Iced is an experimental cross-platform GUI library focused on simplicity and type-safety. Inspired by Elm</a>.</p> A new minor version</a> was released this month containing a bunch of improvements:</p> An OpenGL renderer powered by glow</code></a> and glutin</code></a>. It is an alternative to the default wgpu</code></a> renderer.</li> A trait-based approach to react to mouse and keyboard interactions in the Canvas</code> widget.</li> Basic overlay support, allowing the superposition of interactive widgets on top of other widgets.</li> A drop-down selector widget built on top of the overlay support.</li> A widget that displays a QR code, powered by qrcode</code></a>.</li> Additional internal enhancements, like event capturing and a faster event loop.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> KAS</a> v0.6 and KAS-text</a> v0.2 #</a> </h3> Markdown parsing demo</figcaption> </figure> KAS</a> by @dhardy</a> is a general-purpose UI toolkit; its initial aim is “old school” desktop apps with good keyboard and touchscreen support. Unlike many modern immediate-mode UIs, KAS’s widgets retain state, allowing minimal per-frame updates. KAS supports embedded WebGPU graphics now, and plans to support embedded usage and additional rendering systems.</p> KAS-text</a> v0.2 saw a significant revision to its API, including support for rich text (bold, italic, underline, size and some layout improvements). KAS</a> v0.6 pulls in those changes and adds a few fixes and QoL improvements.</p> Egui</a> v0.4 #</a> </h3> </p> Egui</a> is a highly portable immediate mode GUI library in pure Rust. This month a v0.4.0 version</a> was released with much-improved text editing, and many bugfixes. Check out an updated online demo</a>.</p> Also, egui_web</a> v0.4.0 was released, with a simple fetch API - online example</a>.</p> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> Miniquad running on raspberry pi 4 with a SPI screen.</figcaption> </figure> miniquad</a> is cross-platform windowing and rendering library.</p> This month KMS</a> PR</a> landed on miniquad. Now miniquad can run on without neither X11 or Wayland, right on the Linux kernel with KMS.</p> macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> Small editor footage.</figcaption> </figure> macroquad</a> is a cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS/WASM) game framework built on top of miniquad</a>.</p> This month macroquad got particle system editor aiming for simple 2d pixel-art style effects: try it out online here</a>.</p> Dotrix</a> #</a> </h3> A screenshot of running low-poly female model</figcaption> </figure> The goal of Dotrix</a> is to become a 3D engine for the new RPG project. The engine is free and open source, delivering a set of common high-level features like skeletal animation, skybox, terrain, camera controlling, input mapping and many others. It is built on top of the wgpu</a> with an ECS core which is a part of the engine.</p> Currently supported features:</p> Linear ECS with systems as simple functions, that can have optional context.</li> Import of textures from PNG files.</li> Import of multiple assets from GLTF files (textures, meshes, skins and animations).</li> FPS and delta time counters.</li> Rendering of meshes and simple scenes with light and camera controls.</li> Rendering of skeletal animations.</li> 3 showcase demo applications.</li> </ul> Next in sprint:</p> Input management and mapping;</li> Full camera control with mouse;</li> Skybox renderer.</li> </ul> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA and Raylib. This month, versions 0.5.3 and 0.5.4 were released, with some frequently requested features:</p> A Mesh</code> API, allowing users to create arbitrary 2D geometry</li> Experimental support for high-DPI rendering</li> </ul> There has also been numerous bug fixes and documentation improvements. For full details and a list of breaking changes, see the changelog</a>.</p> Old Gods</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Old Gods</a> is an WIP game engine meant for games targeting the web and SDL2. It reads Tiled map files into a specs based entity component system. Rendering is handled by HtmlCanvasElement or the built-in SDL2 renderer.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> ogmo3</a> #</a> </h3> ogmo3</a> is a Rust crate for parsing projects and levels created with Ogmo Editor 3</a>. This month, version 0.1 was released, adding serialization support, and helper methods for unpacking layer data. The sample code</a> has also been updated to show the new helpers in action.</p> ggez</a> #</a> </h3> ggez bunnymark - 60,000 buns at 60 FPS</figcaption> </figure> ggez</a> is a 2D game framework inspired by Love2D. The project is chugging along getting everything prepared for a 0.6 release at the end of 2020, and a lot of work has been done in the last month:</p> All major dependencies have been updated, including a long-overdue update to winit</code> 0.23.</li> Over a dozen pull requests have been merged, large and small.</li> A bunch of old issues have been cleaned up.</li> </ul> Major features to look forward to include far better math performance, a MeshBatch</code> type, better ergonomics on Linux Wayland, and more. There’s lots of work still to be done though. A bunch of issues are out of date and need triage, docs need to be proofread, and especially examples need be updated and tested on every platform imaginable. Try out the devel</code> branch and give it a go!</p> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Geometry instancing demo.</figcaption> </figure> rg3d</a> is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent updates:</p> Migrated to nalgebra from custom linear algebra.</li> Replaced custom physics engine with Rapier.</li> Implemented sound backend for macOS.</li> Environment mapping - now objects can have reflections.</li> Implemented geometry instancing - now you can render tons of objects with low overhead.</li> Performance improvements.</li> Added gobo</a> for spot lights.</li> Added CPU lightmapper - it is possible now to “bake” static lighting into a texture to improve performance.</li> </ul> Join the rg3d’s Discord channel</a> or follow Dmitry Stepanov on Twitter</a>.</p> Another World Suite</a> #</a> </h3> debugger and resource viewer</figcaption> </figure> Another World Suite</a> by @c_botana</a> is a Rust implementation of the “Another World”</a> (“Out of This World” in USA) game engine, compiled to WebAssembly to run it in the web. It also includes a debugger and a resources viewer.</p> Try it out here!</a></p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> F1 Telemetry TUI</a> #</a> </h3> </p> F1 Telemetry TUI</a> by @aldidana</a> is a terminal telemetry tool for F1 video games.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> bevmnist</a> #</a> </h3> Running through all digits</figcaption> </figure> bevmnist</a> by @FrancoisMockers</a> is a PoC for running inferences from a neural network in a game made with bevy</a>, that can run in WASM (source code on github</a>).</p> Using tract</a>, the goal was to test running neural network inferences from a game. MNIST handwritten digits classification</a> is the “hello world” of neural networks, and has small enough networks available in onnx</a> format that can run in real time in WASM. This project also has github actions that will build and release a bevy</a> game to itch.io for Linux, macOS, Windows and WASM.</p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #96 “New WG members”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> winit is seeking new maintainers</a>.</li> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discussions of this post</strong>: /r/rust</a>, twitter</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #15 - October 2020 Unknown — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 15th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Table of contents:</p> Annual Survey from the Rust GameDev WG</a></li> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Annual Survey from the Rust GameDev WG</a> #</a> </h2> As we did last year</a>, we are once again running a Rust Game Development Ecosystem Survey. It’ll only take 10 minutes, and your responses help us better understand the state of our ecosystem and where we should try to focus our collective efforts.</p> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Endless mountains to explore</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In October, lots of work was done on the UI, and a buff system. There was an overhaul done to the staff item that gives it new primary and secondary attacks. There has also been work done on the axe and bow. The cloud system was overhauled and brought a cheaper way to compute the 3D noise that the system uses. The skill bar was overhauled to implement a new design that could handle the new buff system. This was also the first overhaul in over a year. A SFX system is in the works to allow effects to be mapped to blocks, for sounds like crickets or birds.</p> You can read more about some specific topics from October:</p> Modelling Process</a></li> Staff Overhaul</a></li> New Skillbar and Buffs Visuals</a></li> Cloud Improvements</a></li> Buffs</a></li> Alignment and Hostility</a></li> Fixing CI</a></li> </ul> October’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #88</a>, #89</a>, #90</a>, #91</a>.</p> In November, Veloren will release 0.8. Veloren will also be speaking at MiniDebConf on November 22nd.</p> Team hunt</figcaption> </figure> Crate Before Attack</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Interactive Histogram with Race Results</figcaption> </figure> Crate Before Attack</a> by koalefant (@CrateAttack)</a> is a skill-based multiplayer game where frogs fight and race using their sticky tongues as grappling hooks.</p> A browser build</a> can be played online.</p> Changes since the last update:</p> Added a global leaderboard that visualizes Race and Training results in an interactive histogram.</li> Tweaked frogs physics to make them more bouncy, added an option that would keep tongue connected as long as a key is being pressed.</li> Online Ghosts</a> were added. One can now compete with real players instead of AI when playing Race mode.</li> Improved load-times: level graphics is now quantized with an 8-bit palette, signed distance fields that are used for collisions are now generated offline. Downloads are cached in an IndexedDB, so subsequent starts are even faster.</li> Multiple bugs were fixed.</li> </ul> More details are in September</a> and October</a> DevLog entries and in YouTube-channel</a>.</p> Egregoria</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Egregoria</a>’s objective is to become a granular society simulation, filled with fully autonomous agents interacting with their world in real-time.</p> The 6th devlog</a> was published. Updates include:</p> Island generation.</li> Day/night cycle.</li> Human AI via utility systems.</li> Specs to legion 0.3</a> port.</li> </ul> See also the recent video</a> showcasing very basic AI.</p> Join Egregoria’s Discord server</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers. Any city with OpenStreetMap coverage can be used!</p> Some of this month’s updates:</p> web version</a> launched, powered by winit</code>, glow</code>, and other dependencies having support for WebAssembly;</li> an OpenStreetMap viewer</a> with 100 cities imported;</li> “thought bubbles” for cars looking for parking, by Michael</a>;</li> slow portions of a trip highlighted in the info panel, by Sam</a>;</li> </ul> Worship The Sun #</a> </h3> One of the many unique and confounding puzzles in the game</figcaption> </figure> Worship The Sun is a dark, mysterious 2D puzzle-platform game with computer science themes. It introduces the player to a rich language of puzzle elements and challenges them to solve difficult puzzles that require experimentation, comprehension, and internalisation of the game’s mechanics.</p> The game is built using a custom engine that sits on top of legion</a>, wgpu</a>, and a handful of other crates. It features dynamic lighting, a flexible particle system, bespoke collision behaviour, and a Vim-inspired level editor. The majority of game assets are hand drawn in Procreate</a> and painstakingly animated.</p> The game is a few months into development with a release target of late 2021. You can read about how swimming was added to the game in GameDev Note 1: Taking the Plunge</a> which contains a sneak peek at some of the levels. For updates and possible playtesting opportunities, follow @chrispatuzzo</a> and a /r/WorshipTheSunGame</a> subreddit.</p> Garden</a> #</a> </h3> A couple of trees growing and basking in the sun</figcaption> </figure> Garden</a> is a procedural tree-growing, strategical ecosystem-restoration and biological simulation game with an infinite amount of plant species where every leaf is simulated, and the natural resources are scarce. Every specimen is unique, as the plants grow by responding to the live changes in the environment. The player has to balance many complex mechanics to sustain life and go forward in the game. The game and the custom engine are developed in Rust with an OpenGL backend.</p> Garden developers (temporary name) are preparing for a demo release in a couple of months by tying everything together into a coherent experience. The game is also continually optimized to run on less powerful GPUs, so that everyone can enjoy it.</p> Some of the updates from the October devlog</a>:</p> Near-infinite variety of plant species achieved through treating branch segments as Markov chains (enabling different growth speeds and probabilities for other segment types’ growth from one another) and simulating photosynthesis as an electrical circuit (enabling sugar storage in the form of root vegetables, for example).</li> Concrete brick destruction mechanics were implemented. Dust particles for the animation that appears upon breaking, as well as the debris, were also added to the game.</li> Saving and loading are almost complete.</li> A watering can was added.</li> Smoother soil and debris outlines.</li> </ul> Follow the developers @logicsoup</a> and @epcc10</a> on Twitter for more updates.</p> Akigi</a> #</a> </h3> Akigi</a> is a WIP online multiplayer game.</p> In October, more progress was made on the editor tool for placing entity spawn points. Work was started on prototyping the hunting skill. Functionality was added to allow focusing for TextAreas in the user interface. Improvements were made to the engine’s asset management code to make it more generalized.</p> Full devlogs: #087</a>, #088</a>, #089</a>, #090</a>.</p> Sun Prison</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Sun Prison</a> by Dima Lazarev</a> is a WIP turn-based meditation on Rubik’s cube, Sokoban</a>, and roguelikes, being implemented with Bevy engine</a>. The game is in the very early stages of development, but it is already possible to get lost in the dark</a> or to be eaten by zombies</a>.</p> Follow @dmitrywithouti</a> on Twitter for updates.</p> Camp Misty</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Camp Misty</a> is an asymmetric multiplayer game played on the command line. The game is played with two people. One of the players is a helpless victim searching for car parts. If they find all of the parts, they can repair their car and escape the camp. The other player is a ruthless killer who is trying to hunt down the victim.</p> The game was created as a learning exercise in about two weeks by @ReeCocho</a>, with contributions from the many helpful members of /r/rust</a>.</p> Antorum Online</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Antorum Online is a micro-multiplayer online role-playing game by @dooskington</a>. The game server is written in Rust, and the current “official” client is being developed in Unity. The server can be self-hosted, and the network protocol is open, so even custom clients that adhere to the protocol can connect and play.</p> Two more devlogs were published this month, regarding work done to implement shops, character creation, and a few other features:</p> 21: Belmart, Shops, And Bartering</a></li> 22: Character Creation And Customization</a></li> </ul> The Honor Sagas</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Honor Sagas</a> is an early-in-development 2d MMORPG project. October was the first month of development, and @ectonDev</a> wrote a postmortem</a> of the progress made while participating in #Devtober</a>.</p> Project YAWC #</a> </h3> </p> Project YAWC is a turn-based strategy game in the style of Advance Wars in development by junkmail. October saw the release of Alpha 3, including dynamically generated info cards and minor networking changes. For inquiries or if you are interested in playtesting, contact projectyawc(at)gmail.com.</p> Power Kick</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Power Kick</a> is a one screen platform game inspired by similar old arcade games like Bubble Bobble and SnowBros. Your task is to hit the enemies till they get dizzy and then kick them out of their misery to proceed to the next stage. The kicked enemies will hit the colliding enemies with a possibility to create a chain reaction (similar to the pushed snowball in SnowBros).</p> The game has 20 stages and in stage 10 and 20 you will face a helicopter boss.</p> Can be played solo on the web through WebAssembly or up to two players in the downloadable version: the first player with the keyboard and the second one with a joypad.</p> The development took around two weeks thanks to macroquad</a> and hecs</a>.</p> rymd</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rymd</a> by @_profan</a> is a space shooter prototype made with macroquad</a>. Intended as a test platform for trying out rust for prototyping games and particularly for game AI programming purposes.</p> Development started at the end of October, recent additions include:</p> Basic enemy AI behaviour mostly based on steering behaviours.</li> Possibly the world’s most nauseating physics-driven camera.</li> Too many particles.</li> </ul> pGLOWrpg</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The @pGLOWrpg</a> (Procedurally Generated Living Open World RPG) is a long-term project in development by @Roal_Yr</a>, which aims to be a text-based game with maximum portability and accessibility</a> and focus on replayability, interactions, and emergent narrative.</p> For the past month the main focus of the development was on:</p> Improving the UI.</li> Implementing the input autocomplete system.</li> Implementing save data import and parsing.</li> Implementing world navigation system.</li> Implementing rudimentary CLI graphics (for debugging and some future use).</li> </ul> Main features of the reported (pre-alpha) version are:</p> Ability to generate and explore one or many worlds (see previous news).</li> </ul> For main feature reports and dev blogs follow @pGLOWrpg</a> on Twitter.</p> Space Shooter</a> #</a> </h3> </p> The Space Shooter</a> project is a game in development by Carlo Supina</a> and Micah Tigley</a>. It is a 2D “shoot-em-up” game that takes place in space and is inspired by games like Raiden</a> and Binding of Isaac</a>.</p> Recent development has been focused on creating an online book for documentation for the game. While still a work in progress, the following content is now available:</p> Gameplay</a></li> Contributing Code</a></li> Adding Items</a></li> </ul> If you’re interested in hearing about planning an effective code refactor for a project using ECS, make sure to check out How to Revive a Dead Rust Project</a> at RustFest Global 2020</a>.</p> Weegames</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click to see a demo video</a></figcaption> </figure> Weegames</a> (source code</a>) is a fast-paced minigame collection.</p> There are now 40 minigames in the collection. New features in the latest release include boss games and high scores.</p> Canon Collision</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Canon Collision</a> by @rukai</a> is an Undertale + Homestuck fan-made platform fighter with powerful tools for modding.</p> This month, he completed the abstractions needed for character-specific logic. Notable changes:</p> toriel’s fireball</a></li> wobbly fireball shaders</a></li> items that can be picked up and thrown</a></li> character specific logic</a></li> </ul> galaxy-sim.github.io</a> #</a> </h3> </p> galaxy-sim.github.io</a> (source</a>) by @zephybite</a> and @joshikatsu</a> is a colliding galaxies simulation based on Barnes-Hut and direct algorithms</a>. The project is written using Rust, ThreeJS, and WASM.</p> Discussions: Twitter</a></em></p> Ludum Dare 47 #</a> </h3> Ludum Dare</a> is a regular game jam event, during which developers create games from scratch in a weekend based on a theme suggested by the community.</p> LD47’s theme was “Stuck in a loop”. Here are some of the games made with Rust:</p> “The Island”</a> by @kuviman</a> (source code</a>).</p> A multiplayer online sandbox game. Explore, craft, and try to escape the island (spoiler: you can not, you are stuck in a loop). The world regenerates where you don’t see.</p> </blockquote> Check out the devlog post: “LudumDare 47 - The Island”</a>.</p> </p> </li> “Time Ghosts”</a> by @Healthire</a> (source code</a>).</p> You have a limited time to collect the next part for the Machine, when 12 seconds have passed time rewinds and you have to start over. But don’t worry, your past self is still around to repeat your past actions.</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> “Quantum Loops”</a> by @necauqua</a> (source code</a>).</p> There is a particle forced to exist in a quantum loop and it really hates being real! Disrupt the quantum levels with most efficient use of your energy to let it escape back into nothing!</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> “Keep Inside”</a> by @davidB</a> made with Bevy (source code</a>).</p> A solo pong on a circle.</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> “Keep Moving and Nobody Burns”</a> by @FrancoisMockers</a> made with Bevy (source code</a>).</p> Aim for the high score while avoid getting burned either by that big wall of fire or by your own bombs! Every round, the game will get harder, but you will earn more points. To help you, blowing up those crates may drop bonus that will make your bombs more useful.</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> “Bloody Baron”</a> by @torresguilherme</a> (source code</a>).</p> You’re in a building with 9 other people, and one of them is a brutal killer. Don’t get caught by them, and use your abilities and your logic skills to solve the mystery and vote the right person in the trial!</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> “Soy Content”</a> by @walterpie</a> made with Bevy (source code</a>).</p> A misleading puzzle game with a twist. Find your way in a non-euclidean maze of interconnected rooms. Warning: Game doesn’t contain any Soy.</p> </blockquote> </p> </li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> How to: WGPU + Winit + ECS + Pixels #</a> </h3> @nyxtom</a> published several articles on game development for Entity-Component-Systems, Windowing and Event Loops, and WGPU.</p> ECS in Rust</a> - written as a high level introduction to entity component systems and using the hecs</a> crate.</li> Winit and Pixels</a> - introduces cross platform window management/event loops and provides a tutorial for writing simple pixel graphics and 2d game development using the pixels</a> crate (based on WGPU).</li> Framebuffers, WGPU and Rust</a> - an in-depth analysis of high-level graphics terminology and a full length tutorial for setting up the api and clearing the screen with WGPU.</li> </ul> Creating a Snake Clone in Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> Gameplay of snake clone</figcaption> </figure> Bevy is a rapidly growing game engine written in Rust. This tutorial walks through creating a snake clone, introducing Bevy concepts on the way. The tutorial covers resources, systems, timers, entities, components, materials, creating a grid system, and spawning/despawning entities.</p> Rust FFI: Microsoft Flight Simulator SDK #</a> </h3> </a></p> @ryan_levick</a> made two livestreams about Rust FFI and SDK for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. You can watch recordings here:</p> Part 1</a>: bindgen, C ABIs, linkers, and more.</li> Part 2</a>: more high-level concerns like API design and making an idiomatic API.</li> </ul> Subscribe to @ryanlevick on Twitch</a> for future streams.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> How to: Rust + SDL2 + OpenGL on the Web</a> #</a> </h3> @Therocode</a> published an article</a> that explains how to port games to the web using Emscripten. It is not only useful if you have an existing game to port, but also if you are looking for a starting point for a new application.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> rust-psp</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Move over Tetris Effect and Tetris 99, the first game has been created with rust-psp</a>, and it’s Tetris</a>! This was a big step because it proves that rust-psp is ready for game development, even though it’s still #![no_std]</code>. std</code> support is a work in progress, and the project is always open to new contributors to the library, the tooling, or people who want to make PSP games in Rust.</p> Another development for rust-psp this month is reverse engineering</a> of the Sony library for the hardware vector floating point unit of the PSP. All the vector and matrix operations provided by the Sony library have been PR’ed to rust-psp’s main repo, and there are still more functions to come.</p> To stay up to date on rust-psp</a> development, you can join the project’s Discord</a> or follow @sajattack</a> on Twitter.</p> gbemu</a> #</a> </h3> </p> gbemu</a> by @BlueBlazin</a> is a Gameboy/Gameboy Color Emulator which runs in the browser</a>.</p> … I wrote the emu just for myself as a learning experience. So it’s lacking in a lot of features you’d expect from one made for others to use, and it’s also not mobile-friendly unfortunately (but I’ll work on that soon). Still, it may be of some interest to someone here :D</p> </blockquote> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> skyline-rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> skyline-rs</a> by @jam1garner</a> is a project seeking to allow Rust code to unofficially use the Nintendo Switch SDK focused on modding.</p> This month, @jam1garner</a> made a blog post, Rust for Modding Smash Ultimate</a>, focused on detailing why Rust was such a good fit for modding games on the Switch and his experience porting Rust to the Nintendo Switch. It also features updates regarding:</p> Crates for working with Nintendo and Namco textures formats (bntx</a> and nutexb</a>).</li> An auto-updater client and server for Rustaceans writing Switch mods.</li> The introduction of skyline-web</a>, a new library for working with the Switch’s web browser.</li> Additions to the skyline fork</a> of the Rust standard library.</li> </ul> shared-arena</a> #</a> </h3> shared-arena</a> by @0x5eb</a> is a thread-safe & efficient memory pool. Memory pools are useful for speeding up dynamic (de)allocation of large amounts of data of the same size.</p> shared-arena provides three memory pools with different trade-offs:</p> </p> The crate uses unsafe in a few places, but the code is covered by the miri interpreter, valgrind and 3 sanitizers (address, leak, and memory) on each commit</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> glam</a> v0.10.0 #</a> </h3> glam</a> is a simple and fast linear algebra crate for games and graphics.</p> This month v0.10.0 was released. There were a lot of additions in this update and a small breaking change.</p> The return type of Vec4::truncate()</code> was changed from Vec3A</code> to Vec3</code> which is a breaking change and thus the version jumped from 0.9 to 0.10.</p> </li> Vector swizzle functions similar to those found in GLSL</a> were added. Swizzle functions allow a vector’s elements to be reordered. The result can be a vector of a different size to the input. Swizzles are implemented with SIMD instructions where possible, e.g. for the Vec4</code> type.</p> let</span> v = </span>vec4</span>(</span>1.0</span>, </span>2.0</span>, </span>3.0</span>, </span>4.0</span>); </span> </span>// Reverse elements of `v`. </span>// If SIMD is supported this will use a vector shuffle. </span>let</span> wzyx = v.</span>wzyx</span>(); </span> </span>let</span> yzw = v.</span>yzw</span>(); </span>// Swizzle the yzw elements of `v` into a `Vec3` </span>let</span> xy = v.</span>xy</span>(); </span>// You can swizzle from a `Vec4` to a `Vec2` </span>let</span> yyxx = xy.</span>yyxx</span>(); </span>// And back again </span></code></pre> </li> no_std</a> support was added, using libm</a> for math functions that are not implemented in core</code>.</p> </li> Optional support for the bytemuck</a> crate was added, this allows appropriate glam types to be cast into &[u8]</code>.</p> </li> </ul> For a full list of changes see the glam changelog</a>.</p> density-mesh</a> #</a> </h3> </p> density-mesh</a> by @PsichiX</a> is an image density/height map to mesh generator. It consists of two crates:</p> density-mesh-core - generates mesh from density map.</li> density-mesh-image - generates density map from image.</li> </ul> A typical use case would be to use two of them to create mesh from images but in case you have your own image handler, you can stick to the core module and produce density maps by yourself.</p> There’s also a CLI tool</a>.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Rapier</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Rapier</a> is a set of 2D and 3D physics engines for games, animation and robotics written in Rust.</p> This month</a> the version 0.3.0 has been released with exciting new features:</p> cylinders and cones as collider shapes;</li> collision groups (with bit masks) and collision filters (with callbacks) for deciding what pairs of colliders can touch;</li> the ability to set the mass of rigid-bodies explicitly;</li> linear and angular damping, to progressively slow down rigid-bodies;</li> the ability to attach some user-defined data (of type u128</code>) to any collider or rigid-body.</li> </ul> </a></p> The bevy_rapier</a> plugin for the Bevy game engine has been updated to support all the aforementioned features.</p> Finally, a continuous benchmarking</a> infrastructure has been set up to make sure performance regressions can be detected early.</p> physme</a> #</a> </h3> Physme</a> is not your typical physics engine. It doesn’t exactly simulate real world physics and it never will. Instead, it has only two goals:</p> To provide satisfying real-time dynamics for 2D and 3D games.</li> To have a simple to use API.</li> </ul> Physme will only work with bevy</a> and is not made to support other game engines. The current release supports bevy 0.2, but work is being done to support bevy 0.3.</p> The current feature set includes:</p> Rigid bodies</li> Multiple colliders per body</li> Static and semikinematic bodies</li> Sensor bodies</li> Oriented bounding boxes</li> Fixed, mechanical and spring joints</li> Broad phase</li> </ul> All of the above-listed features are supported in both 2D and 3D.</p> This Month in Mun</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Mun</a> is a scripting language for gamedev focused on quick iteration times that is written in Rust.</p> October updates</a> include:</p> a plugin for mdbook to test Mun code;</li> support for modules and visibility;</li> the ability to generate enum ABI types;</li> bug fixes and other improvements.</li> </ul> building-blocks</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Building Blocks</a> by @bonsairobo</a> is an engine-agnostic voxel library that implements real-time data structures and algorithms for: edits on compressed maps, meshing, search, and collisions.</p> The library has recently seen two releases:</p> v0.1.0 release notes</a></li> v0.2.0 release notes</a></li> </ul> To prove out the functionality of the library, the voxel-mapper</a> project was ported to use building-blocks instead of ilattice3. This resulted in improved performance and memory usage when doing large edits and working with large maps:</p> </p> Join Building Blocks’s Discord server</a>.</p> Rust GPU v0.1</a> #</a> </h3> Sky example in Rust GPU</figcaption> </figure> Rust GPU</a> is a project backed by Embark Studios</a> to make Rust a first-class language and ecosystem for building GPU code.</p> Although still in very early stages of development, Rust GPU released v0.1 in October</a>, and has already garnered over 2000 stars on GitHub. Currently, compiling and running very simple shaders works, and a significant portion of the core library also compiles. While things like if-statements and while-loops are working, many things aren’t implemented yet. For example, for-loops, iterators and match/switch aren’t supported yet. That means that while being technically usable, Rust GPU is far from being production-ready.</p> The motivation behind the project:</p> Historically in games, GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.</p> In part this is because it’s a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don’t support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.</p> </blockquote> The code for the sky example above:</p> #[</span>spirv</span>(entry = "</span>fragment</span>")] </span>pub fn </span>main_fs</span>(</span>input</span>: Input<Vec4>, </span>mut </span>output</span>: Output<Vec4>) { </span> </span>let</span> dir: Vec3 = input.</span>load</span>().</span>truncate</span>(); </span> </span>let</span> cs_pos = Vec4(dir.</span>0</span>, -dir.</span>1</span>, </span>1.0</span>, </span>1.0</span>); </span> </span>let</span> ws_pos = { </span> </span>let</span> p = clip_to_world.</span>mul_vec4</span>(cs_pos); </span> p.</span>truncate</span>() / p.</span>3 </span> }; </span> </span>let</span> dir = (ws_pos - eye_pos).</span>normalize</span>(); </span> </span>let</span> color = </span>sky</span>(dir, sun_pos); </span>// evaluate Preetham sky model </span> output.</span>store</span>(color.</span>extend</span>(</span>0.0</span>)) </span>} </span></code></pre> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, Hacker News</a>, Twitter</a></em></p> gfx-rs</a> #</a> </h3> gfx-rs support for D3D has been improved. @kvark</a> landed a few critical fixes in the DX12 backend, including the proper handle freeing, compressed textures support, blend factors, and debug markers.</p> @cwfitzerald</a> brought DX11 backend practically to the 1st tier with titanic work spread over a dozen of pull requests. It is now able to run bve-reborn</a> correctly:</p> </p> ggez</a> 0.6 Call for Contributions #</a> </h3> The ggez</code> game library traditionally tries to make at least one release at the end of each year, and that is fast approaching. While the graphics engine rewrite is still a work in progress, there’s plenty of other useful updates to be made. Bugfixes, dependency updates, and other ergonomic fixes are all on the table. A lot of work has already been done: removing nalgebra</code> from the public API in favor of just using mint</code>, re-working some dependencies to improve build times, and updating and cleaning up a pile of minor issues. However, there’s still about a hundred accumulated bugs and PR’s to triage and figure out, and a lot of testing to do. Please help! The release checklist is available here</a>.</p> miniquad</a> #</a> </h3> Miniquad compiled from scratch and running on Wayland.</figcaption> </figure> miniquad</a> is cross-platform windowing and rendering library.</p> This month two big PRs got into the final review stage:</p> Native Wayland support</a>: as usual, no third-party dependencies or C code involved; Clean build time for Wayland examples are about 3s.</li> The Metal backend PR</a> showed good signs of life, quad</a> and offscreen</a> examples got successfully run on Metal.</li> </ul> macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> Macroquad-particles real-life example</figcaption> </figure> macroquad</a> is a cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS/WASM) game framework built on top of miniquad</a>.</p> This month was about polishing 0.3-alpha version. Important things that got fixed:</p> Text rendering was reimplemented with fontdue</a>: example</a>, web demo</a>.</li> A long-term issue with Android resources system</a> got fixed.</li> Particle system was released: example</a>, [web demo][particles-web-demo].</li> </ul> And special shoutout goes to donuts</a> game by @cedric-h</a> - a simple game made in a couple of days, like a jam game. It’s a really good showcase of macroquad’s approach to simple game code that allows hardcoding and hacks for empowering gameplay experiments.</p> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> rg3d</a> is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent updates:</p> Implemented fully asynchronous resource loading.</li> Added compressed textures support (DXT1, DTX3, DTX5).</li> Added filtering and wrapping options for textures.</li> Added sky box.</li> Added texture import options for resource manager.</li> All dependencies were moved to rg3d workspace, so there is no need to manually download them when working with the latest version of the engine.</li> Extracted HRTF code in the separate crate</a>, so it could be used without rg3d.</li> Lots of other bugfixes and improvements.</li> </ul> Join the rg3d’s Discord channel</a> or follow Dmitry Stepanov on twitter</a>.</p> Bevy Engine v0.3</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> This month, thanks to 59 contributors, 122 pull requests, and their generous sponsors</a>, Bevy 0.3 was released. You can view the full Bevy 0.3 announcement here</a>. Here are some highlights:</p> Initial Android and iOS support</li> Asset system improvements: Asset handle reference counting</li> Asset loaders can now load multiple assets</li> Sub asset loading</li> Asset dependencies</li> </ul> </li> GLTF scene loader</li> Bevy ECS improvements Query ergonomics: query.iter() returns a real iterator now!</li> 100% lockless parallel ECS</li> Performance improvements</li> Thread local resources</li> </ul> </li> Flexible mesh vertex attributes and index buffer specialization</li> WASM asset loading, touch input, transform re-rewrite, gamepad settings, plugin Groups, dynamic Window Settings, documentation search-ability.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, hacker news</a>, twitter</a></em></p> Community updates:</p> bevy_rapier 0.5</a>: The Rapier Physics project released updates to their official Bevy plugins, which add support for Bevy 0.3 as well as the latest Rapier features announced here</a>.</li> bevy_easings</a>: A plugin for easing a component value to another value, mainly used to animate transition between two transforms, but usable for other components.</li> bevy_miniquad</a>: A plugin replacing winit windowing and render pipeline with miniquad</a> library.</li> physme</a>: A simplistic physics engine for both 2D and 3D simulation. Physically inaccurate, but feels satisfying and is easy to use.</li> bevy_networking_turbulence</a>: Networking plugin running on naia-socket</a> and turbulence</a> libraries.</li> Making a Snake Clone</a>: Walkthrough on how to make a snake clone.</li> bevy_tilemap</a>: A plugin with generic types for rendering multi-threaded chunk-based tile maps.</li> Keep Inside</a>: A solo pong on a circle (made for Ludum Dare 47)</li> Keep Moving and Nobody Burns</a>: A bomberman against time (made for Ludum Dare 47)</li> </ul> Join the Bevy’s Discord</a>, /r/bevy subreddit</a>, and follow @BevyEngine on Twitter</a>.</p> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA and Raylib. This month, versions 0.5.1 and 0.5.2 were released, fulfilling some long-standing feature requests:</p> Custom error types can now be used in your game loop</li> Custom shaders gained support for multiple texture samplers and color uniforms</li> Methods were added to Texture</code> and Canvas</code> for writing pixel data at runtime</li> Various helpful std</code> traits were implemented for Color</code></li> </ul> For full details and a list of breaking changes, see the changelog</a>.</p> ogmo3</a> #</a> </h3> ogmo3</a> is a Rust crate for parsing projects and levels created with Ogmo Editor 3</a>. It is loosely modeled after ogmo-3-lib</code>, the Haxe reference implementation of an Ogmo level parser.</p> This month, it was released onto crates.io for the first time, and a full example</a> was added, showing how a simple project can be loaded into a game engine.</p> Wilds</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Wilds</a> is very early in development game engine.</p> It features a renderer that uses Vulkan ray-tracing extension</a> supported by NVidia RTX cards and future AMD cards. Screenshot above is rendered using DDGI</a> technique implemented exclusively with Rust and GLSL for shaders. In the whole scene there is only one directional light source - “sun” - and no “ambient” light. All geometry in viewport is shadowed from “sun” and is lit with diffuse illumination.</p> To keep things as simple as possible the engine uses Hecs</a> - minimalistic ECS library. Assets are loaded asynchronously using Goods</a> asset manager.</p> Traditional rasteriazation rendering pipeline and support wgpu</a> backend are planned to support wider range of platforms/hardware.</p> Implementing GUI system and basic editor is also a priority goal.</p> Follow progress on Twitter</a>. Contributions and feedback are always welcome.</p> fastnbt & fastanvil</a> #</a> </h3> </p> fastnbt</a> by @owengage</a> is a fast parsing library for Minecraft’s NBT and Anvil formats.</p> The project consists of several crates:</p> fastnbt - fast deserializer and parser for Minecraft: Java Edition’s NBT data format.</li> fastanvil - for rendering Minecraft worlds to maps.</li> fastnbt-tools - various tools for NBT/Anvil, notably a map renderer.</li> anvil-wasm - an entirely in-the-browser map renderer. Demo at owengage.com/anvil</a>.</li> </ul> The project supports only the latest version of Minecraft (1.16 at the moment).</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> mcproto #</a> </h3> mcproto by @Twister915</a> is an implementation of the Minecraft multiplayer network protocol in Rust. It consists of three crates:</p> mcproto-rs</a> - the protocol itself,</li> mctokio</a> - tokio I/O stuff,</li> rustcord</a> - a layer 7 server-switching proxy implementation (WIP).</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Ajour</a> - World of Warcraft Addon Manager #</a> </h3> </a></p> Ajour</a> is a World of Warcraft addon manager written in Rust using Iced</a> as GUI library. The project is completely advertisement free, privacy respecting, and open source.</p> October updates include:</p> Catalog support for installing addons.</li> Beta, PTR support.</li> Release channels on addons.</li> CLI options to run Ajour headless.</li> Community driven API.</li> </ul> Join the Discord server</a> and say hi.</p> </a></p> Proton</a> 5.13-1 #</a> </h3> In addition to adding Linux Support for more Windows-exclusive games, Valve Software’s wine-based translation layer for Linux: Proton now includes Rust as part of its build system. Media Converter</a>, is a Proton module written in Rust as a gstreamer plugin to convert certain media encodings from one format to another.</p> Documentation for building Proton is available on GitHub</a>. Further documentation on Media Converter and its source code is available on the module’s repository</a></p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/rust-gamedev.github.io</a>: #269 “Proper style guide/contributing guidelines”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #21 “Planning a survey for Rust game developers”</a>;</li> #94 “raw-window-handle maintenance”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> rust-gamedev/ecs_bench_suite</a>: #14 “Also benchmark in debug mode”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> winit’s “Good first issue” and “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>.</p> Also, subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discussions of this post</strong>: /r/rust</a>, twitter</a>.</p> This Month in Rust GameDev #14 - September 2020 Unknown — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Welcome to the 14th issue of the Rust GameDev Workgroup’s monthly newsletter. Rust</a> is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. These goals are well-aligned with game development. We hope to build an inviting ecosystem for anyone wishing to use Rust in their development process! Want to get involved? Join the Rust GameDev working group!</a></p> You can follow the newsletter creation process by watching the coordination issues</a>. Want something mentioned in the next newsletter? Send us a pull request</a>. Feel free to send PRs about your own projects!</p> Table of contents:</p> Game Updates</a></li> Learning Material Updates</a></li> Library & Tooling Updates</a></li> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub</a></li> Requests for Contribution</a></li> </ul> Game Updates #</a> </h2> Veloren</a> #</a> </h3> Deer by the riverside</figcaption> </figure> Veloren</a> is an open world, open-source voxel RPG inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Cube World.</p> In September, Veloren hit 5000 commits to the main repo! A privilege escalation bug was found in the game. It was quickly patched, and a PSA was sent out to notify server owners of its presence. A Discord bot was created to help manage a testing server. Airshipper, Veloren’s launcher, saw the release of version 0.4.0. Lots of work is going on to improve the state of Veloren’s server infrastructure. A stress test was run with 15 players to see how smaller server could handle running the game.</p> Improvements were made to the chunk compression which resulted in a ~7x memory reduction in their storage. The settings menu has been overhauled, along with many other elements of the UI. A stone golem boss was merged, adding a new boss to dungeons. Work has been done on beam weapons and collisions, resulting in a significantly improved healing sceptre.</p> You can read more about some specific topics from September:</p> Compilation Breakdown</a></li> Improved Server Metrics</a></li> PSA: Privilege Escalation bug</a></li> Animation Changes</a></li> Attack Updates</a></li> Beam Collisions</a></li> Sceptre Rework</a></li> Memory Optimizations</a></li> Art Blog #7</a></li> </ul> September’s full weekly devlogs: “This Week In Veloren…”: #84</a>, #85</a>, #86</a>, #87</a>.</p> A reprise from hunting at night</figcaption> </figure> In October, Veloren will keep pushing towards more scalable infrastructure. Tests are happening to move towards a Kubernetes cluster to manage more infrastructure from code. Optimizations will keep coming in as we find places to improve. 0.8 may release sometime this month, however, the exact date is yet to be set.</p> A/B Street</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A/B Street</a> is a traffic simulation game exploring how small changes to roads affect cyclists, transit users, pedestrians, and drivers. Any city with OpenStreetMap coverage can be used!</p> Some of this month’s updates:</p> finished support for driving on the left side of the road;</li> isometric buildings and support for textures by Michael</a>;</li> a flurry of major UI updates, thanks to the return of the project’s UX designer;</li> an option to disable parking simulation, to workaround missing data;</li> alleyways imported from OSM;</li> more realistic traffic signal timing constraints, thanks to Sam</a>, a new contributor.</li> </ul> Garden</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Garden</a> is an upcoming game centered around growing realistic plants. Some of the updates from the September devlog</a>:</p> The project switched to Nvidia’s PhysX from a custom physics engine.</li> More accurate plant clone placement.</li> Significant rendering performance improvements.</li> Work on saving and loading system has begun.</li> </ul> galangua</a> #</a> </h3> </p> galangua</a> by @tyfkda</a> is a dynamic 2D shoot ’em up game, written in Rust using SDL2. It works on the desktop as well as in the browser.</p> The source code is available here.</a></p> Way of Rhea</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Way of Rhea</a> is a puzzle platformer that takes place in a world where you can only interact with items that match your current color. Changes since the last update:</p> The circuit level has been reworked: it’s now split into three different levels and the puzzles are better tutorialized, and there are more of them.</p> </li> A tiny amount of screen shake was added to the game.</p> </li> Work has begun on a couple of new levels for the ice biome In this biome, you have to learn to predict the behavior of the crabs to solve the puzzles.</p> </p> </li> </ul> Follow @AnthropicSt</a> or @masonremaley</a> on Twitter or sign up for the mailing list</a> for updates.</p> Citybound</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Citybound</a> is a city simulation and city building game. This month, Anselm Eickhoff</a> published a small demo</a> of his domain specific language for procedural architecture, which is interpreted by Rust and now supports hot-code reload of building rules in the running game.</p> Recall Singularity #</a> </h3> A ray-traced selection of modules</figcaption> </figure> The Recall Singularity is a game about designing autonomous factory ships and stations created by Tom Leys</a>.</p> This month a new devlog was posted: “Recall Singularity in Sep 2020”</a>. You can also check out a status update and progress video here</a>.</p> Updates include:</p> Improving the robustness of the game core and networking.</li> Ship sections and standalone ships.</li> Different synchronization algorithms for different game modes.</li> </ul> Mimas</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Mimas</a> is a WIP voxel engine and game, inspired by Minetest and Minecraft. It’s been in development for almost 2 years and has recently seen a public prototype release 0.4.0.</p> Several of the current features:</p> Procedural map generation with hilly landscape, trees, flowers, water, and caves</li> Map manipulation (removal/addition of blocks)</li> Crafting</li> Chests</li> Textures (taken from the Minetest project, under CC-BY-SA license)</li> Tools</li> QUIC based network protocol with SRP based authentication</li> Multiplayer: chat, (hardcoded) avatars</li> Ability to add custom content (e.g. blocks) using a toml format</li> </ul> Imgur screenshot gallery</a>.</p> Nox Futura (Rust Edition)</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Nox Futura</a> by @blackfuture</a> is an open-source long-term passion project, a Dwarf-Fortress and RimWorld inspired base building game.</p> Some of the recent updates</a>:</p> The WGPU-based rendered is undergoing a major restructure.</li> The game was updated to Legion 0.3 - it required rewriting a lot of code, but the new syntax sugar is a joy to use, and the backend is even faster now.</li> The Greedy Voxel algorithm was significantly improved.</li> OBJ models are now supported - useful for things like tree/vegetation geometry, which can now use a stylized low-poly graphic without the added weight of a bunch of cubes.</li> Palette-based rendering - the output system is now constrained to a 256 color palette, mostly to play with stylized 3D rendering.</li> New format for data files that combines multiple RON objects in one place.</li> </ul> pGLOWrpg #</a> </h3> </p> The @pGLOWrpg</a> (Procedurally Generated Living Open World RPG) is a long-term project in development by @Roal_Yr</a>, which aims to be a text-based game with maximum portability and accessibility and focus on interactions and emergent narrative.</p> The pGLOWrpg meets its first official anniversary on September the 15th and goes public at pGLOWrpg repo</a>!</p> For the past month the main focus of the development was on:</p> Improving the UI.</li> Major refactoring.</li> Unification of I/O means.</li> Making things ready for publication.</li> </ul> Main features of the reported version are:</p> Ability to generate one or many worlds from customizable presets.</li> Ability to have output in both raw (b/w .png) and colorized images.</li> Generated data is as follows: terrain, watermask, biomes, rivers, geological regions, rainfall, and temperature.</li> </ul> For main feature reports and dev blogs follow @pGLOWrpg</a> on Twitter.</p> Oh no, Lava! #</a> </h3> </p> “Oh no, Lava!” by @captainfleppo</a> is the working title of a platforming game which take inspiration from an old iOS game created back in 2014. The game is running with Bevy</a> as its core. The gameplay isn’t there yet, but you as a player need to jump on furnitures, collect coins, and fight lava/fire based enemies with your water gun.</p> Zemeroth</a> #</a> </h3> Be careful with chained reaction attacks!</figcaption> </figure> Zemeroth</a> by @ozkriff</a> is a minimalistic 2D turn-based tactical game. Some of the recent updates:</p> The game now stores simulated text lifetimes</a> for each tile during the event processing to reduce popup text overlapping.</li> Push bombs are more useful now: they still don’t cause direct damage, but now they can push away other bombs too</a>.</li> All the assets sources are merged into the main repository</a> and the project now uses resvg</a> instead of console Inkscape for svg->png rendering.</li> Abilities don’t have parameters now</a>.</li> Dynamic depth-sorting was implemented</a>.</li> The work on adding sounds continues: check out the video of the first results</a> 🔊.</li> Smaller UI improvements and bugfixes.</li> </ul> Akigi</a> #</a> </h3> Akigi</a> is a WIP online multiplayer game. In September, lots of work was done on terrain sculpting systems. Another tool was added, allowing material painting onto the terrain. Along with the scenery placement tool, there are now three separate tools in the editor’s arsenal.</p> Full devlogs: #083</a>, #084</a>, #085</a>, #086</a>.</p> BUGOUT</a> #</a> </h3> Playing KataGo AI in 9x9</figcaption> </figure> BUGOUT</a> is a web application which allows you to play Go/Baduk/Weiqi against a leading AI (KataGo</a>). It provides a multiplayer mode so that you can play other humans, either by joining a public queue or sharing a private URL to your friend.</p> The user interface is lifted from Sabaki</a>.</p> The initial installation’s AI is powered by an energy-efficient dev board</a>.</p> BUGOUT is marching actively toward production, at which point the team will publish the website address and invite users. The author anticipates being finished with the production release prior to Jan 1, 2021.</p> Tetris Bane</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Tetris Bane</a> is an open-source Tetris clone that mixes things up with multiple game modes. There’s a hard bane mode, classic mode for the purists, ultra hard metal mode, and a chill mode. Tetris Bane challenges you to get more then 2 lines in metal mode.</p> You can download</a> the game for Windows, macOS and Linux.</p> The game is written using rust-sdl2</a>. The source code is available here.</a></p> Project YAWC #</a> </h3> </p> Project YAWC is an in-progress Advance-Wars style strategy game being developed by junkmail using ggez</a> as a framework. The game is currently in a closed alpha state with working netplay. September saw the release of version A2, including revamped netcode and the full core set of units.</p> space_shooter_rs</a> #</a> </h3> </p> space_shooter_rs</a> is a 2D shooter game made with the Amethyst</a> game engine. It is inspired by games like Raiden and the Binding of Isaac.</p> In September, Micah Tigley</a> joined the project and has been collaborating with Carlo Supina</a> to refactor a significant chunk of the codebase. Lots of work has been on collision detection, combat, and movement. This will allow for easier future development.</p> Both developers wrote about the work and their experiences developing space_shooter_rs:</p> How to Revive a Dead Project</a></li> Collaborating on Amethyst showcase project: space_shooter_rs</a></li> </ul> Learning Material Updates #</a> </h2> So You Want to Live-Reload Rust</a> #</a> </h3> Cool bear</figcaption> </figure> @fasterthanlime</a> published a giant blog post “So you want to live-reload Rust”</a> - a very deep technical dive into reloading a dylib and a bunch of related issues. Lots of interesting insights for folks who want to better understand nuances of hot reloading.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> rust-wasm-hotreload</a> #</a> </h3> rust-wasm-hotreload</a> by @ShekoHex</a> is a PoC of using WebAssemply as a hot-reloadable code logic at runtime without restarting the host process. Check out a video demo here</a>.</p> Learn WGPU</a> #</a> </h3> This month @sothr</a> released another chapter of the “Learn WGPU”</a> tutorial: “Threading WGPU Resource Loading with Rayon”</a>.</p> Also, the whole tutorial was upgraded to WGPU v0.6</a>.</p> Is It Easy to Draw a Line?</a> #</a> </h3> Example of result chains.</figcaption> </figure> A small note by @VladZhukov0</a> about drawing lines and chains with signed distance fields. The resulted lines are nice looking on edges and have rounded corners. Chains for this article are assumed to be opaque.</p> Check out the online demo</a> and its source code</a>.</p> OpenGL Preprocessor for Rust</a> #</a> </h3> With the full power of Cargo build scripts and Tera</a>, you can create an advanced GLSL preprocessor which can generate code conditionally, in loops, and even inherit code from other templates.</p> </p> Writing plain GLSL code is uncomfortable, code is quite often is duplicated, libraries aren’t something natural for GLSL (means you can’t out of the box do #include “library.glsl”). The last point is especially problematic if some constants actually originate in your game logic (like the number of player types). Updating these values manually in your shader code is repetitive and prone to both error and simple forgetfulness. It’s really helpful to build some kind of preprocessor for your GLSL code, which can include other files, so you can organize your code into manageable chunks. With the power of Tera</a>, it’s now easy to accomplish. Because Rust is also often used for web projects, which need a lot of templated web-pages preprocessing, we can borrow such technology for our needs, combine it with cargo build scripts and create a compile-time preprocessing tool.</p> Rust, Gamedev, ECS, and Bevy #</a> </h3> </p> @hugopeixoto</a> released a couple of blog posts on ECS and Bevy, including a tutorial on how to get started.</p> The first part</a> gives us an in depth overview of what ECS. It starts with pseudocode for an object oriented approach and goes through several iterations until we get to the ECS paradigm.</p> </li> The second part</a> is a tutorial on how to use bevy</a>, a data driven game engine built in Rust. It goes over the basic features of the engine, using the example presented in the first part.</p> </li> </ul> Flappy Bird in Bevy</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> @TantanDev</a> is back with another video</a>! In this one, they made a Flappy Bird clone using Bevy and shared their experience programming with it.</p> The source code can be found here</a>.</p> Real-Time Global Illumination in WGPU</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Infinite light bounces in Cornell Box</figcaption> </figure> DI2edd</a> shared his real-time diffuse global illumination demo on /r/rust_gamedev</a>. It’s written in 100% Rust and uses WGPU for graphics, proving that the API is an excellent choice even for advanced computer graphics applications.</p> The technique provides real time global illumination for static lambertian geometry, and is the implementation of the 2017 paper “Real-time Global Illumination by Precomputed Local Reconstruction from Sparse Radiance Probes”</a>, which proposes a spherical harmonics-based approach to solve the rendering equation in real time.</p> In practice, this means that the expensive light transport calculations are performed in a precomputation step, which relies on - among others - embree-rs</a>, and nalgebra</a> to produce a compressed representation of the scene that is then used for lighting reconstruction at runtime.</p> Library & Tooling Updates #</a> </h2> legion v0.3</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Legion</a> is among Rust’s fastest and most powerful ECS libraries. After months in development, v0.3 has finally been released to crates.io. This is a huge release amounting to a near total rewrite of the library and a major step towards a stable 1.0 release.</p> Check out the v0.3 announcement post</a> for an overview of the new API and all the updates.</p> The project’s repo has also been moved to the Amethyst org to reflect its close collaboration with the Amethyst community.</p> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> Thunderdome</a> #</a> </h3> Thunderdome</a> is a gladitorial</del> generational arena library inspired by generational-arena</a>, slotmap</a>, and slab</a>. It provides constant time insertion, lookup, and removal via small (8 byte) keys that stay 8 bytes when wrapped in Option<T></code>.</p> Data structures like Thunderdome’s Arena</code> store values and return keys that can be later used to access those values. These keys are stable across removals and have a generation counter to solve the ABA Problem</a>.</p> let mut</span> arena = Arena::new(); </span> </span>let</span> foo = arena.</span>insert</span>("</span>Foo</span>"); </span>let</span> bar = arena.</span>insert</span>("</span>Bar</span>"); </span> </span>assert_eq!(arena[foo], "</span>Foo</span>"); </span>assert_eq!(arena[bar], "</span>Bar</span>"); </span> </span>arena[bar] = "</span>Replaced</span>"; </span>assert_eq!(arena[bar], "</span>Replaced</span>"); </span> </span>let</span> foo_value = arena.</span>remove</span>(foo); </span>assert_eq!(foo_value, Some("</span>Foo</span>")); </span> </span>// The slot previously used by foo will be reused for baz. </span>let</span> baz = arena.</span>insert</span>("</span>Baz</span>"); </span>assert_eq!(arena[baz], "</span>Baz</span>"); </span> </span>// foo is no longer a valid key. </span>assert_eq!(arena.</span>get</span>(foo), None); </span></code></pre> Discussions: twitter</a></em></p> Fontdue</a> #</a> </h3> Fontdue</a> is a simple, no_std, pure Rust, TrueType & OpenType font rasterizer and layout tool. It strives to make interacting with fonts as fast as possible, and currently has the lowest end to end latency for a font rasterizer.</p> Fontdue depends on ttf-parser</a> for parsing fonts, which supports a wide range of TrueType and OpenType features.</p> A non-goal of this library is to be allocation free and have a fast, “zero cost” initial load. Fontdue does make allocations and depends on the alloc crate. Fonts are fully parsed on creation and relevant information is stored in a more convenient to access format. Unlike other font libraries, the font structures have no lifetime dependencies since it allocates its own space.</p> Project’s roadmap:</p> v1.0: fontdue is designed to be a replacement for rusttype, ab_glyph, parts of glyph_brush, and glyph_brush_layout. This is a class of font libraries that don’t tackle shaping.</li> v2.0: Shaping - the complex layout of text such as Arabic and Devanagari - will be added. There are two potential pure Rust libraries (allsorts or rustybuzz) that are candidates for providing a shaping backend to Fontdue, but are relatively immature right now.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> ultraviolet v0.6</a> #</a> </h3> ultraviolet</a> by @fu5ha</a> is a crate for computer-graphics and games-related linear algebra, but fast</em>, both in terms of productivity and in terms of runtime performance.</p> This month ultraviolet v0.6</a> was released. Updates include:</p> Support for 256-bit wide AVX vectors and instructions as well as 128-bit wide SSE instructions which were already supported.</li> Support for f64/double precision floats under the f64 feature, including f64x2 and f64x4 SIMD-accelerated types.</li> Support for mint</a> for most scalar types.</li> Lots of smaller API and performance improvements.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a></em></p> This Month in Mun</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Mun</a> is a scripting language for gamedev focused on quick iteration times that is written in Rust.</p> September updates</a> include:</p> on-going work for multi-file projects;</li> build pipeline improvements;</li> bug fixes in the Mun compiler and C++ bindings;</li> a lot of refactors and quality of life improvements.</li> </ul> audir</a> #</a> </h3> audir</a> is a low level audio library supporting Windows (WASAPI), Linux (Pulse) and Android (OpenSLES & AAudio).</p> It aims at providing a minimal and mostly unsafe but feature-rich API on top of common audio backends with focus on gaming applications. The initial release version 0.1.0 provides basic recording and playback support for all available backends, including a small music player example!</p> Currently looking into coupling with dasp</a> for dsp audio graphs to provide a higher level entry point.</p> Crevice</a> #</a> </h3> Crevice</a> is a library that helps define GLSL-compatible (std140) structs for use in uniform and storage buffers. It uses new const fn</code> capabilities stabilized in Rust 1.46.0</a> to align types with explicitly zeroed padding.</p> Crevice depends heavily on mint</a> to support almost any Rust math library. It also contains helpers for safely sizing and writing buffers, making dynamic buffer layout a breeze.</p> #[</span>derive</span>(AsStd140)] </span>struct </span>MainUniform { </span> </span>orientation</span>: mint::ColumnMatrix3<</span>f32</span>>, </span> </span>position</span>: mint::Vector3<</span>f32</span>>, </span> </span>scale</span>: </span>f32</span>, </span>} </span> </span>let</span> value = MainUniform { </span> orientation: cgmath::Matrix3::identity().</span>into</span>(), </span> position: [</span>1.0</span>, </span>2.0</span>, </span>3.0</span>].</span>into</span>(), </span> scale: </span>4.0</span>, </span>}; </span> </span>upload_data_to_gpu</span>(value.</span>as_std140</span>().</span>as_bytes</span>()); </span></code></pre> Discussions: twitter</a></em></p> FemtoVG</a> #</a> </h3> </p> FemtoVG</a> is a 2D canvas API in Rust, based on nanovg</a>.</p> Currently, FemtoVG uses OpenGL as a rendering backend. A Metal backend is 95% done, and a wgpu backend is on the roadmap. The project is definitely looking for contributors.</p> Unlike NanoVG, FemtoVG has full text-shaping support thanks to harfbuzz.</p> FemtoVG, just like the original NanoVG, is based on the stencil-then-cover</em> approach presented in GPU-accelerated Path Rendering</a>.</p> Join the Discord channel</a> or follow FemtoVG on twitter</a>.</p> gfx-rs</a> and gfx-portability</a> #</a> </h3> </p> gfx-portability</a> is a Vulkan portability implementation based on gfx-rs</a>. It’s basically a drop-in implementation of Vulkan on top of Metal and D3D12, useful on platforms that don’t have native Vulkan support, or have buggy drivers.</p> It released version 0.8.1</a> with official support for the new KHR portability extension</a>, as well as a few other extensions, plus a number of correctness fixes.</p> gfx-rs team asks Rust users of Vulkano, Ash, and other Vulkan-only wrappers to try out the gfx-portability as a solution on macOS and relevant Windows 10 platforms.</p> In gfx-rs</a> itself, the DX12 backend, and the descriptor indexing feature support got improved. There has been a push to get DX11 backend in a solid shape, and it can now run vange-rs</a> pretty well 🎉.</p> Riddle</a> #</a> </h3> Riddle</a> is a Rust media library in the vein of SDL, building as far as possible on the most active/standard Rust libraries (winit, wgpu, image, etc). Riddle is deliberately not an engine, or a framework. It is a library devoted to exposing media related features in a unified way while avoiding prescribing program structure. It provides abstractions over windowing, input, audio, image loading/manipulation and provides a basic wgpu based 2D renderer. The docs</a> contain runnable examples for most methods and types.</p> The goal is to provide a stable foundation, resilient to developments in the Rust gamedev ecosystem, on which games, custom engines, and other media applications can be built.</p> Discussions: /r/rust_gamedev</a></em></p> Bracket-Lib</a> #</a> </h3> bracket-lib</a> (previously rltk_rs</code>) by @blackfuture</a> is a Rust implementation of C++ Roguelike Toolkit</a>.</p> Bracket-lib is going through a stability pass, focusing on freezing the API. It will be featured in the author’s upcoming book: Hands-on Rust: Effective Learning through 2D Game Development and Play</em>. The book should be going into early access/beta in time for the next newsletter.</p> macroquad</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Games built with miniquad/macroquad.</figcaption> </figure> macroquad</a> by @fedor_games</a> is a cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS/WASM) game framework build on top of miniquad</a>.</p> This month 0.3 preview was released, featuring:</p> Improved documentation</a> on docs.rs.</p> </li> Screen reading shaders and a tutorial about them</a>.</p> </li> Updated “shadertoy” - small interactive GLSL playground - example. Check out the web demo</a> and its source code</a>.</p> </a></p> </li> </ul> Also, @not-fl3</a> (the main developer of all current *quad projects) has been added to the GitHub Sponsors. Check out the project’s story, vision, and roadmap on the new sponsors page</a>!</p> Tetra</a> #</a> </h3> Tetra</a> is a simple 2D game framework, inspired by XNA and Raylib. This month, version 0.5</a> was released, featuring:</p> Cargo feature flags, allowing you to remove unused functionality and shrink your build</li> Relative mouse events and infinite mouse movement (allowing for FPS-style control schemes)</li> Extra methods for getting and setting the state of a playing sound</li> </ul> For full details and a list of breaking changes, see the changelog</a>.</p> Additionally, this month puppetmaster</a> released tetrapack</a>, a set of useful extensions for Tetra. This includes:</p> Helpful timer types</li> Looping background music</li> Custom mouse cursors</li> Input utility functions</li> Tilemaps and tile animations</li> </ul> Bevy Engine v0.2</a> #</a> </h3> </a></p> Bevy</a> is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source</a> forever!</p> This month, thanks to 87 contributors, 174 pull requests, and their generous sponsors</a>, Bevy 0.2 was released. You can view the full Bevy 0.2 announcement here</a>. Here are some highlights:</p> Async Task System: Bevy now has a brand new async-friendly task system, which enables the creation of context-specific task pools. For example, you might have separate pools for compute, IO, networking, etc. This also provides the flexibility to load balance work appropriately according to work type and/or priority. This new task system completely replaces Rayon and the cpu usage wins were huge!</li> Initial Web Platform Support: (A subset of) Bevy now runs on the web using WebAssembly/WASM! Specifically, Bevy apps can run Bevy ECS schedules, react to input events, create an empty canvas (using winit), and a few other things. This is a huge first step, but it is important to call out that there are still a number of missing pieces, such as 2D/3D rendering, multi-threading, and sound.</li> Parallel Queries: Systems that use queries already run in parallel, but before this change the queries themselves could not be iterated in parallel. Bevy 0.2 adds the ability to easily iterate queries in parallel, which builds on top of the new Async Task System.</li> Transform System Rewrite: Bevy’s old transform system used separate Translation</code>, Rotation</code>, and Scale</code> components as the “source of truth”, which were then synced to a LocalTransform</code> component after each update. There are Good Reasons™ to use this approach, but it created a “lag” between the calculated LocalTransform and the source components and dataflow between components is hard to reason about. This problem was resolved by making a newer, simpler transform system that uses a consolidated Transform</code> type.</li> Joystick/Gamepad Input: The Bevy Input plugin now has cross-platform support for most controllers thanks to the gilrs library!</li> Bevy ECS Performance Improvements: generational entity IDs, read-only queries, lock-free world APIs, direct component lookup.</li> </ul> Community plugin updates:</p> bevy_rapier</a>: Rapier Physics’ official Bevy plugin was updated to support Bevy 0.2.</li> bevy_ninepatch</a>: Display 9-Patch UI elements, where you can specify how different parts of a PNG should grow.</li> bevy_mod_picking</a>: 3d cursor picking and highlighting.</li> bevy_contrib_colors</a>: A simple color library.</li> bevy_input_map</a>: Converts user inputs from different input hardware into game specific actions. Ex: keyboard “Space” or joystick “A” can be mapped to a “Jump” Action.</li> bevy_prototype_lyon</a>: Draw 2D shapes, like triangles, circles, and beziers.</li> bevy_contrib_inspector</a>: Visually edit fields of your bevy resources in a browser or native view.</li> </ul> Discussions: /r/rust</a>, hacker news</a>, twitter</a></em></p> rg3d</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Click to watch a video demo of one of the new examples</a>.</figcaption> </figure> rg3d</a> is a game engine that aims to be easy to use and provide large set of out-of-box features. Some of the recent updates:</p> Render to texture - it is possible to render scenes into textures.</li> Added support for scenes made in rusty-editor</a>.</li> Added sprite graph node.</li> Added simple lightmapper (still WIP).</li> Added new UI widgets and features: Message box - classic message box with different combinations of buttons.</li> Wrap panel - arranges its children by rows or columns with wrapping.</li> File browser - a browser for file system.</li> Color picker - classic HSV+RGB+Alpha color picker.</li> “Bring into view” for scroll panel.</li> Replaced font rasterizer by fontdue.</li> Improved hotkeys in text box.</li> </ul> </li> Improved performance and documentation.</li> </ul> Join the rg3d’s Discord channel</a> or follow Dmitry Stepanov on twitter</a>.</p> rusty-editor</a> #</a> </h3> </p> rusty-editor</a> is a scene editor for the rg3d</a> engine. Some of the recently added features:</p> asset browser + asset previewer,</li> multiselection,</li> improved properties editor,</li> lots of other small improvements and fixes.</li> </ul> godot-rust</a> v0.9 #</a> </h3> </p> godot-rust</a> provides high-level Rust bindings to the Godot game engine</a>.</p> This month v0.9 was released</a>. Besides lots of quality-of-life improvements, this update brings a massive redesign of the API in order to solve long-standing soundness problems. As there’re numerous breaking changes, a chapter about migration from 0.8</a> was added to the user guide.</p> Popular Workgroup Issues in GitHub #</a> </h2> rust-gamedev/wg</a>: #21 “Planning a survey for Rust game developers”</a>;</li> #93 “Consider creating a game math library benchmark for the working group”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> rust-gamedev/ecs_bench_suite</a>: #13 “How results will be updated?”</a>;</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Requests for Contribution #</a> </h2> Embark’s open issues</a> (embark.rs</a>).</li> winit’s “Good first issue” and “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> gfx-rs’s “contributor-friendly” issues</a>.</li> wgpu’s “help wanted” issues</a>.</li> luminance’s “low hanging fruit” issues</a>.</li> ggez’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Veloren’s “beginner” issues</a>.</li> Amethyst’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> A/B Street’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> Mun’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> SIMple Mechanic’s good first issues</a>.</li> Bevy’s “good first issue” issues</a>.</li> </ul> That’s all news for today, thanks for reading!</p> Subscribe to @rust_gamedev on Twitter</a> or /r/rust_gamedev subreddit</a> if you want to receive fresh news!</p> Discussions of this post</strong>: /r/rust</a>, twitter</a>.</p>

Rust GameDev WG

This Month in Rust GameDev #52 - June 2024

Gunbug</a> #</a> </h3> </a> Gunbugs shooting at a bunch of eggplants</figcaption> </figure> Gunbug is a 2D online co-op horde survival shoot’em up game.</p> It focuses on shooting lots of enemies with lots of guns. It can be played solo or with up to 10 players.</p>

haalka</a> #</a> </h3> </video> A Minecraft-like UI made with haalka</figcaption> </figure> হালকা: in bengali, haalka means “light” (e.g. not heavy) and can also be used to mean “easy”</em></p>

bevy_light_2d</a> #</a> </h3> A candle shining 2D light</figcaption> </figure> bevy_light_2d is a new general purpose 2D lighting for the Bevy game engine. Designed to be simple to use, yet expressive enough to fit a variety of needs. Features include:</p>

berdicles</a> #</a> </h3> A fountain of particles</figcaption> </figure> berdicles is an expressive CPU particle system for the Bevy engine. Features include:</p>

This Month in Rust GameDev #51 - May 2024

Newsletter Survey Results

What needs to be improved #</a> </h2> </p> Another free-text question. The feedback here is fairly diverse. The most common complaints we already mentioned in previous sections are:</p> Add an email subscription</li>

This Month in Rust GameDev #50 - April 2024

Newsletter Changes

Rust Gamedev Meetup 33

This Month in Rust GameDev #49 - August 2023

Rust Gamedev Meetup 32

Rust Gamedev Meetup 31

Talks #</a> </h2> Games, but no video: Embedded trinkets in Rust</a> | @Noxim</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An overview of making games with constrained hardware</p> </blockquote>

Games, but no video: Embedded trinkets in Rust</a> | @Noxim</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An overview of making games with constrained hardware</p> </blockquote>

Tunnet</a> | @puzzled_squid</a> #</a> </h3> </p> A short game where you design, build, and optimize a computer network in an underground complex</p> </blockquote>

Rust Gamedev Meetup 30

Talks #</a> </h2> Blue Engine</a> | @ElhamAryanpur</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Updates about the Blue Engine project and its 0.5.0 release.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p>

Blue Engine</a> | @ElhamAryanpur</a> #</a> </h3> </p> Updates about the Blue Engine project and its 0.5.0 release.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p>

Cybergate</a> | @cybersoulK</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An overview of Cybergate, a multiplayer game being developed for native and browser play.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p>

no_std: ?no_problem</a> | @kpreid</a> #</a> </h3> </p> An introduction to making your Rust crates no_std</code> compatible, and why you might want to do this.</p> </blockquote> Links:</strong></p>

This Month in Rust GameDev #48 - July 2023

Talks
Games, but no video: Embedded trinkets in Rust</a> | @Noxim</a>
Slides</a></li>
Hardware</a></li>
Firmware</a></li>
Rustc</a></li>
PAC + HAL</a></li>
Blog post</a></li> </ul>
Tunnet</a> | @puzzled_squid</a>
itch.io page</a></li>
YouTube trailer</a></li>
Website</a></li> </ul>
</p>

Games, but no video: Embedded trinkets in Rust</a> | @Noxim</a>
Slides</a></li>
Hardware</a></li>
Firmware</a></li>
Rustc</a></li>
PAC + HAL</a></li>
Blog post</a></li> </ul>
Tunnet</a> | @puzzled_squid</a>
itch.io page</a></li>
YouTube trailer</a></li>
Website</a></li> </ul>
</p>

Tunnet</a> | @puzzled_squid</a>
itch.io page</a></li>
YouTube trailer</a></li>
Website</a></li> </ul>
</p>

Talks
Blue Engine</a> | @ElhamAryanpur</a>
Blue Engine GitHub repository</a></li>
Blue Engine Discord server</a></li> </ul>
Cybergate</a> | @cybersoulK</a>
Cybergate Discord server</a></li> </ul>
no_std: ?no_problem</a> | @kpreid</a>
`YouTube Video</a></li> Slides</a></li> </ul>`

Blue Engine</a> | @ElhamAryanpur</a>
Blue Engine GitHub repository</a></li>
Blue Engine Discord server</a></li> </ul>
Cybergate</a> | @cybersoulK</a>
Cybergate Discord server</a></li> </ul>
no_std: ?no_problem</a> | @kpreid</a>
`YouTube Video</a></li> Slides</a></li> </ul>`

Cybergate</a> | @cybersoulK</a>
Cybergate Discord server</a></li> </ul>
no_std: ?no_problem</a> | @kpreid</a>
`YouTube Video</a></li> Slides</a></li> </ul>`

no_std: ?no_problem</a> | @kpreid</a>
`YouTube Video</a></li> Slides</a></li> </ul>`