The difference is that I'm writing a metaverse client, not a game. A metaverse client is a rare beast about halfway between an MMO client and a web browser. It has to do most of the the graphical things a 3D MMO client does. But it gets all its assets and gameplay instructions from a server.
From a dev perspective, this means you're not making changes to gameplay by recompiling the client. You make changes to objects in the live world while you're connected to the server. So client compile times (I'm currently at about 1 minute 20 seconds for a recompile in release mode) aren't a big issue.
Most of the level and content building machinery of Bevy or Unity or Unreal Engine is thus irrelevant. The important parts needed for performance are down at the graphics level. Those all exist for Rust, but they're all at the My First Renderer level. They don't utilize the concurrency of Vulkan or multiple CPUs. When you get to a non-trivial world, you need that. Tiny Glade is nice, but it works because it's tiny.
What does matter is high performance and reliability while content is coming in at a high rate and changing. Anything can change at any time, but usually doesn't. So cache type optimizations are important, as is multithreading to handle the content flood. Content is constantly coming in, being displayed, and then discarded as the user moves around the big world. All that dynamism requires more complex data structures than a game that loads everything at startup.
Rust's "fearless multiprogramming" is a huge win for performance. I have about 20 threads running, and many are doing quite different things. That would be a horror to debug in C++. In Rust, it's not hard.
(There's a school of thought that says that fast, general purpose renderers are impossible. Each game should have its own renderer. Or you go all the way to a full game engine and integrate gameplay control and the scene graph with the renderer. Once the scene graph gets big enough that (lights x objects) becomes too large to do by brute force, the renderer level needs to cull based on position and size, which means at least a minimal scene graph with a spatial data structure. So now there's an abstraction layering problem - the rendering level needs to see the scene graph. No one in Rust land has solved this problem efficiently. Thus, none of the four available low-level renderers scale well.
I don't think it's impossible, just moderately difficult. I'm currently looking at how to do this efficiently, with some combination of lambdas which access the scene graph passed into the renderer, and caches. I really wish someone else had solved this generic problem, though. I'm a user of renderers, not a rendering expert.)
Meta blew $40 billion dollars on this problem and produced a dud virtual world, but some nice headsets. Improbable blew upwards of $400 million and produced a limited, expensive to run system. Metaverses are hard, but not that hard. If you blow some of the basic architectural decisions, though, you never recover.
These are all solvable problems, but in reality, it's very hard to write a good business case for being the one to solve them. Most of the cost accrues to you and most of the benefit to the commons. Unless a corporate actor decides to write a major new engine in Rust or use Bevy as the base for the same, or unless a whole lot of indie devs and part-time hackers arduously work all this out, it's not worth the trouble if you're approaching it from the perspective of a studio with severe limitations on both funding and time.
The only challenge is not having an ecosystem with ready made everything like you do in "batteries included" frameworks. You are basically building a game engine and a game at the same time.
We need a commercial engine in Rust or a decade of OSS work. But what features will be considered standard in Unreal Engine 2035?
(For the record software development has nothing to do now with how it looked when I started in 2003, plenty of things have revolutionized the way we write code (especially Github) and made us an order of magnitude more productive at least. Yet the number of developer has skyrocketed. I don't expect this trend to stop, AI is yet another productivity boost in an industry that already faced a lot of them in recent time.
I see this and I am reminded when I had to fight the 0 indexing, when I was cutting my teeth in C, for class.
I wonder why no one complains about 0 indexing anymore. Isn't it weird how you have to go 0 to length - 1, and implement algorithm differently than in a math book?
Most languages have abstractions for iterating over an array so that you don’t need to use 0 or length-1 these days
Am I the only person that remembers how hard it was to wrap your head around numbers starting at 0, rather than 1?
(defvar names (Vector String)
#("Alex" "Kim" "Robin" "Sam"))
(elt names 1)
(defvar names (Vector String)
#("Alex" "Kim" "Robin" "Sam"))
(first names)
(defvar names (Vector String)
#("Alex" "Kim" "Robin" "Sam"))
(elt names (lowbound names))
To say it's the same as using array indices is just not true.
Bevy entity IDs are opaque and you have to try really hard to do arithmetic on them. You can technically do math on instance IDs in Unity too; you might say "well, nobody does that", which is my point exactly.
> You don't need to deal with the game life cycle AND the memory life cycle with a GC.
I don't know what this means. The memory for a `GameObject` is freed once you call `Destroy`, which is also how you despawn an object. That's managing the memory lifecycle.
> In Unity they free the native memory when a game object calls Destroy() but the C# data is handled by the GC. Same with any plain C# objects.
Is there a use for storing data on a dead `GameObject`? I've never had any reason to do so. In any case, if you really wanted to do that in Bevy you could always use an `EntityHashMap`.
The live C# but dead Unity object trick is mostly only useful for dangling handles and IDs and such. It's more that memory won't be ripped out from under you for none Unity data and the usual GC rules apply.
And again the difference between using the GC and rolling your own implementation is pretty big. In your hash map example you still have to solve the issue of how long you keep entries in that map. The GC answers that question.