Homegrown Rendering with Rust

Notice the (2021).

Read the change in which Embark's CTO backs off from Rust.[1] They were building their own rendering ecosystem, but seem to have backed off from that.

The mainstream Rust 3D ecosystem just isn't good enough yet. I've brought this up before.

The core crate for 3D is WGPU. This is a layer which tries to cover Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL, DX12, Android, and WebGPU targets. It works, but there are performance compromises to support all those different targets. Supporting web and Android means giving up some parallelism on desktop.

The main alternative to WGPU is Vulkano, and MoltenVK, which is an adapter for Apple's Metal. (Apple just had to Think Different, which is why many games are not ported to MacOS.) It's OK, but it's really just a subset of Vulkan on top. Same parallelism problem, although not for any essential reason.

All those offer a Vulkan-type API, which is rather low level. The caller has to manage GPU memory and scheduling. For that, there's Bevy, which is a whole game engine framework. Good work has been done in Bevy, but it's a framework, so you do it their way or not at all. There's Rend3, which is just a crate to manage memory and scheduling. I use that. It's been abandoned. I may have to take up maintaining that.

Nobody is pushing these towards maximum performance and quality. Nobody has a good modern big-world 3D shooter on these stacks.

All this stuff works fine if you're doing simple scenes. If you're pushing towards, say, the level of a 10 year old AAA title, it's not there. Modern Unreal Engine, not even close.

Not enough money behind it.

[1] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-ecosystem/commit/61f0e...

Does anyone know if Embark are still using a lot of rust in their production games? They seem to be a very well funded studio (lots of employees, big fancy office, competes with other AAA FPS-games). I wonder if these experimental-sounding projects have given way to more classic tech in the churn of building games that are profitable.

The article's author now works with his girlfriend on this[1] game also written in Rust.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/

The finals is such an impressive game. I’d love to learn how they managed it. The destruction of the entire map doesn’t slow down the game at all.

That said, the only thing stopping the finals from becoming a leading franchise is some balance and game design issues. They’ve built a wonderful casino, but the rules for the card games are rough around the edges. I hope they can drive a dump truck of cash up to riot HQ, and hire a designer passionate about esports. There is so many obviously wrong things in the game… like the recent lh-1 buff that lasted a day before being reverted. What were they thinking? That said, it’s the first game I’ve played in twenty years that makes gaming feel new, and we love so many things about it.

(2021)

Note: this was published in 2021