August 11th, 2024

Bevy's Game Engine Fourth Birthday

Bevy, a Rust-based game engine, marked its fourth anniversary with major updates, including new features and the establishment of The Bevy Foundation, enhancing sustainability and community collaboration.

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Bevy, a free and open-source game engine built in Rust, celebrated its fourth birthday on August 10, 2024. The past year has seen significant milestones, including the release of multiple versions (0.12, 0.13, and 0.14), which introduced features like Deferred Rendering, Lightmaps, and Volumetric Fog. The Bevy community has grown, with over 1,000 unique contributors and nearly 1.5 million downloads on crates.io. The establishment of The Bevy Foundation marked a pivotal moment, providing a structured approach to funding and governance, ensuring the project's sustainability. Alice, a key contributor, transitioned to a full-time role at the foundation, enhancing project management and development efficiency. The renderer has matured significantly, incorporating advanced features that align Bevy with modern game engine standards. Additionally, the UI ecosystem is evolving, with new frameworks and projects aimed at improving user experience. The community is encouraged to reflect on the past year and share their insights, fostering a collaborative environment for future growth.

- Bevy celebrated its fourth anniversary with notable development milestones.

- The Bevy Foundation was established to support the project's sustainability and governance.

- Alice's full-time role has improved project management and development pace.

- Significant advancements in rendering capabilities have been achieved.

- The UI ecosystem is actively developing with new frameworks and community contributions.

Homegrown Rendering with Rust

Embark Studios develops a creative platform for user-generated content, emphasizing gameplay over graphics. They leverage Rust for 3D rendering, introducing the experimental "kajiya" renderer for learning purposes. The team aims to simplify rendering for user-generated content, utilizing Vulkan API and Rust's versatility for GPU programming. They seek to enhance Rust's ecosystem for GPU programming.

Bevy 0.14 – Data driven game engine

Bevy 0.14 release includes Virtual Geometry, Sharp Screen Space Reflections, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Volumetric Fog, and more. Updates also cover Animation Blending, ECS Observers, Color API, and UI improvements.

Blender 4.2

Blender 4.2 LTS, released on July 16th, 2024, brings significant updates to EEVEE and Cycles rendering engines. It includes global illumination, Ray Portal BSDF, improved SSS, and a unified Extensions system. The release emphasizes community involvement and offers improved performance.

Bevy Jam #5

The Bevy Jam #5 on itch.io challenges participants to create games with the Bevy engine in 9 days. Collaboration is encouraged, and winners can choose prizes from the Bevy Merch store.

This month in Servo: console logging, parallel tables, OpenXR, and more

In July 2024, Servo launched new features for its web rendering engine, including console logging in Firefox devtools, parallel table layout, and an OpenXR backend, while also enhancing documentation and financial support.

4 comments

By @diath - 9 months

I feel like every time Bevy is mentioned, on HN or elsewhere, a common question is "what are some examples of shipped games made in Bevy?" and there usually is not much to show, which is a big problem, while I personally have no interest in Rust/Bevy, and will most likely stick to C++ for game development, I feel like it would be in Bevy developers' best interest, to create showcase games. Currently, there are some technical demos and feature show offs, but these always look convincing regardless of the engine, because it's trivial to make trivial things look nice, however, it's hard to grasp the full picture of how ergonomic a framework/engine is without looking at a more complex project. Personally, if I could have a suggestion for Bevy developers, I would encourage them to implement things like a Minecraft clone, a Quake-type game clone, and maybe a platformer like Mario, to create a proper showcase of different components/features combined all together, furthermore, if they released such demo projects under a permissive license, it would allow people that are more into gameplay programming and less into engine/low-level programming, to just take these projects and build upon them, which would accelerate Bevy's adaptation and popularity.

By @eknkc - 9 months

I see a lot of work being done on rust game engines / ecs crates / frameworks etc but I don’t think I’ve heard about an actual successful game launched based on the rust game dev ecosystem.

Are there any good examples?

Don’t get me wrong, bevy looks fantastic but I feel like rust is not the best language for game development. It is hard to do fast paced prototyping using rust. It is hard to do shitty things you might need to do like juggling memory in a definitely unsafe way.

And it also looks like ECS is not a nice to have but a must have in rust game dev. Borrow checker will not be your friend otherwise.

I might be completely wrong though. Also, I’m not a game dev, just interested in the concepts around it. Anyone successfully developing a game (that is not a basic space shooter) in rust?

By @OtomotO - 9 months

I wonder how more often I'll read about the UI focus... It was a focus point at the beginning of 2023, in a blog post.