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Comment by mr_00ff00 | Hacker News Reader

Would love to see zig in game dev. I’ve tried some rust and while I love rust in general, I find game dev in it a bit of a mess.

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I gave it a go with openGL and Rust, was great until I needed some external C++ libraries.. Then I lost motivation and rewrote the whole thing in C++

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absolutely

Have you tried bevy? I’m starting with bevy for a non-game project, but I’m blown away by how simple it is to use once you get used to the magic.

Bevy isn't on the same level as tools like UE and Godot.

To be fair Godot isn't on same level as UE.

Depends on what you're doing. I'm writing a non-game app that requires a scenegraph, raycast mouse selection tool, and other tools of the sort typically required by games and provided by a game engine. But there's a lot of game stuff I don't need, and I need to make major customizations to the rendering engine. It ended up being easier to implement in bevy, due to its modularity, than it would have been in UE4 or Godot.

Zig gamedev libraries aren't either

Maybe I need to give bevy a second go. My big issue is I felt I was learning to speak “bevy” instead of using rust. A lot of functions I wrote required queries of components, but the queries were built and called behind a magically wall.

I don’t have much game dev experience though outside of simple games using libraries like raylib to just move and draw stuff. Maybe once things get complicated enough they are all like bevy.

This is true on both fronts, I think. Bevy magics away the interface between you and the engine via the ECS macros, in a way that is very unusual for a systems programming language like Rust. But that's more or less how all game engines are these days from what I understand.

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