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The Bevy Foundation

102 points| _cart | 2 years ago |bevyengine.org

80 comments

order

weinzierl|2 years ago

"You may notice that every member of the board is an active Bevy Maintainer. This is not a coincidence. We believe that people actually developing the project should be at the helm. There is currently no way to buy a board seat. We have no plans to hire "professional board members" that aren't in the thick of it. For now we plan to stick to the Maintainer == Board Member policy. Functionally, new Board Members are selected via an election of the current board. "Board Member" is currently not a paid position."

Thank you for setting the Foundation up like this!

To make this work in the long run donations are crucial: https://bevyengine.org/donate/

alice-i-cecile|2 years ago

Hi! I'm the fabled "project manager" that we'd like to hire! Helping run Bevy has been an incredible experience, and I'm very excited about the idea of being able to do this full-time. There are a ton of efforts I'd like to lead, and even more that I'd like to be able to help nudge along.

jay_kyburz|2 years ago

Any plan for Physics? There is no mention on front page of the website.

When do the team think the would be comfortable telling people they can build and release game on it?

antoineMoPa|2 years ago

Hi! Thank you, I'm having lots of fun using Bevy!!!

_cart|2 years ago

Bevy's creator, project lead, and now president of the Bevy Foundation here. Feel free to ask me anything!

tekacs|2 years ago

Nothing to ask right now, just -- thank for your (and Alice's) work!

The (non-game) things that I do would be infinitely more painful without Bevy ECS, so I sponsored personally at Diamond for now.

Very excited for relations and I'm hoping that the Bevy Foundation can attract the support it's looking for (and I'll switch over to corporate in a few months if things don't go unexpectedly sideways with my company). :)

rahkiin|2 years ago

How does it feel to have a small project where you are the only programmer turn into such an organization which asks very different things from you?

noelwelsh|2 years ago

I've been using Bevy recently so here are some thoughts on this:

Firstly, the overall quality is high and seeing this attention being paid to the project's organization is another good sign.

Documentation is not great. The Bevy book runs out of content very quickly. The "Cheat Book" has additional useful information: https://bevy-cheatbook.github.io/. With these plus the examples I've been able to figure out everything I need, but it's slow going.

I'm not 100% sold on ECS. It loses a lot of type safety and there doesn't seem to be any way to ensure cleanup of entities and their components.

alice-i-cecile|2 years ago

Thanks (I am the aforementioned project manager) :) Docs are a high priority for me, especially beginner content, assets, and rendering for me. Rust's in-repo examples are really helpful for ensuring they stay up to date, but aren't a replacement for a guided tour.

As for the ECS, I've absolutely felt that: the flexibility of the polymorphism created by "just add another component!" can be both chaotic and freeing. Can you say more about what you're looking for with entity cleanup? I haven't heard that complaint before and want to make sure I understand what you mean.

tiledjinn|2 years ago

ECS is an architecture proposed by the same group that has said "if you know you're not going to use that memory again, just allocate over it". For certain domains, this is a superior solution to management than more costly cleanup. Re-initializing an allocator and leaving behind old data in now uninitialized memory is a lot faster than doing anything with that memory.

For type safety, entities define mapping of types [components are types]. The whole point of ECS is effectively managing types and ensuring correctly typed data is operated on.

the__alchemist|2 years ago

A note on the ECS: This is largely due to poor understanding on my part, but I moved my computational chemistry (egui-based) GUI program (Visualizes various wave function properties) from Bevy to WGPU directly, because the ECS was difficult to grok and debug. It felt like more work to reinvent wheels regarding rendering than manipulate the ECS. I had it working in Bevy, but ported. Not a canonical use case for a game engine!

It's been ~2 years, but my main reason was wanting to write plain rust, vice using a DSL.

ioasuncvinvaer|2 years ago

How does it lose type safety?

I was under the impression that bevy's Query system is type safe.

CooCooCaCha|2 years ago

Personally i think the flexibility of ECS is worth the tradeoffs, but that’s just me.

I’m not sure what you mean by cleanup entities. Whenever i load a level i put it under a root entity and just despawn the root when im done.

llmblockchain|2 years ago

Although Bevy says it's an engine, I think that's a bit of an overstatement. It's more of a library/framework. There's a lot you need to do from scratch.

If you are looking for a more full featured game engine-- I recommend Godot.

I have been using Godot lately and it's refreshing how nicely it flows and how the experience mirrors other OSes (from a Linux user's perspective). If you haven't tried Godot lately, give it a try.

Plus, the whole thing is a single binary (~100mb).

Austizzle|1 year ago

I actually recently switched a project from bevy to Godot and agree, it was really nice and easy to get started. Godot is shockingly simple and intuitive compared to something like unreal engine.

Bevy was also great, but is definitely more of a library and there's not a lot of mature plugins. My use case was a web browser compatible game (wasm compiled bevy) that used websockets for networking. It didn't seem like too much of a stretch, but I didn't end up getting anywhere I wanted to be with bevy unfortunately. Hopefully as it grows it becomes a better option!

But with Godot I ported my code and had it working in the browser with websockets based multiplayer shockingly fast, even having never touched gdscript before!

OtomotO|2 years ago

Any particular reason these 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity designations are no longer granted as freely as before?

alice-i-cecile|2 years ago

From what we could tell, not really! It seems like a slow policy change, basically dictated at the level of the individual bureaucrat.

That said, the Zig Foundation got status in 2020, and the Amethyst Foundation (another Rust gamedev group) also got status recently, so we figured it was worth it to apply since we really do feel like it's the best-fitting designation for how we want to run things and what we want to do.

brundolf|2 years ago

Does Bevy have a graphical editor yet (or one on the roadmap)?

It seems like it has good bones, but taking real territory away from Unity or Godot will be hard without an editor (not just for non-programmers; some game dev tasks are just way easier with a GUI)

Of course it's open so somebody could build one, but it seems to me this deserves to be a first-class citizen

hannofcart|2 years ago

> ...taking real territory away from Unity or Godot

I used to think this too. But having written a lot of hobby code using Godot (via Gdext, an excellent Rust wrapper for it) I feel the editor is a nice to have but not indispensable.

Very soon into the game you'll find that you need an editor that lets you add your own game abstractions into the game. And at that point you're better off writing an editor "in game" than shoe horning your abstractions into the game engine editor.

There's a bit more nuance I probably outght to the above description but too tired to type it all out on my phone now.

pjmlp|2 years ago

Good luck with the efforts, we need more variety in programming language landscape for game engines.

ramon156|2 years ago

Loved bevy since the reddit post (i think that was even pre 0.1). It's a bummer I was in the middle of learning rust, so I wasn't of much help. Would've loved to contribute

BD103|2 years ago

Don't worry, you still can! I've been actively contributing to the past 4 months, working on improving CI and the website. I started out doing PRs for typos and little improvements, and so can you! (I recommend looking for issues marked as "Good-First-Issue," they are the best entry-level things to work on.)

Cilvic|2 years ago

Which post?

ajuc|2 years ago

I write a simple 2d game in bevy to learn rust and ECS. I like it a lot.

I just wish it was slightly better with backward compatibility. There's many useful libraries I can't use because they depend on different bevy versions, and updating the code to new major versions is a hassle. And the bevy cheatbook has some pages refering to behavior that changed several versions earlier.

LarsDu88|2 years ago

Love where Bevy is going. On the UI/UX side it has a long way to go, but on the non-rendering backend architecture side it can beat Unity, Unreal, and Godot in the long run.

Just crossing my fingers because by the time Bevy reaches that goal, compute power may have just 10x'd again, and the existing game engine giants will have added AI creation tooling by then.

mostlysimilar|2 years ago

Can't wait for the days when bug reports are closed with "don't know why this is happening, the AI did it, can't fix"

masto|2 years ago

Apparently Bevy is a game engine.

lyu07282|2 years ago

I hope this will one day become as large and productive as the Blender Foundation

dang|2 years ago

Related:

Revy – proof-of-concept time-travel debugger for the Bevy game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39590683 - March 2024 (36 comments)

Bevy 0.13: ECS-driven game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39412940 - Feb 2024 (59 comments)

Bevy 0.12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144417 - Nov 2023 (84 comments)

Three Years of Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37477971 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)

Bevy's Third Birthday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081501 - Aug 2023 (6 comments)

Bevy 0.11: ECS-driven game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657970 - July 2023 (29 comments)

Bevy XPBD: A physics engine for the Bevy game engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642867 - July 2023 (20 comments)

Bevy and WebGPU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35994106 - May 2023 (40 comments)

Bevy 0.10: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045224 - March 2023 (91 comments)

Scaling Bevy Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387062 - Jan 2023 (20 comments)

Bevy 0.9: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33577284 - Nov 2022 (50 comments)

Automated testing in Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32802402 - Sept 2022 (81 comments)

Bevy 0.8: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32287828 - July 2022 (18 comments)

Bevy 0.7: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31043668 - April 2022 (63 comments)

Bevy game engine 0.6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29854416 - Jan 2022 (89 comments)

Bevy's First Birthday: a year of open source Rust game engine development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28132114 - Aug 2021 (13 comments)

Bevy 0.5: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26716166 - April 2021 (65 comments)

Bevy: A game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131350 - Feb 2021 (117 comments)

Bevy 0.4: data oriented game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25480321 - Dec 2020 (23 comments)

Making a Snake Clone with Bevy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999073 - Nov 2020 (11 comments)

Bevy 0.3: game engine built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24983956 - Nov 2020 (55 comments)

Bevy 0.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530698 - Sept 2020 (43 comments)

Bevy: A Game Engine in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334307 - Aug 2020 (42 comments)

Bevy: A data-driven game engine and app framework built in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123283 - Aug 2020 (103 comments)

xyst|2 years ago

You had me at:

> game engine built in Rust

I hope it succeeds and gets significant market penetration. Will donate monthly

ajuc|2 years ago

The joke goes: "rust has 5 games and 120 game engines written in it" :)