• coding Rust gamedev прекрасное reddit.com "Hi, Reddit!
    I posted here for a few times, and now our team has reached the important stage of development — we are launching our Greenlight campaign on Steam.
    Game idea
    Our idea is quite simple — we found [an article](gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/) about network physics synchronization and realized, that there are very few games that use physics extensively as the core part of gameplay. We have very big plans on this idea, but as a first step — we want to launch our first game with this technology. We found the simplest game mechanics exposing this physics idea and started to work.
    Feedback on the language
    First of all — Rust is an amazing language for game development, maybe it is the best one.
    We have Rust stable on build machine and nightly for development. Nightly is used only for compiler intrinsics for a profiler. There were problems with nightly one or two times, but simple downgrades to previous nightly solved the problem. The main issue was compilation time — our biggest crate compiled for about 3 minutes. But with incremental compilation, it's almost fixed. It still takes minutes sometimes, but often — only a few seconds. I am using incremental compilation from very early testing versions — and I had only one time when it generated invalid code.
    During this year I had only one (ONE!!) bug in the code that was really hard to find. The entire program behaved really strange, crashing sometimes with strange backtrace inside a hashmap implementation. This bug was found within a day, I just double-triple-etc checked all usages of "unsafe" keyword in the codebase (there were 3 times). And yes, the bug was in one of those unsafes.
    Most of the time I was the only programmer, and basically, we were a 3-person team — me, 3d and 2d artists. Recently, my friend joined us as the second programmer. He works on the particle system now. He had no experience with Rust at all, so I watched how fast or painful learning of Rust is for a newbie. And he was completely satisfied! I found that Rust is absolutely good as a mentor. I mean — when you write good code, it compiles smoothly, but when you made a bad decision (like to store pointers to dynamic data everywhere or building over complicated structures) Rust tells you — please, stop, think more on design. And it actually works! I’ve seen how Rust teach you how to code.
    The biggest question, when we started our game with Rust, was about the libraries and an infrastructure. How to build a GUI? How to work with 3d party data? And, yes, we had some problems with libraries. After all, the only big library we are using — is glium. I can't say that glium is perfect, but it works. Our rendering is quite simple, and it works well for our needs. The best part of glium — you don't go too far from OpenGL, so, theoretically, it may be replaced or changed when it will be really needed. On the other hand, glium just works at the beginning and is simple and useful. It’s sad that it's almost not supported anymore, but I absolutely understand reasons behind that. Maybe we will do our own glium-compatible (at least the part we use) OpenGL wrapper, maybe we'll try to add needed features to glium. "
    ♡ recommended by @OCTAGRAM

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