aeva

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary haha where did you hear that

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary so here's what I know - I do not know of any parts of unreal engine that are written in Rust, and I feel like that's the sort of thing I would have heard about quickly if there were. A quick google shows there is a 3rd party module that exposes bindings for stuff to Rust via the C FFI, and it's not in a state the author considers to be usable.

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary I'm not aware of any Rust games that have been ported to consoles and shipped.

Here's a nice high level explanation of what it can take to port a new language to consoles https://github.com/FNA-XNA/FNA/issues/478#issuecomment-1931150158

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary The way you know if a language or an engine or so is available on consoles is usually that there's a secret branch available where all of the porting work has happened that they can't release for contractual reasons, so it's advertised as being available upon request to registered console developers. I've heard of no such thing for Rust.

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary Correct. It may some day be possible, but someone who has access to all the SDKs would need to put in a significant amount of work to port and maintain the language.

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary That bit about two posts down doesn't sound promising :(

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary fwiw here's the ways I see it coming to pass:

1. a Rust game engine project whose developers make games with the engine to prove out features makes something that's successful on PC and decides to invest development time into porting to consoles.

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary 2. a contracting studio that specializes in ports and weird moonshot projects anticipates Rust game development will be a gold mine and does the work in hopes that they can sell it in the future for $$$, and then enough demand actually materializes for the platform branches to continue to be maintained

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary 3. an enterprising studio puts in the work, successfully ships a game, and the game is successful enough that the studio can continue to justify making games like that; and they're willing to share with other registered devs

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary 4. a significant amount of commercially successful PC titles written in Rust emerge, enough so that console vendors notice that there's money to be made in maintaining an official compiler fork

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary for better or for worse the rub here is games are already very labor intensive to make, and the quality bar is so high. Any emerging language community that wants to angle in for game development needs to make iteration times faster to really catch on. Not on paper, not in theory, but in practice. Rust can probably get there once it amasses enough high quality libraries, but from everything I've heard it's not quite there yet.

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary I don't know. Build stuff is not my wheelhouse.

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary @sinbad It might be worth contacting someone at chucklefish who is familiar with what it took to port the language and see if they're willing to comment privately on the issues you're likely to encounter. Without solid information or access to the NDA stuff you're probably better off sticking to C++20 or older and providing a thin Rust wrapper.

aeva, 6 days ago

@fuzzybinary good luck!

aeva, 7 days ago

@kwramm if I were to read a management journal, would I realistically find anything documenting what to expect if one were to, say, as a hobby project, try to render signed distance fields as variable density point clouds using a fast screen space voronoi approximation to fill the gaps?

aeva, 7 days ago

idk, I think there's an ample space for retreading on the failures of others and finding interesting new information, or at least confirming empiricism.

This is, after all, a whole mood:

aeva, 7 days ago

@rf that's a cowardly rule, but it's a start at least

aeva, 7 days ago

@RedGlow you are correct: one cannot reasonably expect positive systemic changes to be driven by people who are thriving under perverse incentives.

aeva, 7 days ago

@operand it certainly sounds like a good idea. I guess whether or not it worked could be the topic of the keynote for the following year

aeva, 6 days ago

@topher_batty hm I think you're making a bit of a bad faith leap there on what I had in mind

aeva, 6 days ago

@shiz I believe in you :D

aeva, 7 days ago

@ruojake kinda reminds me of splatoon