What is Bevy?

Bevy is a modern data-driven game engine built in Rust

WARNING

Bevy is still in the very stages of development. APIs can and will change. Important features are missing. Documentation is non-existent. Please don't build any serious projects in Bevy unless you are prepared to be broken by api changes constantly.

Design Goals

• Provide a first class user-experience for both 2D and 3D games.
• Easy for newbies to pick up, but infinitely flexible for power users.
• Fast iterative compile times. Ideally less than 1 second for small to medium sized projects.
• Data-first game development using ECS (Entity Component Systems)
• High performance and parallel architecture
• Use the latest and greatest rendering technologies and techniques

Features

• Cross Platform: Windows, MacOS, Linux
• Modern Renderer
  • Multiple Backends: Vulkan, DirectX 11/12, Metal
  • Modern and flexible low level "Render Graph" api
    • Easy to use high level defaults for beginners
    • Experts can create their own Render Graphs or modify the defaults
  • Powerful data-driven shader system
    • Define your shaders in either GLSL or SPIR-V
    • Automatically generates pipelines for shaders using SPIR-V reflection
    • Easily and efficiently bind ECS component data to shader uniforms
    • Use component data to define macros in shaders and automatically recompile them if the shader has changed
• Expressive UI System
• Fast iterative compile times
  • the example projects have less than 1 second iterative compiles
• Dynamically load plugins at runtime
  • "script" your game in Rust or extend the engine with new features

Planned Features

See our ROADMAP.md for the current list of planned features.

Getting Started

Nightly Compiler

Bevy requires nightly rust right now. It currently uses specialization features, which are unstable. If specialization goes stable soon then we can go back to a stable compiler. In the meantime, we will try our best to remove specialization usage so we can go back to stable.

Examples:

cargo run --example simple

Fast Compiles

• Bevy can be built using default configuration (ex: cargo build), but for optimal build times we recommend using a nightly compiler with the following settings:
  • LLD Linker: -Clink-arg=-fuse-ld=lld
    • LLD will significantly speed up compile times in Bevy, but it doesn't work out of the box on some platforms / os-es.
    • See this issue and this issue for more information.
  • Generic Sharing (nightly only): -Zshare-generics=y
    • Most of the generics you will use in Bevy apps are also used by the Bevy engine code. Generic sharing is a nightly feature that lets your Bevy app re-use generics used in Bevy engine.
  • Oddly in some cases compiling in release mode can actually reduce iterative compile times with the settings above. In our experience this is true for most of the examples in this project.
  • You can set these flags in one of two ways:
    • .cargo/config
      • We have included an example configuration in .cargo/config_fast_builds. Try renaming it to .cargo/config and see if it works!
    • environment variables:
      • For example, in Bash you would run this command: RUSTFLAGS="-Clink-arg=-fuse-ld=lld -Zshare-generics=y" cargo build --release

Libraries Used

Bevy is only possible because of the hard work put into these foundational technologies:

• wgpu-rs: modern / low-level / cross platform graphics library inspired by Vulkan
• legion: a feature rich high performance ECS library
• glam-rs: a simple and fast 3D math library for games and graphics
• winit: cross platform window creation and management in Rust
• legion_transform: A hierarchical space transform system, implemented using Legion ECS
• shaderc: compiles GLSL and HLSL shaders to SPIR-V binaries
• spirv-reflect: Reflection API in rust for SPIR-V shader byte code

Additionally, we would like to thank the Amethyst, coffee, ggez, and Piston projects for providing solid examples of game engine development in Rust. If you are looking for a game engine to build Rust games in, it is worth considering all of your options. Each engine has different design goals and some will likely resonate with you more than others.

F.A.Q.

Why build Bevy instead of using INSERT_GAME_ENGINE_HERE?

@cart (original creator of Bevy) speaking: I decided to build Bevy after years of contributing code to other engines (ex: Godot). I spent over four years building a game in Godot and I have experience with Unity, Unreal, Three.js, Armory, and Game Maker. I built multiple custom engines using Rust, Go, HTML5, and Java. I have also closely followed the other major players in the Rust gamedev ecosystem, namely Amethyst, coffee, and Piston. I am currently a senior software engineer at Microsoft which has also affected my opinions of software and what it should be.

These experiences led me to want the following from a game engine:

• It needs to be free and open source with no strings attached. Games are a huge part of our culture and humanity is investing millions of hours into the development of games. Why are we (as game developers / engine developers) continuing to build up the ecosystems of closed-source monopolies that take cuts of our sales and deny us visibility into the tech we use daily? As a community I believe we can do so much better.
• It needs to have fast build/run/test loops, which translates to either scripting languages or fast compile times in native languages. But scripting languages introduce runtime overhead, cognitive load, and a barrier between me and the actual engine, so my preference here is a native language with fast compile times.
• Ideally the engine is written in the same language as games are. I found myself loving engines where game code is written in the same language as engine code. Being able to run an IDE "go to definition" command on a symbol in your game and hop directly into the engine source is an extremely powerful concept. And you don't need to worry about translation layers or lossy abstractions. Also, if an engine's community builds games in the same language as the engine, they are more likely (and able) to contribute back to the engine.
• It needs to be easy to use for common tasks, but it also can't hide the details from you. Many engines are either "easy to use but too high level" or "very low level but difficult to do common tasks in".
• It needs to have an editor. Scene creation is a large part of game development and in many cases visual editors beat code. As a bonus, the editor should be built in the engine. Godot uses this approach and it is so smart. Doing so dogfoods the engine's UI system. Improvements to the editor are also often improvements to the engine. And it makes sure your engine is flexible enough to build tooling (and not just games).
• It needs to be data-driven/data-oriented/data-first. ECS is a common way of doing this, but it definitely isn't the only way. These paradigms can make your game faster (cache friendly, easier to parallelize), but they also make common tasks like game state serialization and synchronization delightfully straightforward.

None of the engines on the market quite line up with what I'm looking for. And the changes required to make them meet my requirements are either massive in scope, impossible (closed source), or unwelcome (the things I want aren't what the developers or customers want). On top of that, making new game engines is fun!

Bevy is not trying to out-compete other open-source game engines. As much as possible we should be collaborating and building common foundations. If you are an open source game engine developer and you think a Bevy component would make your engine better, one of your engine's components could make Bevy better, or both, please reach out! Bevy is already benefitting massively from the efforts of the Rust gamedev ecosystem and we would love to pay it forward in whatever way we can.