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53 points mvx64 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it.

My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as:

[dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"]

this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies.

I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer, transforming, lighting and rasterizing each triangle and so on, no special techniques or raycasting), the framebuffer is 320x180 (widescreen 320x240). SDL handles the hardware-accelerated final scaling to the display resolution (if available, for example in VMs it's sometimes not so it's pure software). I do my own physics, quaternion/matrix/vector math, TGA and OBJ loading.

Performance: I have not spent a lot of time on this really, but I am kind of satisfied: FPS ranges from [200-500] on a 2011 i5 Thinkpad to [70-80] on a 2005 Pentium laptop (this could barely run rustc...I had to jump through some hoops to make it work on 32 bit Linux), to [40-50] on a RaspberryPi 3B+. I don't have more modern hardware to test.

All of this is single threaded, no SIMD, no inline asm. Also, implementing interlaced rendering provided a +50% perf boost (and a nice effect).

The Pentium laptop has an ATI (yes) chip which is, maybe not surprisingly, supported perfectly by SDL.

Regarding Rust: I've barely touched the language. I am using it more as a "C with vec!s, borrow checker, pattern matching, error propagation, and traits". I love the syntax of the subset that I use; it's crystal clear, readable, ergonomic. Things like matches/ifs returning values are extremely useful for concise and productive code. However, pro/idiomatic code that I see around, looks unreadable to me. I've written all of the code from scratch on my own terms, so this was not a problem, but still... In any case, the ecosystem and tooling are amazing. All in all, an amazing development experience. I am a bit afraid to switch back to C++ for my next project.

Also, rustup/cargo made things a walk in the park while creating a deployment script that automates the whole process: after a commit, it scans source files for used assets and packages only those, copies dependencies (DLLs for Win), sets up build dependencies depending on the target, builds all 3 targets (Win10_64, Linux32, Linux64), bundles everything into separate zips and uploads them to my local server. I am doing this from a 64bit Lubuntu 18.04 virtual machine.

You can try the game and read all info about it on the linked itch.io page: https://totenarctanz.itch.io/a-scavenging-trip

All assets (audio/images/fonts) where also made by me for this project (you could guess from the low quality).

Development tools: Geany (on Linux), notepad++ (on Windows), both vanilla with no plugins, Blender, Gimp, REAPER.

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armitage__ ◴[] No.45271913[source]
I love custom game engines. Looks fantastic! Will you be sharing the source?
replies(1): >>45272932 #
mvx64 ◴[] No.45272932[source]
Thanks! For several reasons, most probably and regrettably no, for now at least.

More than happy to talk about any specific part however (e.g. how scenes are handled, the code itself, or how particular features are implemented or optimized).

replies(2): >>45273922 #>>45276406 #
nextaccountic ◴[] No.45276406[source]
You talked about using Rust as a better C so I just wanted to ask, do you define any enums with payloads? (also called "sum types" or "tagged unions" in other languages) (edit: also called "algebraic tyeps" and there's an article about it in the front page, though this is a slight misnomer)

Things like

    enum Something {
        One(String),
        Two(i32),
    }
Also, how is your usage of Option? (one such enum)

I think this plus pattern matching is the foundation of Rust's superpowers. It's also very old tech and absolutely not Rust's invention, present in languages like OCaml and SML. Hence the early Rust slogan, "technology from the past, come to save the future from itself"

replies(1): >>45276678 #
1. mvx64 ◴[] No.45276678[source]
Actually yes! I use it when passing a texture into a draw function. I have a TexOrColor enum, and when calling the function you either provide an &Image or a &Color. Before that, if I wanted a colored textureless model, I passed a dummy 1x1 texture to sample from.

And of course, Options and pattern matching are easily the best part of the language and very powerful. I am obsessed with things like "let x = if {...}".