FOSSPicks

Game engine

rg3d

Moving from one syntactically C-based language (Dart, used above) to another, rg3d is a 3D games engine that's been written in Rust, the language that has won Stack Overflow's "most loved programming language" for the last four years. Rust is popular because it takes the best bits of a system programming language like C, such as its high performance and an ability to be coerced and squeezed in ways never intended, and pulls it into the modern era of garbage collection, memory allocation checks, and a build system without a makefile. All of which makes Rust an ideal language for games programming, where the expressiveness and performance of a language is paramount.

Keeping with the "borrowing from C" theme, rg3d is a 3D games engine that ports much of its inspiration from the C99 games platform, Dmitry's Engine. By its own admission, there is still plenty that needs to be done, but that's also doing the current state of rg3d a disservice. To prove this, the developer behind the engine itself is also working on a prototype demo FPS, currently called "rusty-shooter." This is an instinct-driven, fast, and beautifully rendered Quake-like game that shows off the many parts of the game engine currently developed, including deferred shading, binaural sound, a scene graph, particle system, physics, and loaders for many font and image formats. There's also an accompanying scene editor that helps you create game levels without having to resort to tools like Blender, although you'll still need to build the game outside of the editor to preview the gameplay. It's an impressive amount of work for a single developer, and it makes an ideal starting point to learn both 3D games development and the Rust programming language, while at the same time hopefully producing the next blockbuster indie game title for Linux.

Project Website

https://github.com/mrDIMAS/rg3d

The rather brilliant demo game rusty-shooter is written using the rg3d game engine to show its capabilities and to help new game developers get started.

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