Why not use Bevy?

[adsick]

for me it looks like a lot of goals are intersected with bevy game engine, so why just not contribute to it instead of fragmenting ecosystem and separating human resources for developing stuff that already has been made by other people.

[FredrikNoren]

Yeah there's some overlap, and we're excited to share and collaborate on infra pieces with the Bevy project. There are a couple of fundamental reasons why this is not built on Bevy though;

• Ambient's model is based on WebAssembly and small modules that can be written in any language, and which all are run in isolation by the runtime, which means you can even run untrusted third party code on your servers and and clients machines. Bevy's model is based on a "full Rust" stack, where you have a total overview of the finally built binary and can debug and run it as a whole. There are pros and cons to both approaches; Ambient is great for interoping and stitching together a wide range of modules and even adding modules while running. Bevy's is great for when you want total control and you want everything to be in Rust.
• Bevy is a bit more DIY; it's a collection of Rust libraries which leaves things like distribution and deployment to the user. Ambient is more of a batteries included solution; we aim to make it dead simple for users to deploy their games and experiences.
• We also needed full ownership of the infrastructure in order to make the dream of the "multiplayer game engine" come true; we need to be able to iterate on core building blocks, such as optimizing the ECS for the multiplayer use case.
• Finally, there's a historical reason too; when the first few prototype lines of this were written, Bevy wasn't even announced yet. We could have switched when it was released, but at the time Bevy was as new as this project, so it didn't make sense then.

That being said, I would still prefer to try to minimize fragmentation where possible. I think over time both projects will spawn "building block" crates that other engines can take advantage of too, and hopefully things we can share between these projects. I also don't want to rule out the possibility of running Bevy modules inside of Ambient one day, but we'd have to look into the technical perspective there to see how hard that would be to do.

I hope that all makes sense!

[kvfreedom]

I am happy to see more and more pure ecs game engines.
But I like bevy's "full Rust" and unity's "full C#".

[adsick]

I hope that all makes sense

yes, I see. thanks for a detailed answer!

[arpadgabor]

I'm not a game dev but follow the space pretty closely. I'd only like to add that I'm glad that more open source game engines are popping up! Besides Bevy, there's also Godot (albeit not in Rust) that's, from what I can tell, picking up steam, now also Ambient which proposes some pretty cool stuff. I'm excited what there is to come, and more collaboration in this space is awesome! It feels like game dev is slowly getting more into open-source, which is great.

[gedw99]

Godot add on I used recently has a wasm basis. Also a golang system I am working uses wasm on client and server.

I would love to try Ambient woth the user code written in golang . The architecture looks great 👍

is the server side platform open source though ? I am using fky.io to run “ scale to zero” systems and it’s very easy and performant.

Keep up the great work !!

[FredrikNoren]

@gedw99 So the server side of the runtime is open source; you can ambient serve to run an ambient game server. On the platform end (orchestration of machines etc.) we use agnoes, which is also open source, and then some small glue services that are pretty specific to us, which we haven't open sourced.

Also note that a "deployment" of a game is just a bunch of files served over http; i.e. you can take the output of ambient build, put that on a s3 bucket, and then run ambient serve http://address.to/that/bucket, and it will download the content for you.

There are also some Docker files in the project for people who want to run Ambient in a docker container.

[gedw99]

Thanks @FredrikNoren

I used to work in Stockholm in a games company . 2 of them. Kind of miss the Laconm Swedish chill :) and Gamla Stan . Lovely city..

about deployment . Looks easy then

The godot wasm system I used is based on wasmer btw. No web support yet. It’s open source btw if you’re curious.

I found you guys via pop OS rust gui btw.

If you want to chat my profile has my telegram link btw. Always good to compare notes

[gedw99]

There is multiplayer system on server using web transport ? So that’s embedded in the binary output for the server ?

I use NATS Jetstream for multi player stuff at the moment btw. It’s a beast imho .

[katopz]

I think a features comparison table for Ambient vs Bevy vs Godot would be nice for newcomer like me. 🫣

[erlend-sh]

I liked the way @darthdeus compared the Comfy engine to its most prominent alternatives by focusing on general developer experience and outcomes rather than individual features.