RustConf Veloren Talk Proposal

Fields to fill out on form

Title

(Currently chosen by vote)

• Rust at Game Scale

• The Gifts Rust Gives

• Secrets of Rust Game Development

Session format

30 mins

Abstract (A concise, engaging description for the public program. Limited to 600 characters.)

Veloren is an open source game built from scratch in Rust. It looks similar to Minecraft, and is inspired by games like Cube World and Dwarf Fortress. Veloren makes use of many unique features of Rust to allow for a larger-scale game to be built with few compromises. This talk dives into some of the techniques and tricks learned, and shows how Rust can be a first-class language for game development. It breaks down examples of problems seen in game development, and shows how Rust helps to solve them.

Tags

Intermediate, case-study, community, performance

Details (Include any pertinent details such as outlines, outcomes or intended audience.)

This talk's goal will be to show some concrete examples of why Rust is a great language to consider for game development. Viewers will be educated on some of the core ideas of the project, and why Rust plays a key part in them. However, this talk is not a survey of the whole ecosystem, especially in regards to other Rust game engines. It will focus on the tools we use when approaching game development from scratch. It talks about a medium-sized game that considers end-to-end technical requirements.

This talk is intended to be intermediate-level. It will require knowledge of Rust's borrow checker, and the type system. However, many examples in the talk will be high-level enough to be examined through the lens of a non-Rust developer. Specifically, the examples with parallelization, our networking approach, and our methods of diagnosing bottlenecks. This means that the talk also caters to an audience that is looking to see how possible game development in Rust can be.

We will go over several key areas that we've found Rust's capability to excel. Specifically, we want to discuss the ecosystem for Rust game development, how we make use of Rust-specific techniques, and how Veloren makes use of the Rust community. The planned outline for the talk will be as follows:

• 5 mins:
  • Intro about the speaker
  • Intro to the project
  • Context of the project with regards to Rust
• 5 mins: How we use the ecosystem
  • Crates we use
    • specs
    • wgpu/naga
    • serde
  • Benefits of the base ecosystem
    • Rustfmt/clippy/cargo
• 15 mins: How we use Rust (this section will take leftover time from the others)
  • Zero sized structs as markers
  • Parallelization techniques
    • Borrow checker benefits
    • Integration of parallel work with specs
  • Our techniques of "modding" with wasmer plugins
  • Our modular process
    • Separation of the backend server and frontend client
  • Hot reloading abilities
    • Ron files
    • Ease with serde
    • How this solves compilation times for artists
  • Networking
    • Match exhaustivity
    • What deployment looks like
  • How we diagnose issues
    • Tracy
    • Where we find bottlenecks
• 5 mins: Community
  • What it means to us to be a Rust community project
    • The urge to help others, and be open to new developers
    • How we work with other communities and projects
      • Rust Gamedev Newsletter
      • Maintenence of specs
    • How diversity shapes the project

By the end of the talk, viewers will have examples of Rust's capacity as a first-class game development language. Viewers will also see how some of Rust's features play a large part in helping a project of this scale move quickly. Finally, they will have seen how several problems related to game development can be resolved in the Rust ecosystem.

Pitch (Explain why this talk should be considered and what makes you qualified to speak on the topic.)

Veloren is a cross-disciplinary project designed for an end-user to play. It spans the fields of graphics, networking, artificial intelligence, procedural generation, and more. Much of the project makes use of novel crates in the Rust ecosystem, as well as some new ones that have been created out of necessity for the project. Veloren is currently one of the largest examples of game development in Rust, as well as a flagship case of what can be created with the language.

Over 200 developers have contributed to the project, and because of this, we've seen many experienced developers explore what Rust can provide them. The core team worked together to aggregate the list of topics that are part of this proposal. The project has had over three years to solidify its technical structure and has learned a lot from mistakes in the past.

Please feel free to learn more about Veloren through these links:
Website: https://veloren.net/
Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/veloren/veloren

Specifically about myself as the speaker:

I've been part of Veloren's development since the beginning of 2019. I've written weekly blog posts about the game's progress for over 125 weeks in a row. I'm currently part of the core development team, and I'm the lead of the Meta team. I focus on outreach for the project, as well as internal tooling. Because of these experiences, I have one of the widest breadths of knowledge across the entire project.

I've already given two talks about Veloren at conferences. Although both were oriented towards the community, the second one went much more into depth on how Veloren uses the Rust ecosystem. These opportunities got me to reach out to the members of the Veloren team and gather many points about what works well in talks about the project.

Please feel free to take a look at my previous Veloren talks, and my personal Github:
Github: https://github.com/angelonfira
Talk #1 (CUSEC 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS26sqT09Pw
Talk #2 (MiniDebConf #2 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76FPpOnshNw

Name

Forest Anderson

Bio

Forest is the Meta Lead of the Veloren project. He is also a part of the Rust Game Development Working Group. He helps edit "This Month in Rust GameDev", and runs a monthly meetup for Rustaceans to show off what they've been working on in the game development scene. Forest is also the editor of "This Week in Veloren", which has over 125 consecutive editions. Forest studies game development at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he likes to show other students how cool Rust is.

Photo