In my favorite ECS, Bevy you usually have one App with potentially many SubApps that run your systems. Bevy will make sure to spread your systems across all your cores for best parallelization via a thread pool. For building a game (or other software) in which two things happen at very different and independent pacing … Read more
Problem Definition Consider a 2D tile-based game with a side-view perspective. In my case, that game is about worker assignments: The player places tasks anywhere on the map, workers look for reachable tasks to work on. This makes for an interesting pathfinding problem: During a single simulation frame (“tick”), we may need to compute hundreds … Read more
I was looking for an excuse to get my hands dirty with NVidia CUDA. Turns out, its not that hard to wrap your head around if you know some C++ and parallel programming. Thanks to RustaCUDA, it can also be nicely used from Rust (because, why not?). In this little exercise I will implement a … Read more
If you excuse the clickbaity title in this post I would like to introduce a few different perspectives on what Entity Component Systems (ECS) actually are. I will start with the more usual definitions and by the end of the article discuss how its approaches to encapsulation and abstraction in comparison to Object Oriented Programming … Read more
(Safe) rust is known for its rigorous enforcement of borrowing rules: Any piece of memory is always owned by exactly one scope (that is responsible for freeing its memory at some point) and can in addition be in use by either a single scope that is allowed to modify it (mutable borrow) OR by arbitrary … Read more
I’m a huge fan of the Bevy Engine for developing games in rust. Recently, I came across an unstable rust feature that I find utterly fascinating and that can make certain Bevy code much more ergonomic: Arbitrary Self Types. This post assumes basic knowledge about the Bevy ECS and that you do not shy away … Read more
In the previous post on the topic we looked into how to combine ingredients such that they fulfill various (linear) nutritional (lower- and upper-) bounds while optimizing some (linear) objective function such as total cost of the ingredients. We have seen that Linear Programs are a great way to describe these sorts of problems and … Read more
Optimize your own Dog Food In this post we’ll look into how to make your own dog food, seen as an optimization problem. I’ll give a short background intro into this way of feeding your dog (called BARF), which I’m by no means an expert in. What you thus can not expect from this article … Read more
We consider an issue that appears frequently in game development and simulation projects: We have many moving points in a 2d world and need to find out which points are in range of which other points. We’ll call this the “range query problem” here (even though that is a bit imprecise). This has several applications: … Read more
