🪴 A quantum garden

Setting up Bevy

2 min read

Game development is something I have always found fascinating. After all, it combines several completely distinct skills such as programming, art and music to create a (hopefully fun) interactive experience.

Since I like to challenge myself, I decided to setup a quick development environment using a new interesting game engine called Bevy.

The specifics about Bevy are out of scope for this post, but I want to share how I setup a quick development environment.

Of course, Nix-style.

Setting up a development flake

As always, the first step is to setup a development flake. I decided to start from this rust template.

So let’s start

mkdir bevy_game
cd bevy_game
nix flake init --template "github:nulladmin1/nix-flake-templates#rust-fenix-naersk"

This should setup the following structure, as shown from the README.

📦 bevy_game
├─ 🔒 Cargo.lock
├─ ⚙️ Cargo.toml
├─ 🔒 flake.lock
├─ ⚙️ flake.nix
├─ 📁 src
│  ├─ 🦀 main.rs
├─ 📃 README.md

So good so far!

Let’s enter the development shell using nix develop and add bevy to our dependencies.

nix develop
cargo add bevy

This might take a while, but after it is done we should have an environment setup for this. Let’s try compiling the current project and running it.

cargo run

Whoops something went wrong. If we look in the Setup section of the Bevy website, you’ll see that some build dependencies are needed.

I ended up adding the following in the default shell.

...
default = pkgsFor.${system}.mkShell rec {
    nativeBuildInputs = with (pkgsFor.${system}); [
    pkg-config
    ];
    buildInputs =with pkgsFor.${system};  [
    udev alsa-lib vulkan-loader
    xorg.libX11 xorg.libXcursor xorg.libXi xorg.libXrandr # To use the x11 feature
    libxkbcommon wayland # To use the wayland feature
    ];
    LD_LIBRARY_PATH = pkgsFor.${system}.lib.makeLibraryPath buildInputs;
...

Let’s try to run and compile it.

cargo run

This should compile and output a Hello, World! to our terminal. Great!

However this is quite slow… Let’s add dynamic linking to speed up compile times. We’ll add justfile for ease of development.

touch justfile

We’ll make a default command for running bevy with dynamic linking.

run:
    cargo run --features bevy/dynamic_linking

Now we can just call just run, and it should compile and execute!

Issues with drivers on Intel Graphics

Seems like bevy is not working properly with his setup. I looked into nixGL as a way to link the Vulkan drivers, but something must be off in this installation. :(

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