I know it’s explicitly a 2D game engine, but I hope they add some support for 3D geometry. They’ve already got their own shader language, could 3D be that big of an additional effort?
Okay, roughly in the same boat here. Every time I'm deep in a project, I start looking wistfully at other 2D game engines and seemingly waste a few days looking through the docs and tutorials for Flutter/Xamarin/Monogame/Unity/Godot/Ggez/Heaps.io/OpenFL etc etc. I'm currently pausing a Solar2D project and guiltily going through the tutorials for Defold.
So, what have you tried and didn't like, and why? Sell me on Ebiten?
Primarily Unity and Godot, some GameMaker/Mono/Unreal.
My gripes:
* Breaking changes between versions.
* Semi-implemented features riddled with bugs, later deprecated by more of the same (see above).
* Obscure editor bugs arbitrarily popping up as project grows (like old NT Windows).
* Dependency on third parties, despite the game engine already doing everything under the sun.
* Drag and drop asset management with the occasional corruption causing complete reimport/setup.
* Proprietary languages, formats and workflows.
* GUI first.
Ebiten is a small, consistent API that solves just about the amount of problems you don't want to worry about. The website is clear and direct, the examples help to demonstrate pretty much everything. Single install, no dependency headaches.
Anecdotally, it's in line with my general experience with most things Go. I spend most of my time programming, instead of fighting against frameworks and runtimes, fixing problems I didn't create.
I've toyed with Ebiten. It's wonderful. Here are some pain points:
- I've had trouble with sub-texture bleeding requiring me to add paddings between my texture atlas. This could probably also be resolved by not having my own texture atlas and loading each texture separatedly but I like my atlas.
- If you like class inheritance to compose hierarchy of objects, Go isn't well suited. This can be good or bad depending on how you like to architecture.
What I love about Ebiten and Go is the fast compilation times which makes the edit-compile-run feedback loop short and sweet.
The author is friendly, accessible and responsive on slack.
I found Ebiten very easy to build a simple project with. The project maintainer is helpful, kind, and highly responsive too.
There is a #ebiten channel in the Gophers slack that is quite active.
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[0] https://healeycodes.com/boids-flocking-simulation/