When I started two years ago, I basically had to choose a language and a package/framework, so I'd like to share my experience about it.
First, about the package, there are two major ones for 2D games, which are Ebiten(gine) and Pixel.
I initially chose Pixel, because it seemed more documented at the time and had a bigger community. Overall, it was good as long as the game was simple, but unfortunately I regretted this choice later.
Don't get me wrong, I am not here to discredit the author, because there is a phenomenal amount of open source work that was done, and I am thankful for it.
But as my game grew more complex, the engine started to cause big architectural challenges, memory leaks (it does not correctly garbage collect OpenGL's objects for example), and it's multi-threading model is flawed. I also discovered that it was in fact not maintained. Overall it lacks too much maturity for a serious game.
In the end, I decided to ditch it, because it was easier, and my proposals for help on GitHub never got any answer. It took some effort, but having my own engine based on OpenGL was the best choice in this case.
When it comes to Ebiten, I have only used the sound library called Oto, but overall my opinion of the whole package now is that it is well maintained and architected.
Now when it comes to choosing a language, I hesitated between:
- Go, which I had a lot of experience with and seemed good enough, even if the typing system is a bit too weak
- Rust, which I was (and still is) interested in, but had no experience, and unsure if it was worth it in terms of productivity (because of the additional time spent on worrying code, and the compilation time itself). Also, it didn't have game engines which seemed as mature as in Go at this time (I wish I had known that I would end-up with my own engine).
- C++, which is the industry standard, but on which I have very limited experience. Also, I just didn't want to bother with the header files and the compilation stack.
I chose Go, and too be honest it is a choice that I now regret, but also I have to live with it because I cannot afford a rewrite at this point.
Go certainly had a lot of productivity benefits, but also major flaws when it comes to game development:
- The lack of packages related to data structures. In games, we need a lot of specific sets, trees, queues, tries and maps, but those are almost non existent in Go. The best one is "gods", which still does not support generics. Overall it is always difficult to find quality and experienced packages, even for broadly used and fundamental algorithms.
- The fact that dependency cycles are handled on a package basis, and not per-class or per-file. This is a major source of headaches for video games, because contrarily to web servers, there are not a limited number of predefined layers: everything needs to depend on almost everything else, and Go makes it even worse in this case.
- The lack of data structures is made even worse by the native map, because it forcefully randomizes the iteration order, which causes a lot of bugs and makes it unusable 90% of the time. The authors wanted to prevent people from using it as if the key order was guaranteed, but their fix also broke the natural consistency of iteration order. This means for example that the drawing order of objects is different every frame, even when the data didn't change at all.
- When it comes to modding, there are not much options, because Go does not have a very easy or natural compatibility with FFI (cgo is awkward to use, and not really usable with dynamic linking), the native plugin package is experimental (and not even working in windows), and the support for WebAssembly is still quite poor (but getting better).
Your game looks great, congrats on your progress! I especially enjoyed how the zoom works when you're leaving/arrive planets, and the unique propulsion system (also, the anchor made me giggle!).
> lack of data structure packages
I tend to not need many, so I'd be curious if you can recall any structure in particular which you couldn't find? No biggie if not.
> package structure not suited for games
I'm not a game dev, but I've seen some larger games such as https://github.com/divVerent/aaaaxy/tree/main/internal (if you haven't played it before—do it!) which seems to be able to place everything into separate packages without issue, so perhaps there's something to gleam from their architecture?
> maps are random when iterated
Hash map iteration shouldn't be sorted in _any_ language (here's Rust, for example https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio... (Python makes it _appear_ as if dicts are sorted hash maps, but that's only because it doesn't only use a hash table, but a vector as well (same as you'd have to do in Go))), otherwise it would cause both portability and security (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/2630) issues. You should probably be using a b-tree if you aren't willing to sort it yourself.
I'd _highly_ recommend Ebitengine in the future, as not only have there been multiple brilliant games using it, but it also has Switch/Android/iOS support, and you can find help with any issue whatsoever in their Discord. People have even built 3D games with it, and Hajime is an absolute beast of a developer.
> Your game looks great, congrats on your progress! I especially enjoyed how the zoom works when you're leaving/arrive planets, and the unique propulsion system (also, the anchor made me giggle!).
Thank you. Feedbacks are very much appreciated. There is still a long was until an eventual release, but it's very fun to work on it.
> I tend to not need many, so I'd be curious if you can recall any structure in particular which you couldn't find? No biggie if not.
I had trouble finding basic structures like sets or linked lists, as much as more specific ones like R-tree, M-tree, KD-tree quad-tree or specific kinds of tries.
When quickly searching on Google, there are pretty much always some results, but when looking at the details it's not that great. Most of the packages have some kind of flaw that was a deal-breaker for me. Most common ones are:
- The package is something developed by one guy 4 years ago, and has pretty much no stars and is abandoned
- The structure is somehow backed by the native `map`, meaning that it has the same randomized iteration order
- There is some kind of logic to try to handle multi-threading, mixed-up with the data structure's logic. Often with mutexes/locks, thus killing the performance. My game is pretty much only mono-thread, and I just need something simple and that does not care about synchronization.
- The structure is not generic, but only uses `interface{}`
- The structure lacks tests or have unreadable code made of 1-letter variables
> I'm not a game dev, but I've seen some larger games such as https://github.com/divVerent/aaaaxy/tree/main/internal (if you haven't played it before—do it!) which seems to be able to place everything into separate packages without issue, so perhaps there's something to gleam from their architecture?
Thanks for the reference. After looking at it, is seems to me that they are creating really tiny packages made of one or two files. I don't want my codebase to end-up with thousands of 1-file packages, it does not seem very maintainable. I want to keep having packages with clearly defined purposes and domains.
> Hash map iteration shouldn't be sorted in _any_ language (here's Rust, for example https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio... (Python makes it _appear_ as if dicts are sorted hash maps, but that's only because it doesn't only use a hash table, but a vector as well (same as you'd have to do in Go))), otherwise it would cause both portability and security (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/2630) issues. You should probably be using a b-tree if you aren't willing to sort it yourself.
I think that you didn't understand my message (or I didn't explain clearly enough). I do not need the items to be sorted, I need the iteration order to be consistent.
Let's say that I insert A, B and C in a map, then want to iterate on it. I will get an unspecified order, maybe ABC, maybe CBA, maybe BAC, which does not matter to me. However, in any language, this order will be consistent across all future iterations unless the data is changed. This is a natural property of any data structure. So if I got CBA in the first loop, I will also get CBA in the second and third loops.
In golang this is not the case because they actively inserted a random order. It means that even if the data does not change, I may get CBA in the first iteration, but BAC in the second, then ABC... Which created a ton of issues for me.
Yes, I noticed those packages recently. The problem is that there is little data about how reliable and maintainable goloader is going to be on the long term.
As I care about performance and security, I don't want a scripting language, but WASM seems to be a very promising possibility. I have made benchmarks with 2~3 WASM engines in Go, and so far I am not completely convinced about the quality and performance of the available APIs. Also, when compiling Golang to WASM, the native compiler is still abysmally bad and does not have full support for imports, so Tinygo is a must-have.
Anyway, modding is still a long term idea at this point, so hopefully the ecosystem will get more mature within a couple of years.
I am the developer of Astral Divide, which is entirely written in Go: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2597060/Astral_Divide/
When I started two years ago, I basically had to choose a language and a package/framework, so I'd like to share my experience about it.
First, about the package, there are two major ones for 2D games, which are Ebiten(gine) and Pixel.
I initially chose Pixel, because it seemed more documented at the time and had a bigger community. Overall, it was good as long as the game was simple, but unfortunately I regretted this choice later.
Don't get me wrong, I am not here to discredit the author, because there is a phenomenal amount of open source work that was done, and I am thankful for it. But as my game grew more complex, the engine started to cause big architectural challenges, memory leaks (it does not correctly garbage collect OpenGL's objects for example), and it's multi-threading model is flawed. I also discovered that it was in fact not maintained. Overall it lacks too much maturity for a serious game.
In the end, I decided to ditch it, because it was easier, and my proposals for help on GitHub never got any answer. It took some effort, but having my own engine based on OpenGL was the best choice in this case.
When it comes to Ebiten, I have only used the sound library called Oto, but overall my opinion of the whole package now is that it is well maintained and architected.
Now when it comes to choosing a language, I hesitated between:
- Go, which I had a lot of experience with and seemed good enough, even if the typing system is a bit too weak
- Rust, which I was (and still is) interested in, but had no experience, and unsure if it was worth it in terms of productivity (because of the additional time spent on worrying code, and the compilation time itself). Also, it didn't have game engines which seemed as mature as in Go at this time (I wish I had known that I would end-up with my own engine).
- C++, which is the industry standard, but on which I have very limited experience. Also, I just didn't want to bother with the header files and the compilation stack.
I chose Go, and too be honest it is a choice that I now regret, but also I have to live with it because I cannot afford a rewrite at this point.
Go certainly had a lot of productivity benefits, but also major flaws when it comes to game development:
- The lack of packages related to data structures. In games, we need a lot of specific sets, trees, queues, tries and maps, but those are almost non existent in Go. The best one is "gods", which still does not support generics. Overall it is always difficult to find quality and experienced packages, even for broadly used and fundamental algorithms.
- The fact that dependency cycles are handled on a package basis, and not per-class or per-file. This is a major source of headaches for video games, because contrarily to web servers, there are not a limited number of predefined layers: everything needs to depend on almost everything else, and Go makes it even worse in this case.
- The lack of data structures is made even worse by the native map, because it forcefully randomizes the iteration order, which causes a lot of bugs and makes it unusable 90% of the time. The authors wanted to prevent people from using it as if the key order was guaranteed, but their fix also broke the natural consistency of iteration order. This means for example that the drawing order of objects is different every frame, even when the data didn't change at all.
- When it comes to modding, there are not much options, because Go does not have a very easy or natural compatibility with FFI (cgo is awkward to use, and not really usable with dynamic linking), the native plugin package is experimental (and not even working in windows), and the support for WebAssembly is still quite poor (but getting better).