Bones
A 'meta-engine' framework made to facilitate the development of moddable, multiplayer 2D games.
Initially borne out of Jumpy, Bones will eventually be the engine of choice for all Fish Folk games. It is suitable for any other games with similar requirements.
By default Bones is rendered with Bevy, but it is fundamentally engine-agnostic and comes with its own lightweight ECS, asset server and user experience. Bones is officially focused on 2D games and models itself after the likes of Corgi. It can however be used for 3D games as well, if you are willing to create custom rendering integrations.
Overview
Bones ECS
Bones is designed around a simple, custom Entity Component System (ECS), designed to make it easier to get a few features that are important to us:
- Determinism: Bones ECS is deterministic by default, making it easier to get a re-producible and predictable gameplay.
- Snapshot/Restore: The Bones ECS world can be trivially snapshot and restored.
- Modding/Scripting: Bones ECS is built on our
bones_schemasystem, which allows for runtime reflection and the ability to interact with data types defined outside of Rust.
Determinism and Snapshot/Restore are also key features for getting excellent network play with the rollback networking model, while requiring no changes to the core game loop implementation.
Bones Lib
The bones_lib contains the bones_ecs and the bones_asset system. It defines the concept
of a Game which contains all of your game logic and data in a collection of Sessions that
each have their own ECS World.
Bones lib has no rendering components or even math types, it is only concerned with organizing your game logic and assets.
Bones Framework
On top of bones_lib there is the bones_framework, which defines the rendering components and
math types. Right now bones_framework is focused only on 2D rendering. 3D is not a priority for
us now, but there is no technical limitation preventing community developed 3D rendering components
either on top of bones_lib directly or as an extension to the bones_framework.
Bones Bevy Renderer
A game created with only the bones_framework is renderer agnostic, allowing us to create
rendering integrations with other engines. Our official integration is with the [Bevy] engine.
Rendering in the bones_framework is intentionally simple, and some games may need more advanced
features that aren't supported out of the box. Bones, and it's Bevy integration, are designed so
that you can create custom rendering specific to your needs. That means you can still take advantage
of any fancy new Bevy plugins, or maybe use something other than Bevy entirely!
Bones Scripting
bones_ecs is built to be scripted. Effort has also been made to avoid putting unnecessary
performance limitations into the scripting system. Bones comes with an integration with the
piccolo VM to enable Lua scripting out-of-the-box.
This integration allows Lua scripts to access the ECS world in a way very similar to the
Rust API. Rust components and resources can be annotated with #[repr(C)] to enable direct
access by Lua scripts, and if a type cannot be #[repr(C)], you can still manually
create your own Lua bindings for that type.
Allowing both Rust and the scripting language to talk to the same ECS world allows you to easily blend both languages in your game, and have them interact quite easily in many circumstances. If a portion of your game needs extra high performance or low-level access, you can use Rust, but if you want hot reloaded and moddable elements of your game, you can use Lua.
The scripting system is not limited to Lua. Using the simple dynamic API to bones_ecs, you can
create your own integrations to any language or system you desire.
The scripting system is new and work-in-progress, but all of the major things have been successfully implemented, and it is going to be actively used in Jumpy.
Contributing
If you would like to contribute, feel free to reach out on our Discord server to ask questions!
We also use TODO Issue to automatically create issues from all of our TODO comments in code. You can check out the todo issue list to see if there's any thing you'd like to take a hack at.
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