> You can't even achieve PS2-era graphics with Rust right now.
Don't you have access to Vulkan from Rust? So you should be able to do whatever you want, same as doing it in any other language I assume that can plug into it.
Haven't looked into it, but I think there were a bunch of projects for Vulkan bindings for Rust. Not sure how much harder it's to use that vs using it from C++.
So ambient uses WebGPU, which on rust usually means the wgpu library, which has a vulkan backend for platforms that support vulkan. It's possible that's what you're thinking of.
The issue is that vulkan is really low level. So while it's possible to do whatever you want, you need tooling to make it worth the effort to do in rust. For example, let's say this morph thing is a click and drag difficulty level operation in Unreal engine, but in ambient there's no specific tool for it so you have to write 10K lines of code to do the same thing. In this case, the issue isn't what's possible through the gpu, but rather how much work a developer has to do.
If you have to choose between writing big portions of code to do what other engines nice you for free vs. spending that time on your game, many developers will opt for the more mature engine.
(I say this as someone who is not a game developer, I've never used Unreal engine, and I have no idea what this morph operation is, but this is the shape of the issue at play here)
This sounds to me like an engine issue, it has nothing to do with it being in Rust. Same can apply to engine in any language. I.e. whether it provides certain features for you or not and you need to implement them yourself.
This is a massive amount of work before animators can make any use of it. Teams or indie devs that want to use modern animation in their games can't make use of Bevy/Fyrox(/Ambient?) until they develop these tools, which may take years at this rate.
Tickets for more modern animation have been filed in both projects for quite some time, but they lack the staffing and engineering headcount to work on it.
These engines are in a place where they can do rigid bone animation, but that's it. No faces, no breathing, no talking. You can hack your way forward with bones, but it's not as good and it's hard to build/maintain.
I'm doing my part by donating to many of the engineers building these systems in Rust, but I can't expend extra engineering help from myself or my team - we're too busy building things, and sadly I'll probably have to start launching web-facing stuff with Godot due to its incredible maturity. Our entire stack is almost entirely Rust, so it's a bit sad for us.
Don't you have access to Vulkan from Rust? So you should be able to do whatever you want, same as doing it in any other language I assume that can plug into it.