Building Fyrox: A Rust Game Engine (with Dmitry Stepanov)

To kick off 2025 we’re looking at Fyrox a game engine built in Rust, largely by one person - Dmitry Stepanov. For an individual project, it’s covered an incredible amount of ground, covering the rendering and animation features you’d expect from a game engine, with some features that might surprise you - like Rust scripting support with hot-reloading. As we dive into Fyrox, Dmitry explains what it takes to build a game engine, why he chose Rust (and why he’s happy with the choice), and how one person can hope to build a project of that size. – Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices Support Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/join Fyrox Homepage: https://fyrox.rs/ The Fyrox Book: https://fyrox-book.github.io/ Rapier Physics Engine: https://rapier.rs/ The Mine (on Steam): https://store.steampowered.com/app/898980/The_Mine/ Dmitry’s Engine: https://github.com/mrDIMAS/DmitrysEngine GJK Collision Detection Algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert%E2%80%93Johnson%E2%80%93Keerthi_distance_algorithm WPF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation PICO-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/ Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins – 0:00 Intro 2:12 Why Build A Game Engine? 7:18 Dmitry's Industry Experience 11:19 Why Choose Rust? 15:52 Where Do You Start On A Game Engine? 22:35 Does OO Fit With Rust? 32:37 How Are Components Written? 39:13 Hot-Reloading Rust Code 49:13 Write From Scratch vs. Use A Library 56:24 The Engine's GUI Toolkit 1:02:15 Are UIs Harder Than Rendering? 1:10:25 How Long Did Hot Reloading Take To Get Right? 1:14:37 How Do You Add Reflection To Rust? 1:20:12 Building A Game Engine As A (Mostly) Solo Project 1:22:52 Where's Fyrox Now, Where's It Going? 1:28:05 Writing the Fyrox Book 1:32:40 How Is Fyrox Supported? 1:42:21 Outro