I think this comment is slightly disingenuous, I think it's more obvious that the aesthetics of any game (let alone engine) will primarily depend on the quality of the Assets. If you loaded up these quake 3-era meshes and textures into Unreal Engine 4 or something else you'd call 'modern', I guarantee you they'd look the same or similar.

The lighting isn't even that bad sans indirect illumination, which unreal only just got recently and Unity is losing due to Enlighten being shut down.

This reminds me of people comparing open source software with proprietary software on account of aesthetics - it's not the licensing model, or the game engine, it's the presence or absence of artists that makes the difference.

Not to mention the low-poly and demake trends.

The visual fidelity of a game is a moot argument and the quality of assets is subjective.

It seems like you're criticising the examples for being less than elaborate and mistaking that for a shortcoming of the engine. It's not some "easy game studio 2020"-type thing that should spit out pretty games with 10 lines of custom code, it's a basic engine that can be built upon.

I question how much of "modern" graphics (IE things you can get a PHD for) is a manifestation of the engine, and how much is a result of the underlying libraries being used, and the fancy shaders being written. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe an engine like this could catch up.

That might be true for the most cutting edge 3D shooters. But nowadays that’s not all that matters. I’m sure this can find a niche.

I'm not talking about shooters. I'm talking about what it looks like. The lighting, specifically.

To be honest I'm not trying to implement "bleeding edge" renderer, it would just take enormous amount of time which can be put into other more important parts (there are plenty of them).

Have you considered collaborating with the author to improve the lighting? I'm sure they wouldn't mind help.

That's something that can be improved.

OK, look at how good of a foundation it is.

It's a single person project. I haven't seen a more advanced rust engine. Adding better rendering isn't too bad once you have some engine architecture.

You’re the one comparing it to Unity, Unreal and Godot. Everyone else is talking about game engines on Rust and how cool it is that this person built it.

You need to look at this as result/time. Godot has been around for six years, the others for much longer. This has been around for a year and again, it's a one person project. What do you expect?

Well, I'm talking from the point of view of a user. Why would I choose this engine over Godot, Unity, Unreal? Just because it's a single-person project?

Who asked you to choose this engine over Godot, Unity or Unreal? And why would others make a choice for you? Such a choice would only be up to you based on your own requirements, nobody else can make that choice.

Also this post is really about showing off an engine made in Rust, a "hack" so to speak. You are in Hacker News where people post (usually technical) things that others might find interesting - but not necessarily useful. Consider we get posts about people writing software for retro computers, just for the fun of it.

I don't know what to tell you. Don't? Why did people care about Godot in 2015 when Unity was around? For the same reason.

With enough time and resources, I wonder if we'll one day see a Rust game engine that can outperform these projects.

Maybe, but you can already use Rust with Godot.

Not the same.

Could this not just be a case of using something on hand / creating them relatively quickly and not a limitation of the engine itself?