cosmic engine, the c++ -> c# game engine source port i've been working on for about half a year now, has been powered by, and practically built around, the veldrid cross-platform graphics library. unfortunately i've just learned that as of two weeks ago, the maintainer has stated he can no longer publicly update the library (coinciding with him announcing a move to a new job 🤔)
so this places cosmic in a tough situation right now. seeing as i can no longer trust that the library will be publicly updated alongside .net tooling, i feel like i'm now forced to do a big rewrite of the engine one way or another...
i see three options:
- just get rid of "biased" api-agnostic graphics support. the renderer will be opengl only and be much simpler code-wise, but won't be able to take advantage of the speed of running through directx on windows/metal on macos
- try to find a similar cross-platform graphics solution for .net. veldrid was the only .net library that felt like it was explicitly designed to take advantage of the language and environment. other c/c++-based libraries (bgfx, sokol, et al) could suffice but i don't know how good existing bindings are
- move the engine to another language. it would take a lot of time and effort, but i already did it once for this engine (that's what makes it a source port after all), and i wouldn't be afraid to do it again if it came to it. i've been tempted to learn rust, so this could be the gateway to that at least
