Unreal Rust

TL;DR unreal-rust allows you to write games with Unreal Engine in Rust.

unreal-rust is an opinionated Rust integration for Unreal. Rust cares about ownership, mutability and lifetimes. Mapping Unreal concepts to Rust 1 to 1 would only cause a headache. Instead unreal-rust will be written on top of the Unreal AActor and expose its API in a Rust friendly way.

The first big change is that unreal-rust will use an Entity Component System (ECS). For unreal-rust I decided to use bevy instead of rolling my own. I am just a single developer and I have to pick my battles. Writing and maintaining an ECS would distract me from doing actual work. The folks at bevy have done a wonderful job of making the ECS user friendly :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:.

I want to deeply integrate Rust into Unreal and everything should be accessible. You can add Rust Components to AActor in the editor. For example you can add a CharacterConfigComponent to the PlayerActor, which you can then access from within Rust. This allows to configure your character from Unreal without needing to touch any code. Additionally you can access Rust Components from within Blueprint. This allows you to drive Animation blueprints, or pass data into your UI.

Rust communicates with Unreal through C FFI. Its a bit out of scope for this blog post but I did a small write up to explain how it works in the unreal rust wiki.

Read in full here:

https://maikklein.github.io/unreal-rust-1/

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