Dexterous Developer

An experimental hot reload system for the bevy game engine. Inspired by DGriffin91's Ridiculous bevy hot reloading - adding the ability to re-load arbitrary systems, and the ability to transform resource/component structures over time.

Fuller documentation is available at: https://lee-orr.github.io/dexterous_developer/

Features

• Define the reloadable areas of your game explicitly - which can include systems, components and resources (w/ some limitations)
• Reset resources to a default or pre-determined value upon reload
• Serialize/deserialize your reloadable resources & components, allowing you to evolve their schemas so long as they are compatible with the de-serializer (using rmp_serde)
• Mark entities to get removed on hot reload
• Run systems after hot-reload
• Create functions to set-up & tear down upon either entering/exiting a state or on hot reload
• Only includes any hot reload capacity in your build when you explicitly enable it - such as by using the CLI launcher
• Cross-platform/cross-device hot reload - run a "hot reload server" on a development environment, and execute the application elsewhere. For best results, the dev environment should be a linux device or a linux-based development container, but it can be configured to work directly on windows or mac as well - albiet less reliably. Support for cross-compilation directly on windows/mac is not a priority, since those can always be set up to host a docker-in-docker environment with linux, which is confirmed to work.

Known issues

• Won't work on mobile or WASM
• events and states still need to be pre-defined

Installation

Grab the CLI by running: cargo install dexterous_developer_cli.

You'll be able to run the dexterous verion of your code by running dexterous_developer_cli run in your terminal.

In your Cargo.toml add the following:

```toml [lib] name = "libTHENAMEOFYOUR_GAME" path = "src/lib.rs" crate-type = ["rlib", "dylib"]

[dependencies] bevy = "0.11" dexterous_developer = "0.0.9" serde = "1" # If you want the serialization capacities ```

If your game is not a library yet, move all your main logic to lib.rs rather than main.rs. Then, in your main.rs - call the bevy_main function:

```rust fn main() { libNAMEOFYOURGAME::bevy_main(); }

```

and in your lib.rs, your main function should become:

```rust

[hotbevymain]

pub fn bevymain(initialplugins: impl InitialPlugins) { App::new() .addplugins(initialplugins.initialize::()) // You can use either DefaultPlugins or MinimnalPlugins here, and use "set" on this as you would with them // Here you can do what you'd normally do with app // ... and so on } ```

If you have a plugin where you want to add reloadable elements, add the following in the file defining the plugin:

```rust

impl Plugin for MyPlugin { fn build(&self, app: &mut App) { app .setupreloadableelements::(); } }

[dexterousdevelopersetup]

fn reloadable(app: &mut ReloadableAppContents) { app .addsystems(Update, thissystemwillreload); }

```