Man, I was literally at their booth in GDC 25 minutes ago.<p>Truthfully the program they have looks fantastic at empowering UI/UX designers to do more with games.<p>I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the normal flow is that a UI/UX designer will spend days in Figma; give the output to a programmer and the programmer will (often) say that it's impossible to implement for X,Y reason.<p>What follows is a back and forth between the programmer and the designer until eventually a design exists that can be implemented.<p>This is compounded by the fact that there's no <i>good</i> UI framework in Unreal engine, at least not for AAA games.<p>So, while I have not done a feasibility test yet, the workflow of this tool is definitely the best I've seen and seems to integrate seamlessly with Unreal Engine and blueprints.<p>I'm personally really excited, because with this it's possible for a UI/UX designer to work without the aid of a programmer.<p>(also, game programmers tend to hate doing UI).
There's a lot of active research around rendering 2-d vector graphics with GPU tessellation (Raph Levien's work for instance), so this is pretty cool that they're shipping a product with this technique.<p>I've never used Rive so I'm wondering if its strictly for making cool animations or if it can be used for building dynamic UI's (the kind that you might use an immediate mode gui lib for)?
Didn't we already do this experiment with Flash? Macromedia/Adobe made the player free, and charged for tools. In the same way, it seems that Rive wants to open source the player and then charge for the editor. Maybe its a bit different since Rive seems targeted at game devs using other platforms like Unity and Unreal - presumably to embed things like cinematics? But then of course you have this (OSS) player, which implies Rive <i>also</i> wants to own the whole experience. Hence the reference to Flash.<p>It's not really my area, but best of luck to you!
I've been looking forward to this ever since they announced it. Previously they used Skia and their entire app is (and rendering output was) built with Flutter. Now Flutter has a new rendering engine via Impeller which is more optimized than Skia for Flutter specific challenges.<p>When I asked the Impeller team before what they thought of the Rive renderer, they said that it is great for vector graphics but Impeller needs to also deal with all of the UI related rendering challenges like displaying text properly, so they're not a one to one comparison. Hopefully with this renderer being open source now, both teams can learn from each other.
So I love Rive—the product and the company. And I love open source.<p>But this is an MIT license for Rive's rendering abstraction layer, a subset of the Rive runtime that requires the Rive Editor to build content for.<p>I'm just curious about the goals for open sourcing this and what your hope and plan is for the larger community you'd like to build around it. Can you think of perhaps another project that would benefit from adopting just the renderer? Thanks!
This looks extremely cool and I'm excited to use it in my own personal hobby projects.<p>It looks like the somewhat standardised Cairo/Skia/canvas/NanoVG API (moveTo, lineTo, etc.) is provided so should hopefully take not much effort to learn, I'm hoping.<p>(I do see lineTo here at the very least. <a href="https://github.com/rive-app/rive-renderer/blob/main/renderer/pls_path.hpp">https://github.com/rive-app/rive-renderer/blob/main/renderer...</a> )
How does the rendering performance of this compare to something like Skia or Pathfinder? Note that the latter can also optionally do the paths-to-triangles conversion step using GPU compute, if the hardware supports that. There's also Vello for a more comprehensive compute-based approach to 2D rendering.
This is really exciting to see for me personally.<p>I've been pushing over the past six months or so for multiple clients, from healthcare companies with basic mobile apps to deep gaming companies / products, to adopt Rive over Lottie and other past solutions, as I think it's finally hit its stride and is "ready-for-adoption".<p>This was the last piece that came up in some of those discussions as a potential concern (latest renderer being "closed source" / not quite final).<p>Really excited to see this problem space continue to improve thanks to this decision and the work the Rive team is doing in general (drop shadows, blur, etc. are all going to be very exciting as they ship)!
This problem seems to create a continuous stream of software attempting to solve it with no definitive solution.<p>It's kind of strange, because there is a single objectively correct rendering for any vector graphics scene given a pixel sampling function and colorspace metric (the one where each output pixel's value is the closest representable color to the convolution of that function with the scene, expressed as a function from R^2 to R and a linear color scheme respectively), and it seems like it would be achievable with GPU compute and some care with error bounds on either curve tessellation or numerical computation of the exact symbolic integrals of curves.<p>And it also seems easy to make such a solution have a tunable level of approximation to have faster rendering.
It's so insane they don't offer any way to export movie files. The animation IDE is decent. Nowhere near as good as Flash was. But at least let me animate in it and export movie files.<p>It's hilarious how so much new tech is just barely scratching the surface of what Flash offered in terms of a creative production tool. Every passive consumer fixates on Flash the plug-in and has no idea how incredible the tool was.
How feasible is it to build web games with this? I’d like to build something with this treating it like you would Pixi.js, it looks to me like it’d be as performant if not better but with the amazing advantage of having a vector asset pipeline built into the system. Using vector graphics with Pixi, especially when rendering in a web worker, is a pain in the ass.
I like this a lot, but it represents a turning away from desktop technology (as in having a native editor as a desktop app) that just makes me say “no”.
Is there technical documentation to understand the method behind the engine? because at first sight it seems like the classic "path flattening to polygon and then triangulation" that has been used for 20+ years (at Mazatech our first AmanithVG on OpenGL used that technique) but I'm sure there is more than that on Rive renderer ...to be recognized as a such powerful engine.
So does this mean someome can create a free editor I can use for basic animation that I don't have to pay $25 for the rest of my life to use?<p>Edit* $39 per month if you don't pay for an entire year in one go. Wtf haha, anyone actually paying this for basic solo-dev work?
Happy to see this!<p>Would love to see somebody try to re-implement some limited Canvas2D API but using Rive Renderer as a backend. Would likely be faster and more flexible in some ways (e.g. I've found that Canvas2D clipping is not anti-aliased in some browsers).
That's exciting! Congrats on the release.<p>I didn't know about rive but it looks like a better framer / lottie.<p>Especially with an OSS renderer with an eye to performance.<p>I tried out the bevy integration (definitely the best implementation of ECS, anywhere) and there's a working (still unmerged) fork but it's still using vello.<p>Looking forward to see more!
> It isn’t hyperbolic to say what you can do with Rive is about to change in an earth-shattering way.<p>Actually, I think this is exactly what "hyperbolic" means
Looks kinda interesting but I am not gonna touch anything that thinks an acceptable set of drawing tools is "pen and a couple of basic shapes", I quit pulling out every single point by hand in Illustrator a decade ago and my art <i>and</i> my job satisfaction has been much better for it. Finding the right settings for Illustrator's pencil tool (the defaults are absolutely useless) sped up my work by at <i>least</i> one order of magnitude.<p>Using the pen tool for all your shapes is about as efficient as using Photoshop's pencil tool to set every pixel yourself, or writing your entire app in assembly.