Ebiten in 2020

Hajime Hoshi
2020-12-15

It's been 7 years since I started to develop Ebiten. This article is a retrospective of Ebiten in 2020.

Sponsors

These people sponsored me in between December 2019 and November 2020. I can't thank you enough!

(In the order of total sponsoring amounts)

Contributors

These people contributed to Ebiten in between December 2019 and November 2020. I appreciate all the contributions!

(In the order of total commits)

Events

Summary

• The most significant change in Ebiten is introducing a Go-flavored shading language. I hope this would be used more in actual applications.
• The second most significant change in Ebiten is updating the major version to v2. This was the first trial, but apparently worked well. v3 will be released in about 5 years.
• I have been working on supporting consoles. An actual output will be shown in 2021.
• Compared with the last year, the number of applications with Ebiten has been increased. I am very grateful with that. I picked up some of them in this article.

December, 2019

January

• I've finished supporting Go modules for Gomobile. Gomobile is a very essential product for Ebiten, and supporting Go modules is necessary for Ebiten v2.

February

• I was doing an experiment to run the Go toolchains as WebAssembly. The output is in the project Asobiba.

March

• Started to develop go2dotnet. This is a tool to convert from Go to C# so that an Ebiten game work on MonoGame. With this, I planned to make Ebiten games work on consoles. Actually I've succeeded to make an Ebiten game work on MonoGame, but the output C# was too big to convert into C++ for consoles, then I abandoned this project. Instead, I started to develop go2cpp based on my experience of go2dotnet later.

April

May

• Started to develop go2cpp. This tool converts Go to C++. The purpose is to make Ebiten games works on consoles.

June

• Introduced a breaking change to make Ebiten faster.

July

August

September

October

package main

// Uniform variables.
var Time float
var Cursor vec2
var ScreenSize vec2

// Fragment is the entry point of the fragment shader.
// Fragment returns the color value for the current position.
func Fragment(position vec4, texCoord vec2, color vec4) vec4 {
	// You can define variables with a short variable declaration like Go.
	lightpos := vec3(Cursor, 50)
	lightdir := normalize(lightpos - position.xyz)
	normal := normalize(imageSrc1UnsafeAt(texCoord) - 0.5)
	ambient := 0.25
	diffuse := 0.75 * max(0.0, dot(normal.xyz, lightdir))

	// You can treat multiple source images by
	// imageSrc[N]At or imageSrc[N]UnsafeAt.
	return imageSrc0UnsafeAt(texCoord) * (ambient + diffuse)
}

November

December

• I'm now working on supporting consoles, especially Nintendo Switch. Stay tuned!

Ebiten in 2021 and after

• The highest priority task is supporting consoles, especially Nintendo Switch (Issue 744). I believe this can be done with go2cpp. Due to NDA, I cannot make the work open, but I'd like to release an Ebiten game for Nintendo Switch some day.
• The other thing I am interested in is supporting UI (Issue 1029). I think that supporting a native text input would be useful.