Design Safety and Goals

Safety

One of the main goals in the development of the engine is to provide a high level of safety. What does this mean? In short: protection from memory-safety related bugs. This does not include any logic errors, but when your game is free of random crashes due to memory unsafety it is much easier to fix logic bugs, because you don't have to think about potentially corrupted memory.

Safety also dictates the architectural design decisions of your game. The typical callback hell, that is possible to do in many other languages, is very tedious to implement in Rust. It is possible, but it requires quite a lot of manual work which quickly tells you that you're doing it wrong.

Performance

Game engines are usually built using system-level programming languages, which provide peak performance levels. I3M is not an exception. One of its design goals is to provide high levels of performance by default, leaving an opportunity for adding custom solutions for performance-critical places.

Ease of use

Another very important part is that the engine should be friendly to newcomers. It should lower the entry threshold, not make it worse. I3M uses well known and battle-tested concepts, thus making it easier to make games with it. On the other hand, it can still be extended with anything you need - it tries to be as good for veterans of the game industry as it is for newcomers.

Battle-tested

I3M has large projects built on it, which helps with understanding the real needs of a general-purpose game engine. It also helps reveal weak spots in the design and fix them.