Bevy Rand

What is Bevy Rand?

Bevy Rand is a plugin to provide integration of rand ecosystem PRNGs in an ECS friendly way. It provides a set of wrapper component and resource types that allow for safe access to a PRNG for generating random numbers, giving features like reflection, serialization for free. And with these types, it becomes possible to have determinism with the usage of these integrated PRNGs in ways that work with multi-threading and also avoid pitfalls such as unstable query iteration order.

Using Bevy Rand

There's now a tutorial, go to here if you want a more comprehensive rundown of how to use bevy_rand.

Usage of Bevy Rand can range from very simple to quite complex use-cases, all depending on whether one cares about deterministic output or not. First, add bevy_rand, and either rand_core or rand to your Cargo.toml to bring in both the components and the PRNGs you want to use, along with the various traits needed to use the RNGs. To select a given algorithm type with bevy_rand, enable the feature representing the algorithm rand_* crate you want to use. This will then give you access to the PRNG structs via the prelude. Alternatively, you can use bevy_prng directly to get the newtyped structs with the same feature flags. However, using the algorithm crates like rand_chacha directly will not work as these don't implement the necessary traits to support bevy's reflection.

All supported PRNGs and compatible structs are provided by the bevy_prng crate. Simply activate the relevant features in bevy_rand/bevy_prng to pull in the PRNG algorithm you want to use, and then import them like so:

bevy_rand feature activation

rand_core = "0.6"
bevy_rand = { version = "0.8", features = ["rand_chacha", "wyrand"] }

bevy_prng feature activation

rand_core = "0.6"
bevy_rand = "0.8"
bevy_prng = { version = "0.8", features = ["rand_chacha", "wyrand"] }

The summary of what RNG algorithm to choose is: pick wyrand for almost all cases as it is faster and more portable than other algorithms. For cases where you need the extra assurance of entropy quality (as in, better and much less predictable 'randomness', etc), then use rand_chacha. For more information, go here.

DO NOT use bevy_rand for actual security purposes, as this requires much more careful consideration and properly vetted crates designed for cryptography. A good starting point would be to look at RustCrypto and go from there.

Registering a PRNG for use with Bevy Rand

Before a PRNG can be used via GlobalEntropy or EntropyComponent, it must be registered via the plugin.

use bevy_ecs::prelude::*;
use bevy_app::App;
use bevy_prng::WyRand;
use bevy_rand::prelude::EntropyPlugin;
use rand_core::RngCore;

fn example_main() {
    App::new()
        .add_plugins(EntropyPlugin::<WyRand>::default())
        .run();
}

Basic Usage

At the simplest case, using GlobalEntropy directly for all random number generation, though this does limit how well systems using GlobalEntropy can be parallelised. All systems that access GlobalEntropy will run serially to each other.

use bevy_ecs::prelude::ResMut;
use bevy_prng::WyRand;
use bevy_rand::prelude::GlobalEntropy;
use rand_core::RngCore;

fn print_random_value(mut rng: ResMut<GlobalEntropy<WyRand>>) {
    println!("Random value: {}", rng.next_u32());
}

Forking RNGs

For seeding EntropyComponents from a global source, it is best to make use of forking instead of generating the seed value directly. GlobalEntropy can only exist as a singular instance, so when forking normally, it will always fork as EntropyComponent instances.

use bevy_ecs::prelude::*;
use bevy_prng::WyRand;
use bevy_rand::prelude::{GlobalEntropy, ForkableRng};

#[derive(Component)]
struct Source;

fn setup_source(mut commands: Commands, mut global: ResMut<GlobalEntropy<WyRand>>) {
    commands
        .spawn((
            Source,
            global.fork_rng(),
        ));
}

EntropyComponents can be seeded/forked from other EntropyComponents as well.

use bevy_ecs::prelude::*;
use bevy_prng::WyRand;
use bevy_rand::prelude::{EntropyComponent, ForkableRng};

#[derive(Component)]
struct Npc;

#[derive(Component)]
struct Source;

fn setup_npc_from_source(
   mut commands: Commands,
   mut q_source: Query<&mut EntropyComponent<WyRand>, (With<Source>, Without<Npc>)>,
) {
   let mut source = q_source.single_mut();
   for _ in 0..2 {
       commands
           .spawn((
               Npc,
               source.fork_rng()
           ));
   }
}

Features

• thread_local_entropy - Enables ThreadLocalEntropy, overriding SeedableRng::from_entropy implementations to make use of thread local entropy sources for faster PRNG initialisation. Enabled by default.
• serialize - Enables Serialize and Deserialize derives. Enabled by default.
• rand_chacha - This enables the exporting of newtyped ChaCha*Rng structs, for those that want/need to use a CSPRNG level source.
• rand_pcg - This enables the exporting of newtyped Pcg* structs from rand_pcg.
• rand_xoshiro - This enables the exporting of newtyped Xoshiro* structs from rand_xoshiro. It also exports a remote-reflected version of Seed512 so to allow setting up Xoshiro512StarStar and so forth.
• wyrand - This enables the exporting of newtyped WyRand from wyrand, the same algorithm in use within fastrand/turborand.
• experimental - This enables any unstable/experimental features for bevy_rand. Currently, this will expose utilities for making use of observers for reseeding sources.

Supported Versions & MSRV

bevy_rand uses the same MSRV as bevy.

The versions of rand_core/rand that bevy_rand is compatible with is as follows:

Migrations

Notes on migrating between versions can be found here.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.