Bevy 0.17 adds raytraced lighting, improved observers & events, headless UI widgets & more

Bevy 0.17 is now available as the latest release of this open source Rust-based, data-driven game engine. This update introduces experimental support for physically realistic real-time lighting, though current limitations apply. Developer workflows improve with cleaned-up Observer and Event APIs, as well as a streamlined process that no longer requires manual type registration for reflection.

Building on usability, Bevy now provides a work-in-progress headless UI widget library, alongside an opinionated set of tooling-focused widgets and a built-in frame time debugging widget. Bevy UI also supports background and border gradients, enhancing design options.

For rendering, this release brings several advances: the engine now supports Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for antialiasing and upscaling on Nvidia RTX GPUs, allows artistic modulation of light intensity using textures, adds more accurate atmosphere lighting through raymarching, and delivers improved performance in the virtual geometry system using bounding volume hierarchy culling. Tilemap rendering also benefits from a new chunk-based method, setting the stage for further expansion of Bevy's built-in tilemap features.

Following these updates, developers gain initial integration of Dioxus subsecond for limited hotreloading of Rust code, plus the ability to load assets from HTTP and HTTPS sources. Numerous other enhancements and bug fixes are included in this release, with more details in the official release notes.