Bevy 0.19 brings next-gen scenes, faster rendering, contact shadows & new feathers widgets

Bevy 0.19 has been released as the latest version of this simple, open source data-driven game engine built in Rust, bringing a ton of new features, bug fixes, and quality of life tweaks. This release introduces a major upgrade to the scene system with the arrival of Bevy Scene Notation (BSN). Developers can now define scenes more ergonomically in code with the bsn! macro, and future releases will support asset-based scene definitions. The new system is composable, patchable, and aware of dependencies, removing the need to manually manage all Entity Component System (ECS) and asset dependencies for scene spawning.

Building on these core improvements, this release further enhances rendering performance by offloading additional tasks to the GPU and applying renderer optimizations. As a result, Bevy can efficiently draw larger and more complex scenes. Alongside these changes, contact shadow support dramatically improves shadow detail over previous releases, achieving more visually polished results without relying on resource-intensive ray tracing techniques.

Following the scene system and rendering updates, Bevy now includes an expanded editor widget collection ported to BSN, providing a richer toolset for developers. The user interface gains upstream support for text input, enabled by the new EditableText component. Developers also benefit from improved text rendering, an official app settings framework integrated with Entity Component System resources, and new post-processing effects like vignette and lens distortion. In addition, skinned mesh culling now accounts for mesh animations, optimizing rendering for animated characters and objects.