Peacock

Peacock is a game engine for making beautiful games.

🚧 UNDER CONSTRUCTION 🚧

Peacock is still very much a work-in-progress. You're welcome to use it and report any issues you find, but I make no promises about stability or supporting your specific use cases until we hit 1.0.0.

Installation

To install Peacock, add the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
peacock = "0.0.1"

If you're like me and enjoy living on the bleeding edge, you can use a git dependency:

[dependencies]
peacock = { git = "https://github.com/maxdeviant/peacock" }

Since we're still in the early days, I would suggest opting for the git dependency.

Dependencies

Peacock is built on top of SDL2, so you will need to install the SDL2 libraries for your platform.

Nix/NixOS

nix-shell

Debian/Ubuntu

If you're running a Debian or Ubuntu-based Linux distribution you can (most likely) do the following:

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev

macOS

brew install sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_ttf

For other platforms check out the rust-sdl2 docs.

Usage

use peacock::graphics::{self, Color};
use peacock::{Context, ContextBuilder, Result, State};

struct GameState;

impl State for GameState {
    fn update(&mut self, ctx: &mut Context) -> Result<()> {
        Ok(())
    }

    fn draw(&mut self, ctx: &mut Context, dt: f64) -> Result<()> {
        Ok(())
    }
}

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    ContextBuilder::new("Hello, world!", 800, 600)
        .build()?
        .run(&mut GameState)
}

Examples

Check out the examples directory for more in-depth examples.

Motivation

Fig 1: The state of Rust game engines.

With the abundance of 2D game engines for Rust it does seem a little silly that I would add yet another one into the mix, so I'll do my best to explain my motivations for writing Peacock.

Up until recently I was using ggez for my games, but it got to the point where it was pretty frustrating to work with. The 0.4.0 branch had a lot of shortcomings, bugs, and APIs that were on the chopping block. This led me to switch to the devel branch, which cleaned up some stuff, but in turn had issues of its own. Now, in light of The State of GGEZ 2019, I figured it would be a good time to search for greener pastures.

Tetra was the next engine to catch my eye, and at a glance it makes a lot of the same decisions I would for an engine. But having just come off ggez I found it hard to sell myself on an even more immature engine. Even the thought of getting in at the ground-floor and contributing to Tetra didn't quite appeal to me either.

This got me thinking about what it is that I really want in a Rust game engine. After some thought, I think what it really comes down to is control. I want to be able to build games the way I want to without worrying about hitching my cart to an engine that goes down a direction that doesn't align with my goals.

Goals

• Safety
  • We're using Rust, so we want things to be safe
  • Some of our libraries make this difficult:
    • SDL2's C bindings are unsafe
    • Peacock doesn't directly depend on it (yet), but in userland specs likes to panic a lot
• "Batteries Included"
  • Peacock should have everything in it that allows you to get games off the ground fast
  • This may mean including things that aren't generic enough for every game (e.g., input, pathfinding, etc.)
    • We may be able to investigate making things modular here, but we don't want to overdo it and turn into Piston
• Consistent APIs

Non-Goals

Things that I don't care about at this juncture:

• Targeting web and mobile devices
• 3D support

Prior Art

Here are some of the engines that have served as inspiration for Peacock:

• ggez
• Tetra
• luxe
• MonoGame