While at FOSDEM at the beginning of Feburary 2020 I gave a talk about some of the work that some of my PhD students and I have been doing using Domain Specfic Languages (DSLs) in the design of Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs). The project is called Muses and this is a link to the slides for the talk. This blog is not about that work!
On returning from FOSDEM I was talking to my son, currently going by the name Bob 1, and he asked what I'd been doing when in Brussels. Well on the journey back on the Eurostar I'd been watching a Catherine West's RustConf'18 keynote Using Rust for Game Development and so I started to talk about that and how I wanted to write a game. In fact what I was really interested at this point was learning more about Entity Control Systems (ECS), but that was beside the point.
So after some discussion we decided that I would implement a clone of original space invaders and Bob 1 would be my tester. I would implement this completly in Rust using minimnal number of existing crates, in particular I would implement my own ECS, no using exiting Rust packages, such as Specs. The results of some late night working can be found here.
While it was fun writing my own mini ECS, sprite and animation libraries, I knew that it was unlikely the next game project would be using my own game engine. For most part this was not because don't want to write a game engine, I do, but more I was interested in seeing what was out there already in Rust, and learning more about how experienced game developers utilise Rust.
So the burning question as we entered lockdown in the UK, other than worrying about family, friends, and students was, which of the many exciting Rust projects should I begin looking at? Rust's community is amazing and this is no less true for game development. In particular, I started out looking through the pages of Are We Game Yet?, a great resource for all things games in Rust. I was aware of many of the existing crates, particularly when it comes to rendering.
pub type IndexType = u16; #[derive(Debug, Default)] pub struct VertexType { pub position: [f32; 2], pub colour: [f32; 4], } /// Component for the triangles we wish to draw to the screen #[derive(Debug, Default)] pub struct Mesh { pub vertices: Vec<VertexType>, pub indices: Vec<IndexType>, }