I made my first GL project using Piston.

So, I made a Tweet not too long before I made this post, and it was me showing off my first OpenGL project using Piston.

And I attached two images.

One of the target folder, with the program over it:

And the other of the src folder, so you could see how the app was structured:

The point of this post is to talk about how my experience was, and even as someone who just started, would recommend Piston.

So. What was the project I made in Rust?
A game in-development.

I'm working on RuntDeale, a game inspired by (but NOT an AU of) Undertale, an 2.5D RPG bullet-hell game.
What do I have so far? -- I have a white background with a purple square that can be moved using the W, A, S, and D keys.

So far, my experience has been okay.
I've been able to create a window of a variable size and title, have been able to draw a shape to the screen, provide custom colors, and rotate a shape.

Now, how much code does it take to do all that?
With Piston, this much:

                   # Total lines: 234
                   #     Compact: 135
                   #     CptLns:  (12, 28, 2, 11, 1, 27, 54)
                   #
                   # Avg lines:   033
                   #     Compact: 019
src/
  rd_events/
    gameloop.rs    # Lines: 23
    buttons.rs     # Lines: 49
    mod.rs         # Lines: 02

  rd_utils/
    colors.rs      # Lines: 27 (not all lines are required)
    mod.rs         # Lines: 01

  main.rs          # Lines: 39 (some lines are whitespace)
  app.rs           # Lines: 93

So relative to what I've seen before, that's not a lot of code.
Just a few lines for making the window and event register, a fair bit of lines to rendering the the background and drawing the shape at its given X, Y position, and a small bit for detecting the key-presses and updating the X and Y position.

So. Why do I like Piston so far?
It's concise, and it's been (for the most part) straightforward.

Check out their homepage, https://piston.rs, they even show off some great examples of how their library has been used!

• Rust 2048
• Hematite

Thanks for reading.
Cheers.

Comments

[Calin Baenen]

Check out the Piston crate on crates.io: crates.io/crates/piston.