Amethyst

What is Amethyst?

Amethyst is a data-driven and data-oriented game engine aiming to be fast and as configurable as possible.

Principles

These principles are what make Amethyst unique and competitive in the world of game engines.

• Massively parallel architecture.
• Powered by a correct Entity Component System model.
• Rapid prototyping with RON files for prefabs and an abstract scripting API.
• Strong focus on encouraging reusability and clean interfaces.

Why Amethyst?

Extreme Multithreading

Amethyst is based over a very powerful parallel ECS called Specs. This allows games built with Amethyst to maximize the processing power usage to make it run as smooth and as fast as possible, without the headache of multithread programming.

Clean

By design, the amethyst engine encourages you to write clean and reusable code for your behaviours and data structures, allowing engine users to easily share useful components, thus reducing development time and cost.

Using the ECS architecture, the code of games can be cleanly divided between data and behaviour, making it easy to understand what is going on, even if the game is running on a massive 64 cores processor.

Community

While we may not be feature-packed (yet!), we all strongly believe that the community-oriented side of amethyst will thrive as we move forward!

Features

Please visit the features page for a list of features Amethyst provides.

Navigation

• Link to the book (latest release)
• Link to the book (master)
• Link to the examples (latest release)
• Link to the examples (master)

Usage

While the engine can be hard to use at times, we made a lot of documentation that will teach you everything you need to use Amethyst comfortably!

If you don't understand a part of the documentation, please let us know. Join us on Discord or open an issue, we are always happy to help!

Getting started

To compile any of the examples run:

$ cargo run --example name_of_example

All available examples are listed under examples.

Our most advanced example is currently called pong. It is a pong game, as you may have guessed it.

$ cargo run --example pong

There are quite a few prototype games that were made with Amethyst. A list will be available soon. While we create this list, feel free to join our discord and ask about which projects are currently being made with Amethyst.

For a full-blown "Hello World" tutorial check out the Getting Started chapter in the book.

Dependencies

If you are compiling on Linux make sure to install the dependencies below.

Additionally, make sure you have EGL installed. Since the package depends on your drivers, we cannot list it here.

Debian/Ubuntu

$ sudo apt install libasound2-dev libx11-xcb-dev libssl-dev cmake libfreetype6-dev libexpat1-dev libxcb1-dev

Fedora

$ sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel openssl-devel cmake freetype-devel expat-devel libxcb-devel

Other

See your distribution specific installation process for the equivalent dependencies.

Please note that you need to have a functionnal graphics driver installed. If you get a panic about the renderer unable to create the context when trying to run an example, faulty driver installation can be the issue.

Building Documentation

You can build the book locally with:

$ cargo install mdbook
$ mdbook build book

If you're actively editing the documentation, it's easiest to run:

$ mdbook serve book

and go to http://localhost:3000. For more information, see the mdBook project.

The text can be found in book/html/index.html. To generate the API documentation locally, do:

$ cargo doc

The API reference can be found in target/doc/amethyst/index.html.

Questions / Help

We do not support anything other than the most recent Rust stable release. Use nightly and beta channels with this project at your own risk.

Please check out the FAQ before asking.

If you have a question, feel free to ask on our Discord server and we'll help you.

Other places you may want to check out are r/rust_gamedev and #rust-gamedev IRC.

Contributing

We are a community project that welcomes contributions from anyone.

If you're interested in helping out, please read the contribution guidelines file before getting started.

We have a good first issue category that groups all issues or feature request that can be made without having an extensive knowledge of rust or amethyst. Working on those issues is a good, if not the best way to learn.

If you think you are not ready to code yet, you can still contribute by reviewing code written by other members of the community. In fact, code reviews ensures that the code that gets added to amethyst is of the highest quality as possible. Pull requests available for reviews are here.

If for some reason we don't have any open PR or good first issues (that would be a good thing), you can look through the issue tracker.

License

Amethyst is free and open source software distributed under the terms of both the MIT License and the Apache License 2.0.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.