Piston overview

Here is an overview of the Piston architecture. Everything is developed under the MIT license, unless specified otherwise.

Examples/tutorials/getting started

These are places to get started with Piston.

• piston-examples - Small examples
• piston-tutorials - Getting started
• piston wiki - Information for people working on the Piston project
• piston_window - A window wrapper for convenience

Demonstrations

These projects demonstrate the functionality of Piston.

• skeletal_animation_demo - Demonstrates 3D skeletal animation using Gfx
• piston-music - Simple music library using SDL2 and current library
• hematite - Demonstrates 3D voxel rendering (Minecraft)

The Piston core

These libraries model the input, window and event loop. The core does not depend on any platform specific API. It uses a modular design to reduce effects of breaking changes. The reason is to write generic libraries that work across projects, and to make 90% of the ecosystem reusable and platform/API independent.

• pistoncore-input
• pistoncore-window
• pistoncore-event_loop
• piston - reexports core libraries

Utility libraries

These libraries supports the functionality and integration between other libraries. They are small and simple. The reason is to give the user free choice of higher level libraries that overlap in functionality, but keep the integration internally in Piston.

• vecmath
• quaternion
• dual_quaternion
• piston3d-cam
• interpolation
• shader_version
• piston-viewport
• piston-float
• piston-rect - Simple rectangle layout
• piston-texture
• current - "Globals" for prototyping, high level libraries, diagnostics
• table - Dynamical typed Lua-like table structure
• texture_packer - Pack small images together into larger ones
• select_color - Color selection
• read_color - Read hex colors
• read_token - Read tokens using look-ahead
• range - Range addressing
• fps_counter - FPS counter
• find_folder - Find a folder from current directory
• array - Convenience methods for working with arrays
• piston-shaders - Repository for GPU shaders
• piston-history_tree - A persistent history tree for undo/redo

Bindings

These are bindings to C libraries.

• glfw-rs - GLFW3 bindings and idiomatic wrapper for Rust.
• freetype-rs - Safe wrappers for FreeType fonts
• freetype-sys - Low level wrappers for FreeType fonts
• physfs-rs - PhysFS bindings

Standalone libraries

These libraries can be used separately or together with the Piston ecosystem. The reason is to decouple dependencies such that the functionality in these libraries can be reused as much as possible.

• image - Image encoding and decoding
• imageproc - Image processing operations
• piston_collada - Advanced standard format for 3D
• wavefront_obj - Simple 3D format
• hematite_nbt - Minecraft's Named Binary Tag (NBT) format
• piston_meta - Meta parsing for domain specific text formats
• dyon - A rusty dynamically typed scripting language

Image formats & processing

• image - Collects encoders and decoders
• gif - GIF encoder and decoder
• png - PNG decoder
• tiff - TIFF encoder and decoder
• color_quant - Color quantization

Backends

These integrates Piston with various external APIs. The window and graphics backends are decoupled. The reason is greater flexibility when shipping a product, easier to compare API design and performance, and works both for cross and native platforms.

Window (uses the piston core):

• pistoncore-glfw_window
• pistoncore-glutin_window
• pistoncore-sdl2_window

2D graphics (uses piston2d-graphics:

• piston2d-opengl_graphics
• piston2d-gfx_graphics
• piston2d-glium_graphics

Libraries that extends Piston

These libraries leverages the generic functionality of Piston into higher level features.

Under PistonDevelopers:

• conrod - Immediate UI
• camera_controllers - 3D camera navigation
• piston-ai_behavior - AI behavior trees
• piston-button_tracker - Tracking mouse/button events
• piston-button_controller - Handles events and state for buttons
• piston-split_controller - Split layout
• piston2d-scroll_controller - Handling scroll area
• piston2d-sprite - Sprite animation
• piston2d-shapes - Convenience structs for 2D shapes
• piston2d-drag_controller - Drag & drop for 2D
• timer_controller - Timer events

External:

• carboxyl_window - Functional reactive programming for window events, GNU license
• elmesque - 2D graphics inspired by the Elm graphics modules

Gfx libraries

These libraries uses the Gfx backend agnostic graphics API.

• dev_menu - Uses pistoncore-input
• gfx_text - Uses FreeType
• gfx_debug_draw - Rendering lines and text in 3D space
• piston3d-gfx_voxel - Voxel rendering
• piston-gfx_texture - Integrates Gfx textures with Piston
• skeletal_animation

Community projects

• pluto - Game competition website, using Rust server stack
• hematite - A Minecraft client
• hematite_server - A Minecraft server

Under planning/inactive/not-usable-yet

Sorted by activity.

• opengex - Rust library for OpenGEX format
• turbine - 3D game engine with built-in editor
• editor - Editor interface
• inventory - Plugin management in Rust programs
• mush - GUI for graphs
• gfx_window_shared - An alternative window backend using Gfx
• graphics-lab - Visualize and test 2D graphics
• axis_helper - A 3D axis helper
• control_point - Manipulating control points
• vec - SIMD instructions for generic vectors

Productivity tools

• VisualRust - A Rust plugin for Visual Studio
• Eco - Rust ecosystem breaking change analysis

Infrastructure

• Piston docs - Documentation for Piston's projects
• Piston blog - The Piston project's blog
• Piston website - The Piston project's website
• Hematite website - The Hematite project's website