A hand-crafted 2D game library in Go. Take a look into the features to see what it can do.
go get github.com/faiface/pixel
See requirements for the list of libraries necessary for compilation.
The Wiki of this repo contains an extensive tutorial covering several topics of Pixel. Here's the content of the tutorial parts so far:
- Creating a Window
- Drawing a Sprite
- Moving, scaling and rotating with Matrix
- Pressing keys and clicking mouse
- Drawing efficiently with Batch
- Drawing shapes with IMDraw
- Typing text on the screen
The examples directory contains a few examples demonstrating Pixel's functionality.
To run an example, navigate to it's directory, then go run
the main.go
file. For example:
$ cd examples/platformer
$ go run main.go
Here are some screenshots from the examples!
Lights | Platformer |
---|---|
Smoke | Typewriter |
---|---|
Here's the list of the main features in Pixel. Although Pixel is still under heavy development, there should be no major breakage in the API. This is not a 100% guarantee, though.
- Fast 2D graphics
- Simple and convenient API
- Drawing a sprite to a window is as simple as
sprite.Draw(window, matrix)
- Wanna know where the center of a window is?
window.Bounds().Center()
- ...
- Drawing a sprite to a window is as simple as
- Full documentation and tutorial
- Works on Linux, macOS and Windows
- Window creation and manipulation (resizing, fullscreen, multiple windows, ...)
- Keyboard (key presses, text input) and mouse input without events
- Well integrated with the Go standard library
- Use
"image"
package for loading pictures - Use
"time"
package for measuring delta time and FPS - Use
"image/color"
for colors, or use Pixel's owncolor.Color
format, which supports easy multiplication and a few more features - Pixel uses
float64
throughout the library, compatible with"math"
package
- Use
- Geometry transformations with
Matrix
- Moving, scaling, rotating
- Easy camera implementation
- Off-screen drawing to Canvas or any other target (Batch, IMDraw, ...)
- Fully garbage collected, no
Close
orDispose
methods - Full Porter-Duff composition, which enables
- 2D lighting
- Cutting holes into objects
- Much more...
- Pixel let's you draw stuff and do your job, it doesn't impose any particular style or paradigm
- Platform and backend independent core
- Core Target/Triangles/Picture pattern makes it easy to create new drawing targets that do arbitrarily crazy stuff (e.g. graphical effects)
- Small codebase, ~5K lines of code, including the backend glhf package
Pixel is in development and still missing few critical features. Here're the most critical ones.
- Audio
Drawing text- Antialiasing (filtering is supported, though)
Advanced window manipulation (cursor hiding, window icon, ...)- Better support for Hi-DPI displays
- Mobile (and perhaps HTML5?) backend
- More advanced graphical effects (e.g. blur)
- Tests and benchmarks
Implementing these features will get us to the 1.0 release. Contribute, so that it's as soon as possible!
PixelGL backend uses OpenGL to render graphics. Because of that, OpenGL development libraries are needed for compilation. The dependencies are same as for GLFW.
- On macOS, you need Xcode or Command Line Tools for Xcode (
xcode-select --install
) for required headers and libraries. - On Ubuntu/Debian-like Linux distributions, you need
libgl1-mesa-dev
andxorg-dev
packages. - On CentOS/Fedora-like Linux distributions, you need
libX11-devel libXcursor-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel mesa-libGL-devel libXi-devel
packages. - See here for full details.
The combination of Go 1.8, macOS and latest XCode seems to be problematic as mentioned in issue #7. This issue is probably not related to Pixel. Upgrading to Go 1.8.1 fixes the issue.
Pixel is in, let's say, mid-stage of development. Many of the important features are here, some are missing. That's why contributions are very important and welcome! All alone, I will be able to finish the library, but it'll take a lot of time. With your help, it'll take much less. I encourage everyone to contribute, even with just an idea. Especially welcome are issues and pull requests.
However, I won't accept everything. Pixel is being developed with thought and care. Each component was designed and re-designed multiple times. Code and API quality is very important here. API is focused on simplicity and expressiveness.
When contributing, keep these goals in mind. It doesn't mean that I'll only accept perfect pull requests. It just means that I might not like your idea. Or that your pull requests could need some rewriting. That's perfectly fine, don't let it put you off. In the end, we'll just end up with a better result.
Don't start working on a pull request before submiting an issue or commenting on one. Proposals also take the form of issues.
For any kind of discussion, feel free to use our Gitter community.