patoncrispy

patoncrispy

Hands-on Rust: Adequate docs for bracket_lib

I’m new to Rust and am using this book to learn more as well as to feed my interest in game dev. I’ve just finished the flappy dragon example and wanted to go on and learn how to make modifications, but haven’t had much luck finding adequate documentation to get started.

I know the docs.rs link bracket_lib - Rust (docs.rs), but that doesn’t show me how to use the libraries features. There is also the Roguelike Tutorial ( Introduction - Roguelike Tutorial - In Rust (bracketproductions.com)), but that doesn’t show me how to use sprites, for example.

The best I could find is some of the existing examples, and the repo associated with the book, but by that stage it’s all figured out for me which kinda spoils things a bit.

Just wondering if anybody knows any documentation or simple examples of using bracket-lib without any ‘spoilers’ for the book? A ‘Getting Started’ guide with simple examples would be great!

Marked As Solved

herbert

herbert

Author of Hands-on Rust

Hi!

There’s a short tutorial showing how to go from Flappy Dragon to the bonus version on the book’s website: From Flappy Dragon to Flappy Bonus · Hands-On Rust

I agree that some extra documentation would be a good idea. For now, if you clone the Github repo (GitHub - amethyst/bracket-lib: The Roguelike Toolkit (RLTK), implemented for Rust.) and cd into bracket-terminal, you can type cargo run --example and get a list of the examples (run by adding the example name, e.g. cargo run --example dwarfmap). The source code for all of these is in the examples directory. I’ve tried to annotate the examples to explain what’s going on.

I’ll try and get a better set of documentation posted at some point soon (it’s hard to give an exact timeframe). Some parts of the library are very mature/stable (the simple/sparse consoles, and probably the “fancy” console). Documenting those should be pretty straightforward. The sprite system is pretty new, so documentation for it will have to wait it to stabilize.

If you want to go far beyond the examples in Hands-on Rust, I recommend taking a look at the Amethyst and Bevy engines. Bracket-lib is designed as a teaching tool—so it sacrifices performance in the name of teach-ability in a few cases. Both Bevy and Amethyst use the same ECS approach as the book, and (especially Bevy) are developing a great body of examples and tutorials. I also know of at least one reader who implemented all of the book’s examples using Macroquad instead of bracket-lib, retaining the Legion and ECS elements. I’ve not used Macroquad enough to recommend or not-recommend it.

Also Liked

patoncrispy

patoncrispy

Wow that was quick! Thanks for the pointers! That first article is a help already and I’ll go through the examples you mentioned - thanks!

For the Chapter 3 Wrap Up section, I feel like I wasn’t armed with enough information to be able to get started on that stuff. Animation, for example, feels worlds away from just moving an icon around. I think a greater explanation of tilesets and how they work would be really useful! I’ve spent the past hour going through the code for the book and it all makes much more sense now. I only wish I didn’t have to go to the answers to be able to get here.

I’m really enjoying to book though and cracking on through it. Thanks again for the quick and thorough response!

herbert

herbert

Author of Hands-on Rust

Just a quick note, I’ve started pulling some documentation together. It’ll be a while before it’s complete (quite a large amount of ground to cover). The initial documentation covers the examples I pointed you towards. The in-progress documentation is gradually appearing at What is Bracket-lib - Bracket-Lib Usage Guide

Where Next?

Popular Pragmatic Bookshelf topics Top

jon
Some minor things in the paper edition that says “3 2020” on the title page verso, not mentioned in the book’s errata online: p. 186 But...
New
GilWright
Working through the steps (checking that the Info,plist matches exactly), run the demo game and what appears is grey but does not fill th...
New
herminiotorres
Hi @Margaret , On page VII the book tells us the example and snippets will be all using Elixir version 1.11 But on page 3 almost the en...
New
alanq
This isn’t directly about the book contents so maybe not the right forum…but in some of the code apps (e.g. turbo/06) it sends a TURBO_ST...
New
jskubick
I’m running Android Studio “Arctic Fox” 2020.3.1 Patch 2, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I only made it to page 8 before running into ...
New
jskubick
I’m under the impression that when the reader gets to page 136 (“View Data with the Database Inspector”), the code SHOULD be able to buil...
New
akraut
The markup used to display the uploaded image results in a Phoenix.LiveView.HTMLTokenizer.ParseError error. lib/pento_web/live/product_l...
New
AufHe
I’m a newbie to Rails 7 and have hit an issue with the bin/Dev script mentioned on pages 112-113. Iteration A1 - Seeing the list of prod...
New
taguniversalmachine
It seems the second code snippet is missing the code to set the current_user: current_user: Accounts.get_user_by_session_token(session["...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Stop developing web apps with yesterday’s tools. Today, developers are increasingly adopting Clojure as a web-development platform. See f...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Write Elixir tests that you can be proud of. Dive into Elixir’s test philosophy and gain mastery over the terminology and concepts that u...
New
AstonJ
Or looking forward to? :nerd_face:
498 14002 274
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
New
NewsBot
Node.js v22.14.0 has been released. Link: Release 2025-02-11, Version 22.14.0 'Jod' (LTS), @aduh95 · nodejs/node · GitHub
New
xiji2646-netizen
Woke up to this today: Claude Code’s complete source code exposed via npm source map. Not a snippet. All 512,000 lines. 1,900 TypeScript ...
New

Sub Categories: