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macroquad is a simple and easy to use game library for Rust programming language, heavily inspired by raylib.

macroquad attempts to avoid any Rust-specific programming concepts like lifetimes/borrowing, making it very friendly for Rust beginners. See the docs.

Features

Supported Platforms

Build Instructions

Setting Up a Macroquad Project

Macroquad is a normal rust dependency, therefore an empty macroquad project may be created with:

# Create empty cargo project
cargo init --bin

Add macroquad as a dependency to Cargo.toml:


[dependencies]
macroquad = "0.3"

Put some macroquad code in src/main.rs:

use macroquad::prelude::*;

#[macroquad::main("BasicShapes")]
async fn main() {
    loop {
        clear_background(RED);

        draw_line(40.0, 40.0, 100.0, 200.0, 15.0, BLUE);
        draw_rectangle(screen_width() / 2.0 - 60.0, 100.0, 120.0, 60.0, GREEN);
        draw_circle(screen_width() - 30.0, screen_height() - 30.0, 15.0, YELLOW);

        draw_text("IT WORKS!", 20.0, 20.0, 30.0, DARKGRAY);

        next_frame().await
    }
}

And to run it natively:

cargo run

For more examples take a look at Macroquad examples folder

Linux

# ubuntu system dependencies
apt install pkg-config libx11-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libasound2-dev

# fedora system dependencies
dnf install libX11-devel libXi-devel mesa-libGL-devel alsa-lib-devel

# arch linux system dependencies
 pacman -S pkg-config libx11 libxi mesa-libgl alsa-lib

Windows

On windows both MSVC and GNU target are supported, no additional dependencies required.

Also cross-compilation to windows from linux is supported:

rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

cargo run --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

WASM

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo build --target wasm32-unknown-unknown

This will produce .wasm file in target/debug/wasm32-unknown-unknown/CRATENAME.wasm or in target/release/wasm32-unknown-unknown/CRATENAME.wasm if built with --release.

And then use the following .html to load it:

<details><summary>index.html</summary>
<html lang="en">

<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>TITLE</title>
    <style>
        html,
        body,
        canvas {
            margin: 0px;
            padding: 0px;
            width: 100%;
            height: 100%;
            overflow: hidden;
            position: absolute;
            background: black;
            z-index: 0;
        }
    </style>
</head>

<body>
    <canvas id="glcanvas" tabindex='1'></canvas>
    <!-- Minified and statically hosted version of https://github.com/not-fl3/macroquad/blob/master/js/mq_js_bundle.js -->
    <script src="https://not-fl3.github.io/miniquad-samples/mq_js_bundle.js"></script>
    <script>load("CRATENAME.wasm");</script> <!-- Your compiled wasm file -->
</body>

</html>
</details>

One of the ways to server static .wasm and .html:

cargo install basic-http-server
basic-http-server .

IOS

To run on the simulator:

mkdir MyGame.app
cargo build --target x86_64-apple-ios --release
cp target/release/mygame MyGame.app
# only if the game have any assets
cp -r assets MyGame.app
cat > MyGame.app/Info.plist << EOF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>mygame</string>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.mygame</string>
<key>CFBundleName</key>
<string>mygame</string>
<key>CFBundleVersion</key>
<string>1</string>
<key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key>
<string>1.0</string>
</dict>
</plist>
EOF

xcrun simctl install booted MyGame.app/
xcrun simctl launch booted com.mygame

For details and instructions on provisioning for real iphone, check https://macroquad.rs/articles/ios/

<details> <summary>Tips</summary> Adding the following snippet to your Cargo.toml ensures that all dependencies compile in release even in debug mode. In macroquad, this has the effect of making images load several times faster and your applications much more performant, while keeping compile times miraculously low.
[profile.dev.package.'*']
opt-level = 3
</details>

async/await

While macroquad attempts to use as few Rust-specific concepts as possible, .await in all examples looks a bit scary. Rust's async/await is used to solve just one problem - cross platform main loop organization.

<details> <summary>Details</summary>

The problem: on WASM and android it's not really easy to organize the main loop like this:

fn main() {
    // do some initialization

    // start main loop
    loop {
        // handle input

        // update logic

        // draw frame
    }
}

It is fixable on Android with threads, but on web there is not way to "pause" and "resume" WASM execution, so no WASM code should block ever. While that loop is blocking for the entire game execution! The C++ solution for that problem: https://kripken.github.io/blog/wasm/2019/07/16/asyncify.html

But in Rust we have async/await. Rust's futures are basically continuations - future's stack may be stored into a variable to pause/resume execution of future's code at a later point.

async/await support in macroquad comes without any external dependencies - no runtime, no executors and futures-rs is not involved. It's just a way to preserve main's stack on WASM and keep the code cross platform without any WASM-specific main loop.

</Details>

Community

Platinum sponsors

Macroquad is supported by:

<p> <a href="https://embark-studios.com"> <img src="https://www.embark.dev/img/logo_black.png" width="201px"> </a> </p>