mini_gl_fb 0.2.4

Tool for quickly creating a window and drawing to a buffer with OpenGL
Documentation

Mini GL "Framebuffer"

Provides an easy way to draw a window from a pixel buffer. OpenGL alternative to other easy framebuffer libraries.

Designed to be dead simple and easy to remember when you just want to get something on the screen ASAP!

extern crate mini_gl_fb;

fn main() {
    let mut fb = mini_gl_fb::gotta_go_fast("Hello world!", 800.0, 600.0);
    let buffer = vec![[128u8, 0, 0, 255]; 800 * 600];
    fb.update_buffer(&buffer);
    fb.persist();
}

fb.update_buffer can be called as many times as you like and will redraw the screen each time. You can bring your own timing mechanism, whether it's just sleep(ms) or something more sophisticated.

Get full access to glutin for custom event handling

You can also "breakout" and get access to the underlying glutin window while still having easy setup:

let mut fb = mini_gl_fb::gotta_go_fast("Hello world!", 800.0, 600.0);

let GlutinBreakout {
    mut events_loop,
    gl_window,
    mut fb,
} = fb.glutin_breakout();

fb.update_buffer(/*...*/);

Other features

  • Hardware accelerated buffer scaling (window and buffer can have different sizes)
  • Exposes a function for creating a context with glutin in one line
  • Exposes a function for creating a VAO, VBO, quad, and blank texture in one line
  • If you don't want to use glutin you can bring your own context too!

See the docs for more info.

Planned Features

Listed in rough order of importance and ease (which are surprisingly correlated here!).

  • Bounds check on update_buffer which will currently segfault if you pass the wrong size.

  • Shader playground. Add a method for using shadertoy-like fragment shaders to be applied to your submitted pixel data.

  • Some built in managed ways of getting interactivity, possibly such as a functional reactive style draw function that renders based on a provided Store struct. Other simpler alternatives include automatically drawing after running some event handlers and some methods for drawing at intervals (fixed/dynamic delta time).

  • Fully replace and customize the vertex, geometry, and fragment shader, including adding your own uniforms (but probably not adding any vertex attributes).

  • Support for more textures, possibly actual OpenGL framebuffers for complex sequences of post processing. I am undecided on whether this is appropriate for this library.