Crate semeion

An experimental 2D environment simulator, that let's you define the behavior and the shape of your entities, while taking care of dispatching events generation after generation.

Motivation

semeion is a library that was born out of the curiosity to see how to abstract those few concepts that are, most of the times, shared between very simple 2D games mostly focused on simulations, such as cellular automata or zero-player games. When writing such "home-made" games, it's usually standard practice to rely on already existing game engines, which do a good job in abstracting the complexity of the event loop, graphic rendering system, or assets management; they all come in different flavors, but they mostly share the same concepts when it comes to event handling: the update callback allows you to define where the logic of your game will take place, and the draw callback allows you to define where the rendering of your entities is going to happen; finally the third main component regards the player's input events.

This is great for the developer, the simplicity and feature richness of game engines such as SFML or ggez, just to name a couple, allowed many developers to write their own Atari Pong version.

But besides the event handling, the graphics rendering system, and the assets management, I noticed that writing small games, especially when focusing on simulations and similar, always involved another type of abstraction that was shared and re-implemented several times in each of these game variants: the entities management.

While there are already several systems capable of providing you with an abstraction to take care of your entities, and many of these are proven to be very efficient and scale well in the industry by exploiting patterns like the Entity-Component-System (ECS) that you can find for example in Amethyst, I wasn't satisfied with the current state of the art like I was with game engines focused on very small projects (and obviously :) I wanted to write my own).

This is where semeion takes place; it's a very simple and very immature framework that acts orthogonally to your game engine, and allows you to focus on the behavior of your entities while it takes care of dispatching the events that are strictly related to the entities themself during their own lifetime, which belong to the 2D environment shaped like a grid of squared tiles of the same size, generation after generation.

With semeion, you can implement the generic Entity trait and define the behavior of your entities for each kind, and how they will interact with each other according to their scope of influence, location in the Environment, and lifetime.

Even though semeion has been developed with ggez as a companion game engine, it is independent from it, and can be easily used with the game engine of your preference. Check out the examples folder to see how to use the library.

Re-exports

pub use entity::*;

pub use env::*;

pub use space::*;

Modules

entity
env
space