snake-pipe-rust

Not just yet another snake game in the terminal 😉.

https://github.com/topheman/snake-pipe-rust/assets/985982/76161595-1c3a-4252-9cbd-25e144bf185c

This one follows the unix philosophy as:

snakepipe gamestate accepts user inputs, calculates the state of the game and writes it to stdout
snakepipe render reads the state of the game from stdin and renders it on the terminal
snakepipe throttle reads a pre-recorded game from stdin and writes to stdout each tick so that snakepipe render can pick it up

That way:

you could write your own version of the gamestate or render command in any programming language and make it work with mine
it's a great exercise to handle stream serialization/deserialization in rust

Prerequisites

Rust 1.75.0

Install

cargo install snakepipe

Usage

🎮 Play in terminal

# basic usage
snakepipe gamestate|snakepipe render

# change the defaults
snakepipe gamestate --frame-duration 80 --width 70 --height 20 --snakepipe-length 15|snakepipe render

# call help on any of the commands
snakepipe --help

📼 You can even record and replay using basic piping

# record a game into a file using the `tee` command utility
snakepipe gamestate|tee /tmp/snakepipe-output|snakepipe render

# replay the game you recorded
cat /tmp/snakepipe-output|snakepipe throttle|snakepipe render

Manual of commands

Commands: gamestate render throttle help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options: -h, --help Print help -V, --version Print version

Options: --frame-duration <FRAME_DURATION> in ms [default: 120] --width <WIDTH_> default 25 --height <HEIGHT_> default 25 --snakepipe-length <snakepipe_LENGTH> [default: 2] --fit-terminal

Options: --frame-duration <FRAME_DURATION> in ms [default: 120]

Using as a library

This crate is a cli, but it also exports a lib from where you can import a few utilities, such as snakepipe::stream::parse_gamestate - direct link to docs.rs:

use snakepipe::stream::{parse_gamestate, Game};

fn main() -> () {
    match parse_gamestate() {
        Ok(stream) => {
            println!(
                "Frame duration {}, Snake length {}, Level {}x{}",
                stream.options.frame_duration,
                stream.options.snake_length,
                stream.options.size.width,
                stream.options.size.height
            );
            for parsed_line in stream.lines {
                do_something(parsed_line);
            }
        }
        Err(e) => {
            println!("Error occurred while parsing stdin: \"{}\"", e);
        }
    }
}

fn do_something(parsed_line: Game) {
    println!("Snake head position {:?}", parsed_line.snake.head)
}

Make an implementation of the render command that starts a server so that the render happens in a browser
Make an implementation of the actual render for the terminal in an other language than rust