Amethyst is a data-driven and data-oriented game engine aiming to be fast and as configurable as possible.
These principles are what makes Amethyst unique and competitive in the world of game engines:
- Massively parallel architecture.
- Powered by a correct Entity Component System model.
- Rapid prototyping with RON files for prefabs and an abstract scripting API.
- Strong focus on encouraging reusability and clean interfaces.
Amethyst is based over a very powerful parallel ECS called Specs. This allows games built with Amethyst to maximize the available processing power to run as smoothly and as quickly as possible, without the headaches of multi-threaded programming.
By design, the Amethyst engine encourages you to write clean and reusable code for your behaviours and data structures. This allows engine users to easily share useful components, thus reducing development time and cost.
Using the ECS architecture, the code of games can be cleanly divided between data and behaviour, making it easy to understand what is going on, even if the game is running on a massive 64-core processor.
While we may not be feature-packed (yet!), we all strongly believe that the community-oriented side of Amethyst will thrive as we move forward!
Please visit the features page for a list of features Amethyst provides.
- Link to the book (latest release)
- Link to the book (master)
- Link to the examples (latest release)
- Link to the examples (master)
While the engine can be hard to use at times, we made a lot of documentation that will teach you everything you need to use Amethyst comfortably.
If you don't understand a part of the documentation, please let us know. Join us on Discord or open an issue; we are always happy to help!
To compile any of the examples run:
$ cargo run --example name_of_example
All available examples are listed under the examples directory.
For a full-blown "Hello World" tutorial check out the Getting Started chapter in the book.
There are also many open source games and prototypes being made with Amethyst. See our showcase in the regularly updated Games Made With Amethyst thread on the community forum for some good sources of inspiration.
If you are compiling on Linux, make sure to install the dependencies below.
Additionally, make sure you have EGL installed. Since the package depends on your drivers, we cannot list it here.
$ sudo apt install libasound2-dev libx11-xcb-dev libssl-dev cmake libfreetype6-dev libexpat1-dev libxcb1-dev
$ sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel openssl-devel cmake freetype-devel expat-devel libxcb-devel
See your distribution-specific installation process for the equivalent dependencies.
Please note that you need to have a functional graphics driver installed. If you get a panic about the renderer unable to create the context when trying to run an example, a faulty driver installation could be the issue.
You can build the book locally with:
$ cargo install mdbook
$ mdbook build book
If you're actively editing the book, it's easiest to run:
$ mdbook serve book
and navigate to http://localhost:3000. The text itself can be found in book/html/index.html. For more information, please see the mdBook project.
To generate the API documentation locally, do:
$ cargo doc
The API reference can be found in target/doc/amethyst/index.html.
Amethyst supports only the latest stable release of Rust. Use the nightly and beta channels with this project at your own risk.
If you have a question, please check out the FAQ before asking. Chances are, the solution to your problem is already present there. If you still need help, feel free to ask on our Discord server.
Other places you might want to check out are r/rust_gamedev and the #rust-gamedev IRC.
Amethyst is a community-based project that welcomes contributions from anyone. If you're interested in helping out, please read the contribution guidelines before getting started.
We have a good first issue category that groups all issues or feature requests that can be made without having an extensive knowledge of Rust or Amethyst. Working on those issues is a good, if not the best, way to learn.
If you think you are not ready to code yet, you can still contribute by reviewing code written by other members of the community. Code reviews ensure that code merged into Amethyst is of the highest quality as possible. Pull requests that are available for reviews can be found here.
If for some reason we don't have any open PRs in need of a review nor any good first issues (that would be a good thing), feel free to consult our issue tracker.
Thank you to all our backers! 🙏 Become a backer
Amethyst is supported by:
Amethyst is free and open source software distributed under the terms of both the MIT License and the Apache License 2.0.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.