🔗 Getting Amethyst up and running

I have played a bit with Rust in the past, but I’ve never done much with it.

To get myself more acquainted with the language, I’ve decided to try to write a small game with it, always a fun way to play with programming.

For that, I’ve started digging into the options and found Are we game yet?, a great resource with pointers for all things Rust and game development.

I’ve decided to try Amethyst for a game engine, as my first impressions with the documentation look quite good, and it will be nice to get updated with more modern game event management concepts.

I’ve followed the book’s instructions to get the latest stable Rust, and it also provides a 2D starter template repo. I managed to get it up and running, but I ran into a couple of hiccups, which I thought I’d document here.

First, I got this problem:

thread 'main' panicked at 'attempted to leave type `platform::platform::x11::util::input::PointerState` uninitialized, which is invalid', /rustc/d9a105fdd46c926ae606777a46dd90e5b838f92f/library/core/src/mem/mod.rs:659:9

Fortunately, 10 days ago someone at /r/rust_gamedev ran into the same thing, and the solution was to downgrade Rust from 1.48.0 to 1.46.0.

Doing that was simple:

rustup default 1.46.0

(Really impressed with how smooth the tooling is!)

I ran `cargo run` again, everything rebuilt, but then I ran into another problem:

thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: Unsupported', /Users/hisham/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/gfx-backend-vulkan-0.3.3/src/lib.rs:326:9

There’s a ton of people reporting different errors for panicked at ‘called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` on the internet, but a search for “err value unsupported gfx-backend-vulkan” put me on the right track. Another Amethyst beginner fixed the same issue by installing the necessary Vulkan library.

The recipe for this library was not yet available for GoboLinux, but thanks to our friends in Gentoo, it was easy to read their ebuilds for vulkan-loader and vulkan-headers and build the equivalents for Gobo.

With the Vulkan library built, I tried again, and then it progressed further, but still failed. But then, the output itself told me what was missing and gave me a useful hint:

vulkan: No DRI3 support detected - required for presentation
Note: you can probably enable DRI3 in your Xorg config

Fixing that was easy, thanks to a very on-point blog post by an Arch user, which told me to edit my /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the following entries for my Intel Xorg driver:

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna"
   Option      "TearFree"     "true"
   Option      "DRI"          "3"
EndSection

I restarted X, and voilà! The 2D starter repo for Amethyst showed me window with graphics and accepted keyboard input.

Now let’s continue reading the Amethyst book to learn how to make a simple game in Rust! :)