Source code from Atlas, our 64k demo presented at Revision 2019 with Macau Exports

Monad

Last update: Jan 2, 2023

Related tags

Learning Resources rust demoscene demotool directx intro 64k

Overview

Atlas source code dump

This is a dump of the source code for the engine, graphics tool and player for Atlas, our 64k demo released with Macau Exports at Revision 2019. It's been updated to build with the latest Rust nightly, but for the most part is identical to what we showed in the graphics breakdown stream.

Goals of this dump:

You should be able to build and run a fully-functional tool and player.
You should be able to explore the code in this repo and maybe learn some things about how we built it.

To that end, we will accept pull requests and issue reports that help us achieve these goals. Other PRs and issues will not be accepted. For instance, a PR to fix a crash when starting the player is fine, but a PR that replaces part of our post-processing stack is not.

Building

You'll need a 32-bit, nightly build of Rust. The repo has been tested on the 2021-10-01 nightly. Install Rustup then run the following command in the repo folder:

> rustup override set nightly-2021-10-01-i686

The repo contains two executable packages. The graphics tool provides features including live shader reloading, a property editor and an animation system with a timeline and curve editor. The player bundles up a synth, shaders and animation data into an optimized executable that plays the demo from start to end and can be krunched to under 64kb.

To build and launch the tool, run the following command from the tool folder:

> cargo run

To build the player:

Ensure the tool has run at least once to generate the export blob - see the section below on running the tool.
Ensure you have a resource compiler available on your PATH. If you have Visual Studio installed, this can be achieved by using a Developer Command Prompt.
Run the following command from the player folder.
```
> cargo build --release
```

This will create a player.exe inside the target folder in the repo.

Using the tool

The tool will open the project file at project/saves/000000-000000-head.save when started, and save to that file on close. By default this has the timeline from the post-party final version of Atlas.

When closed, the tool minifies all shaders and generates a binary blob of shaders and animation data to be packed into a player build. This blob is placed in project/data.blob. Closing the tool will take a bit of time due to minifying shaders, if you want to disable this set MINIFY_SHADERS to false at the top of tool/src/exporter/shaders.rs.

For more info on using the tool have a look at the Atlas graphics breakdown video.