nateroids

created to teach natepiano how to code games, visualizations and simulations in bevy using rust. i started with this tutorial, added avian3d for physics as well as a few other dependencies you can find in cargo.toml. the goal is to make this fun, playable, and beautiful.

first install rust

install rust (from https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install)

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

make rust compile faster

For the edit/build/run loop, use cargo dev to run or cargo dev-build to build. These project aliases enable incremental compilation even when your global Cargo config disables it.

use sccache to make follow on compiles faster as it will cache locally anything you've already built. this comes in handy if you get other projects that all need to compile with bevy or anything you commonly depend on in these projects

cargo install sccache

and to enable it globally create / edit your $HOME/.cargo/config.toml by adding this to it - make sure you're using your local path - on my system it is:

[build]
rustc-wrapper = ".cargo/bin/sccache"

clone nateroids project

git clone https://github.com/natepiano/nateroids

run it - the first time will take a while even if you have sccache installed as you have to populate the cache, n'est-ce pas? This will build a debug version and run it:

cargo run

start playing!

If you want to run it in release, you can do so by running:

cargo run --release

It might run faster on your machine. It will definitely be a smaller binary.

Forwarded trackpad controls

To use a MacBook trackpad forwarded as mouse-wheel events through Deskflow:

NATEROIDS_FORWARDED_TRACKPAD=1 cargo run

Two-finger scrolling orbits, Shift+scroll pans, and Control+scroll zooms. Physical mouse wheels receive those same controls while this mode is enabled. Native trackpad input and middle-button dragging retain their existing controls.

Press Shift+C to open camera settings. Change scroll_mode between MouseWheel and ForwardedTrackpad, or adjust line_scroll_sensitivity, without restarting. Settings changed in the inspector last for the current run. Without the environment variable, mouse-wheel scrolling zooms as before.