Amethyst is an open-source project that values community contribution. We could always use a helping hand! What would you like to do?
- I want to submit issues or request features.
- I want to contribute code.
- I want to write documentation.
- Are there any useful resources I can read?
One way you can help Amethyst is to report bugs or request features on our GitHub issue trackers. We can't fix problems we don't know about, so please report early and often! Make sure to post your issue on the tracker most relevant to you:
- Engine Tracker: Issues on the game engine itself or the documentation.
- Tools Tracker: Issues on the toolchain surrounding the engine.
- Website Tracker: Issues on the website and This Week in Amethyst.
Before posting your issue, please take a moment to search the tracker's existing issues first, as it's possible that someone else reported the same issue before you. Though it helps save time, don't worry! We won't mind if you accidentally post a duplicate issue.
Amethyst does not officially support beta or nightly channels of Rust. If an issue can only be reproduced on those channels our resolution strategy will be to communicate with the rust project itself to ensure the issue does not reach the stable branch.
That's all there is to it! Thanks for posting your issue; we'll take it to heart and try our best to resolve it.
Whenever a new issue is filed by anyone, please label it accordingly. These labels help developers prioritize what they should work on next. All Amethyst issue trackers use the same set of labels to mark each issue. Please select one (1) label from each of the following three sections that is most relevant to the issue:
- Diff: How difficult do you think it is to resolve?
- Hard (highest)
- Medium
- Easy (least)
- Pri: Relatively speaking, how important is it?
- Blocker (highest)
- Critical
- Important
- Normal
- Low (least)
- Type: What kind of issue are you reporting?
- Bug
- A problem with the software.
- Feature
- New functionality you would like to see.
- Improvement
- Making existing functionality better.
- Question
- Any kind of question about the project.
- RFC
- Need peer review or a brainstorming session on a particular topic.
- Task
- A task or long-term initiative we should pursue.
- Bug
You may also attach supplementary information using the orange labels beginning with "Note".
- Note: Select any of these if the associated statement is true.
- Doc
- This issue deals with documentation.
- Help Wanted
- This issue requires lots of people's help to get done.
- Doc
Finally, a "Status" label can be assigned to stalled or unresolved issues.
- Status: Adds extra hints about the
- Stalled
- This issue hasn't been updated and has gone stale. If it's particularly old and irrelevant, feel free to close it.
- Wontfix
- This issue will not be pursued either because it is deemed either very low priority or is outside the scope of the project goals.
- Stalled
A visual "kanban" board showing the status of all issues in the repository can be found in the Projects tab, next to "Pull Requests." Feel free to check it out and update it as you like.
So, you want to write some code? Great! But before you start writing, please make sure you are familiar with how our repositories are structured:
- develop: If adding features, tweaking, improving docs, etc. do so here.
- release-*: If releasing a bugfix against a specific release, do so here.
- hotfix-*: Do not touch. Hotfix branches for broken (yanked) releases.
- master: Do not touch. Latest production-ready state of the code.
To begin hacking, fork the repository to your account and git clone
the forked
copy to your local machine. Then switch to either the develop branch or
appropriate release-* branch. Now you're ready to work!
Before submitting your pull request to the repository, please make sure you have done the following things first:
- You have ensured the pull request is based on a recent version of your respective branch.
- You have processed your source code with
cargo fmt
. - All of the following commands completed without errors.
cargo build
cargo test --all
cargo run --example {example-name}
- You have granted non-exclusive right to your source code under 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.
To streamline the process, the .pre-commit.sh
script will run tests on each
commit in a sanitary way for you; to have it run automatically on each commit
simply create a symbolic link with
$ ln -s -f ../../.pre-commit.sh .git/hooks/pre-commit
or copy it to your .git
folder with
$ cp .pre-commit.sh .git/hooks/pre-commit
Note: if you use cp
you won't get upstream changes to .pre-commit.sh
, but if
you use ln
and you checkout a path without the .pre-commit.sh` script in your
working directory, the hook won't run.
This ensures that you can't commit your changes if tests fail. If you need to make a commit without running tests, then simply use
$ git commit --no-verify
Note: the pre-commit
hook stashes all of your unstaged changes temporarily to
ensure that your changes don't depend on code you haven't included in your
commit. So if you've lost any work, run git stash list
and git stash apply
to bring your changes back.
If you want to be publicly known as an author, feel free to add your name and/or GitHub username to the AUTHORS.md file in your pull request.
Once you have submitted your pull request, please wait for a reviewer to give feedback on it. If no one responds, feel free to @-mention a developer or post publicly on the appropriate chat room on Gitter asking for a review. Once your code has been reviewed, revised if necessary, and then signed-off by a developer, it will be merged into the source tree.
- Pull Requests shall not be merged before at least 24 hours have passed.
- Pull Requests shall be approved by at least two members (two approvals from contributors can count as one member approval.)
- Merging a PR shall be done with
bors r+
- If a member self-requested a review, the PR shall not be merged until they reviewed the PR (exception: the member becomes inactive)
Note: The author of a PR cannot approve their own PR.
- If something went wrong (like a broken version has been released, the website doesn't work at all, ..) no approval is required for merging
- Merging can be performed instant (but still with bors)
- Same here, no approval is required for merging
- There is no reason to wait 24 hours here
- Unless it's a major rewrite in our testing / benchmarking architecture, one review is sufficient.
- Please still wait one day before merging the PR
- If there are very experimental branches, there's no need to use bors; in fact, CI may even fail if that makes working on it easier.
- A review would be good prior to merging, but rules don't need to be strict here
- Should be labeled with
type: RFC
- Needs at least three approvals by members only
- Should be left open for reviews for a couple of days
When pulling remote changes to a local branch or machine, we recommend users to rebase instead of creating merge commits.
This is used sometimes when an upstream change cause problems with your pull request. The best practice is to do a fast-forward ("ff") rebase.
First, setup a remote called upstream
:
# Do one of the following. SSH is prefered, but not available on all
# environments.
$ # For ssh
$ git remote add upstream [email protected]:amethyst/amethyst.git
$ # For https
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/amethyst/amethyst.git
If your origin
remote points to the original repo we recommend you to set it
to your own fork. Check with git remote origin get-url
to be sure.
$ # Set origin remote to fork, <your-fork> is [email protected]:<your-username>/amethyst.git
$ # For https use https://github.com/<your-username>/amethyst.git
$ git remote origin set-url <your-fork>
To learn how to rebase a upstream change into your branch, please read this excellent wiki post.
$ # Fetch latest changes
$ git fetch upstream
$ # Rebase this branch to upstream
$ git checkout <branch-name>
$ git rebase upstream/<branch-to-sync-with>
If any errors occur, Git will try to guess what happened. If you can't figure out how to solve your problem, a quick Google search can help, or you can hit us up on our Gitter chat.
If needed, abort with git rebase --abort
and also sometimes
git merge --abort
.
To check whether anything major has changed upstream, you can do:
$ # Fetch latest changes
$ git fetch upstream
$ # Do a "non-intruisive" check.
$ git merge --ff-only --no-commit upstream
Then you can decide to do a FF rebase. This way, our commit logs remain nice and clean, and we'll be grateful.
Thank you so much for your contribution! Now Amethyst will be a little bit faster, stronger, and more efficient.
Documentation improvements are always welcome! A solid project needs to have
solid documentation to go with it. You can search for documentation-related
issues on any of our GitHub trackers by filtering by the orange note: doc
label.
There are two types of documentation in Amethyst you can work on:
Our Rust API documentation is generated directly from source code comments
marked with either ///
or //!
using a tool called Rustdoc. See
the official Rust book's chapter on Rustdoc for more information on how
this works.
The Amethyst book is generated using a different documentation tool called mdBook. This tool generates pretty HTML e-books from individual Markdown (.md) files. You can find the source files for this book in the book/src/ directory of the Amethyst repository.
Documentation of any kind should adhere to the following standard:
- Lines must not extend beyond 80 characters in length.
- To enhance readability in text editors and terminals, use only reference style Markdown links, as shown in the example below. However, if the link points to an anchor that exists on the same page, the inline style should be used instead.
Here is some [example text][et] with a link in it. While we are at it, here is
yet [another link][al]. If we are linking to [an anchor](#anchor) on the same
page, we can do this inline.
[et]: https://some.url/
[al]: https://another.url/
When submitting your pull requests, please follow the same procedures described in the Pull Requests section above.
You can build Amethyst with a profiler
feature like this:
cargo build --release --features profiler
Or if you wanted to run an example with profiler:
cargo run --example my_example --release --features profiler
After an Amethyst instance built with profiler
feature shuts down a
thread_profile.json
file is generated. It holds information about engine performance
(how much time do various bits of code take to run).
Amethyst uses the same profiling method as webrender (thread_profiler crate).
thread_profile.json
can be viewed using Chromium tracing utility.
You can access it by launching Chromium and typing in about:tracing
in your address bar.
Then you can hit load button and choose thread_profile.json
file.
- Amethyst
- Amethyst Gitter - The Amethyst project's public chat room.
- Design Inspiration
- Bitsquid: Behind The Scenes (2013)
- Flexible Rendering for Multiple Platforms (2012)
- Mantle Programming Guide and API Reference (2015)
- Misconceptions of Component-Based Entity Systems (2014)
- Nitrous & Mantle: Combining Efficient Engine Design with a Modern API (2014)
- State Pattern - Pushdown Automata (2009)
- Rust
- Rust By Example - Get acquainted with Rust through a series of small code samples.
- The Rust Programming Language - The canonical online book about Rust.