snake-pipe-rust

Not just yet another snake game in the terminal 😉.

snakepipe.mp4

This one follows the unix philosophy as:

• snakepipe gamestate accepts user inputs, calculates the state of the game and writes it to stdout
• snakepipe render reads the state of the game from stdin and renders it on the terminal
• snakepipe throttle reads a pre-recorded game from stdin and writes to stdout each tick so that snakepipe render can pick it up

That way:

• you could write your own version of the gamestate or render command in any programming language and make it work with mine
• it's a great exercise to handle stream serialization/deserialization in rust

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.75.0

Install

cargo install snakepipe

Usage

🎮 Play in terminal

# basic usage
snakepipe gamestate|snakepipe render

# change the defaults
snakepipe gamestate --frame-duration 80 --width 70 --height 20 --snakepipe-length 15|snakepipe render

# call help on any of the commands
snakepipe --help

📼 You can even record and replay using basic piping

# record a game into a file using the `tee` command utility
snakepipe gamestate|tee /tmp/snakepipe-output|snakepipe render

# replay the game you recorded
cat /tmp/snakepipe-output|snakepipe throttle|snakepipe render

Manual of commands

snakepipe --help

Usage: snakepipe 
Commands:
gamestate
render
throttle
help       Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
Options:
-h, --help     Print help
-V, --version  Print version

snakepipe gamestate --help

Usage: snakepipe gamestate [OPTIONS]
Options:
--frame-duration <FRAME_DURATION>  in ms [default: 120]
--width <WIDTH_>                    default 25
--height <HEIGHT_>                  default 25
--snakepipe-length <snakepipe_LENGTH>      [default: 2]
--fit-terminal

snakepipe render --help

Usage: snakepipe render
  

snakepipe throttle --help

Usage: snakepipe throttle [OPTIONS]
Options:
--frame-duration <FRAME_DURATION>  in ms [default: 120]

Using as a library

This crate is a cli, but it also exports a lib from where you can import a few utilities, such as snakepipe::stream::parse_gamestate - direct link to docs.rs:

use snakepipe::stream::{parse_gamestate, Game};

fn main() -> () {
    match parse_gamestate() {
        Ok(stream) => {
            println!(
                "Frame duration {}, Snake length {}, Level {}x{}",
                stream.options.frame_duration,
                stream.options.snake_length,
                stream.options.size.width,
                stream.options.size.height
            );
            for parsed_line in stream.lines {
                do_something(parsed_line);
            }
        }
        Err(e) => {
            println!("Error occurred while parsing stdin: \"{}\"", e);
        }
    }
}

fn do_something(parsed_line: Game) {
    println!("Snake head position {:?}", parsed_line.snake.head)
}

Next

• Make an implementation of the render command that starts a server so that the render happens in a browser
• Make an implementation of the actual render for the terminal in an other language than rust