Revived fork of the original Pixel library by faiface. This fork is intended to be a community-driven effort to continue the development of the library. We were unable to get a hold of the original author, to take ownership of the original repository to carry on the legacy of the wonderful work. If you are interested in contributing, please join us in the Discord Chat!
A hand-crafted 2D game library in Go. Take a look into the features to see what it can do.
go get github.com/gopxl/pixel/v2
If you are using Modules (Go 1.11 or higher) and want a mutable copy of the source code:
git clone https://github.com/gopxl/pixel # clone outside of $GOPATH
cd pixel
go install ./...
See requirements for the list of libraries necessary for compilation.
The Wiki of this repo contains an extensive tutorial covering several topics of Pixel.
For the tutorial walking through the basics of Pixel, check out The Basics!
The examples repository contains a few examples demonstrating Pixel's functionality.
To run an example, navigate to it's directory, then go run the main.go file. For example:
$ cd pixel-examples/platformer
$ go run main.go
Here are some screenshots from the examples!
| Lights | Platformer |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Smoke | Typewriter |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Raycaster | Gizmo |
|---|---|
 |
 |
We aim to release a new version the 1st of every month.
Here's the list of the main features in Pixel. Although Pixel is still under heavy development, there should be no major breakage in the API. This is not a 100% guarantee, though.
- Fast 2D graphics
- Audio through a separate Beep library.
- Simple and convenient API
- Drawing a sprite to a window is as simple as
sprite.Draw(window, matrix) - Wanna know where the center of a window is?
window.Bounds().Center() - ...
- Drawing a sprite to a window is as simple as
- Full documentation and tutorial
- Works on Linux, macOS and Windows
- Window creation and manipulation (resizing, fullscreen, multiple windows, ...)
- Keyboard (key presses, text input) and mouse input without events
- Well integrated with the Go standard library
- Use
"image"package for loading pictures - Use
"time"package for measuring delta time and FPS - Use
"image/color"for colors, or use Pixel's owncolor.Colorformat, which supports easy multiplication and a few more features - Pixel uses
float64throughout the library, compatible with"math"package
- Use
- Geometry transformations with
Matrix
- Moving, scaling, rotating
- Easy camera implementation
- Off-screen drawing to Canvas or any other target (Batch, IMDraw, ...)
- Fully garbage collected, no
CloseorDisposemethods - Full Porter-Duff composition, which enables
- 2D lighting
- Cutting holes into objects
- Much more...
- Pixel let's you draw stuff and do your job, it doesn't impose any particular style or paradigm
- Platform and backend independent core
- Core Target/Triangles/Picture pattern makes it easy to create new drawing targets that do arbitrarily crazy stuff (e.g. graphical effects)
- Small codebase, ~5K lines of code, including the backend glhf package
Here are some packages which use Pixel:
- TilePix Makes handling TMX files built with Tiled trivially easy to work with using Pixel.
- spriteplus Basic
SpriteSheetandAnimationimplementations - PixelUI Imgui-based GUIs for Pixel
- pixelutils Variety of game related utilities (sprite packer, id generator, ticker, sprite loader, voronoia diagrams)
Pixel is in development and still missing few critical features. Here're the most critical ones.
AudioDrawing text- Antialiasing (filtering is supported, though)
Advanced window manipulation (cursor hiding, window icon, ...)- Better support for Hi-DPI displays
- Mobile (and perhaps HTML5?) backend
More advanced graphical effects (e.g. blur)(solved with the addition of GLSL effects)- Tests and benchmarks
- Vulkan support
Implementing these features will get us to the 1.0 release. Contribute, so that it's as soon as possible!
If you're using Windows and having trouble building Pixel, please check this guide on the wiki.
OpenGL development libraries are needed for compilation. The dependencies are same as for GLFW.
The OpenGL version used is OpenGL 3.3.
- On macOS, you need Xcode or Command Line Tools for Xcode (
xcode-select --install) for required headers and libraries. - On Ubuntu/Debian-like Linux distributions, you need
libgl1-mesa-devandxorg-devpackages. - On CentOS/Fedora-like Linux distributions, you need
libX11-devel libXcursor-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel mesa-libGL-devel libXi-devel libXxf86vm-develpackages. - On Linux to use Wayland instead of X11, compile your project with
-tags wayland. - See here for full details.
The combination of Go 1.8, macOS and latest XCode seems to be problematic as mentioned in issue #7. This issue is probably not related to Pixel. Upgrading to Go 1.8.1 fixes the issue.
While pixel does run on Windows, you will likely have significantly better performance running in WSL2, which now has support for GUI applications built-in with WSLg.
Installation instructions here. If you already have an old version of WSL installed,
make sure to follow the upgrade instructions to get WSL2 as well as update your distribution of choice to version 2. Additionally, if you have an old DISPLAY environment variable set in your ~/.bashrc (or equivalent) for WSL1, you should remove it. This is now configured automatically.
Once WSL is setup, follow the usual Go and OpenGL installation instructions for your chosen distribution of linux.
Finally, add export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=0 to your ~/.bashrc (or equivalent) if you see an error like Error: creating window failed: VersionUnavailable: GLX: Failed to create context: GLXBadFBConfig when attempting to launch an OpenGL application from WSL.
Go supports cross platform build targets natively, but because pixel depends on CGo it is necessary to specify a C cross-compiler that is compatible with the target.
To build a windows executable on linux, you will need to install a windows C compiler, such as mingw. The following commands can be used to build for an amd64 architecture on windows.
Install mingw on linux with apt:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gcc-mingw-w64Build for windows amd64
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 CGO_ENABLED=1 CXX=x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc go buildJoin us in the Discord Chat!
Pixel is currently in a developmental phase, with many of its key features already in place, while others are still in the works. We genuinely appreciate and value contributions, as they can significantly expedite the development process. I invite everyone to contribute in any way they can, even if it's just sharing an idea. We especially value the submission of issues and pull requests.
That said, it's important to remember that Pixel is being developed with a great deal of thought and attention to detail. Each component has gone through numerous design iterations to ensure quality. We place a high premium on code and API quality, with an emphasis on simplicity and expressiveness. When contributing, please bear these goals in mind. This doesn't mean that only flawless pull requests will be accepted. Rather, it means that there may be times when a proposal might not align with our vision, or when a pull request might require some revisions. This is completely normal and should not discourage you. After all, our shared goal is to achieve the best end result possible.
Take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md for further information.