Upaya

upaya: a means that goes or brings one up to some goal; skillful means

Zig-based framework for creating game tools and helper apps. Consists of the following:

• Sokol: used for cross-platform window creation and rendering
• STB Image and Rect: image loading, image saving and rect packing
• Tiny Filebrowser: cross-platform filebrowsers and dialogs
• Dear ImGui: needs no introduction
• Known Folders: staple of many zig codebases. See the GitHub page: known-folders

Upaya provides a set of conveniences to speed up tool building:

• upaya.fs: one-liners for saving/loading JSON/binary files
• upaya.mem: C allocator and a temp allocator (just use and never free)
• upaya.menu: helpers for managing a main menu bar
• upaya.colors: ImGui color translations and helpers
• upaya.math: math helpers and a random number generator

Getting Started

First fetch Upaya: git clone --recursive https://github.com/prime31/zig-upaya/

Zig is a fast moving target right now and Upaya uses some of the newer features in the language. You will want to be using a nightly build of Zig rather than an older release. Once you have zig installed, you can use zig build help. The available examples will be listed in the Steps section. zig build run will always build the most recent example.

Your First Upaya App

A full basic Upaya app is below. You can start putting code right in the update method which will be called each frame.

const upaya = @import("upaya");
usingnamespace upaya.imgui;

pub fn main() !void {
    upaya.run(.{
        .init = init,
        .update = update,
    });
}

fn init() void {}

fn update() void {
    _ = igBegin("My First Window", null, ImGuiWindowFlags_None);
    igEnd();
}

Building a Command Line App

Parts of Upaya can be used for command line tools as well. For example you may want to build a command line image manipulator that uses the STB Image and STB Image Write libs included in Upaya. To do that, the Upaya build.zig file has a separate method that you can use to setup the dependencies for you executable: linkCommandLineArtifact. When you call linkCommandLineArtifact it will skip linking Sokol, Dear ImGui and Tiny Filebrowser giving you a stripped down binary. Note that you must manually initialize the temp allocator by calling upaya.mem.initTmpAllocator(); See the “texture_packer_cli” example code.