README.md

Wallpaper Engine KDE - Rust

Description

I am trying to create a wallpaper engine for KDE using Rust for some reasons:

1. The current version uses Vulkan as a backend, which is not supported by Asahi Linux.
2. The installation puts the .so file in the system level directory, which is not necessary.
3. It uses rpc to communicate between the frontend and the backend. I dont like this approach.
4. Having fun with Rust.

Roadmap

• Make a KDE wallpaper plugin which can be found in the wallpaper settings.
• Provide our functionality to the QML frontend as a .so file.
• Render the wallpaper using Qt GSNode.
• Render a triangle using OpenGL and Qt.
• VFS to load local assets and unpacked assets from the scene file.
• Hardcode to render a walllpaper from the steam workshop.
• Scene unpacker, see RePkg
• Shader preprocessor, inc #include, // [COMBO]
• JSON parser to load the scene.json file.
• Rewrite the renderer part, because it may contain multiple scene objects.

Other things to do

• Logger, watch debug output in the plasma shell.
• Switch to anyhow for error handling.

Playground

• [] Finish a workflow in test mod, 1. load a scene file and mount unpacked files, 2. load the scene.json file, 3. read the shader files, 4. render the wallpaper.

Notes

• Shaders in a unpacked scene file is not using standard GLSL. They support #include, which comes from ~/steam/steamapps/common/wallpaper_engine/assets/. Technically, I can embed these files, but due to the copyright issue, I will not do that.

Issues

• Probably unnecessary to all-in Rust. Remake the rendering part in C++ and port it to Rust. Because the Qt bindings are not stable yet. Indeed, I can port more Qt APIs, but it is not worth it.
• If above, do the config parsing part, and other parts, which are not related to Qt, in Rust.