rive-cpp

Rive hero image

Rive C++ is a runtime library for Rive, a real-time interactive design and animation tool.

The C++ runtime for Rive provides these runtime features:

Loading Artboards and their contents from .riv files.
Querying LinearAnimations and StateMachines from Artboards.
Making changes to Artboard hierarchy (fundamentally same guts used by LinearAnimations and StateMachines) and efficiently solving those changes via Artboard::advance.
State of the art vector renderer that delivers top performance & quality without comprimise. Currently support Graphics APIs are Metal, Vulkan, D3D12, D3D11, and OpenGL/WebGL.
Abstract Renderer interface for hooking up an external vector renderer.

Build system

We use premake5. The Rive dev team primarily works on MacOS. There is some work done by the community to also support Windows and Linux. PRs welcomed for specific platforms you wish to support! We encourage you to use premake as it's highly extensible and configurable for a variety of platforms.

Build

In the rive-cpp directory, run build.sh to debug build and build.sh release for a release build.

If you've put the premake5 executable in the rive-cpp/build folder, you can run it with PATH=.:$PATH ./build.sh

Rive makes use of clang vector builtins, which are, as of 2022, still a work in progress. Please use clang and ensure you have the latest version.

Testing

Uses the Catch2 testing framework.

cd tests/unit_tests
./test.sh

In the tests/unit_tests directory, run test.sh to compile and execute the tests.

(if you've installed premake5 in rive-runtime/build, you can run it with PATH=../../build:$PATH ./test.sh)

The tests live in rive/test. To add new tests, create a new xxx_test.cpp file here. The test harness will automatically pick up the new file.

There's a VSCode command provided to run tests from the Tasks: Run Task command palette.

Code formatting

rive-cpp uses clang-format, you can install it with brew on MacOS: brew install clang-format.

Memory checks

Note that if you‘re on MacOS you’ll want to install valgrind, which is somewhat complicated these days. This is the easiest solution (please PR a better one when it becomes available).

brew tap LouisBrunner/valgrind
brew install --HEAD LouisBrunner/valgrind/valgrind

You can now run the all the tests through valgrind by running test.sh memory.

Disassembly explorer

If you want to examine the generated assembly code per cpp file, install Disassembly Explorer in VSCode.

A disassemble task is provided to compile and preview the generated assembly. You can reach it via the Tasks: Run Task command palette or you can bind it to a shortcut by editing your VSCode keybindings.json:

[
    {
        "key": "cmd+d",
        "command": "workbench.action.tasks.runTask",
        "args": "disassemble"
    }
]