Tiny train tracks for the bottom of your desktop 🚅

This was a fun weekend+ project (bigger than a "true" weekend project, but most of it was done in a weekend), just for joy and whimsy :)

This project use the excellent Ebitengine, a lightweight game engine for the go programming language. The assets where made using libresprite

Both the code and the assets are provided under the MIT License, meaning you can remix, reuse, modify this project, but a copy of the license must be included with the licensed material.

This project was made without the use of AI.

Downloading the executables

You can download the executable from the latest release

Current supported os/architectures:

• darwin/amd64
• darwin/arm64
• darwin/universal
• linux/amd64
• windows/amd64

Huge thanks to Yara for providing the Mac versions <3

Building from source

To build this project from source, you will need a go installation version 1.24.0 or above. you can follow the instruction on the official go.dev website to install go. (if you dont already have it on your machine)

you can type go version to check you have the correct version of go installed

Now that you have go installed, lets get started:

First, Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/nrissot/desktop_train.git

Then, you can simply run

go build

(Notes): (on linux, Ebitengine require the gcc C compiler, and extra dependancy. please check out this install guide to learn more)

and yipie, you did it :) double-click on the executable or execute it from your terminal and that's it, enjoy the trains

Configs / Stats

upon the first launch of the app, it'll create a .desktop_train/ directory. This directory contains two files config.json and stats.json.

the config.json file contains 4 fields:

{
	"Window_y_offset": 39, 		// offset in pixel from the bottom of the monitor screen 
	"Only_Clean_Tracks": false, // should the tracks use only the plain version of the tile ? (no variants)
	"Tracks_Visible": true,		// should the tracks be visible ?
	"Log_Statistics": true		// should desktop train log it's statistics in the stats.json file ?
}

the stat.json store the amount of trains that passed on your screen (purely informative, doesnt serve any purpose (kinda like this project actually, it just sit there and look fun))

{
	"Train_Counts": 1408
}