Creating The Tiles From Rust

The tiles in the game should have a random placement. We'll need to add the rand dependency to Cargo.toml for the randomization, using the cargo command.

cargo add rand@0.8

What we'll do is take the list of tiles declared in the .slint language, duplicate it, and shuffle it. We'll do so by accessing the memory_tiles property through the Rust code. For each top-level property, a getter and a setter function is generated - in our case get_memory_tiles and set_memory_tiles. Since memory_tiles is an array in the .slint language, it's represented as a Rc<dyn slint::Model>. We can't modify the model generated by the .slint, but we can extract the tiles from it, and put it in a VecModel which implements the Model trait. VecModel allows us to make modifications and we can use it to replace the static generated model.

We modify the main function like so:

fn main() {
    use slint::Model;

    let main_window = MainWindow::new().unwrap();

    // Fetch the tiles from the model
    let mut tiles: Vec<TileData> = main_window.get_memory_tiles().iter().collect();
    // Duplicate them to ensure that we have pairs
    tiles.extend(tiles.clone());

    // Randomly mix the tiles
    use rand::seq::SliceRandom;
    let mut rng = rand::thread_rng();
    tiles.shuffle(&mut rng);

    // Assign the shuffled Vec to the model property
    let tiles_model = std::rc::Rc::new(slint::VecModel::from(tiles));
    main_window.set_memory_tiles(tiles_model.into());

    main_window.run().unwrap();
}

Note that we clone the tiles_model because we'll use it later to update the game logic.

Running this gives us a window on the screen that now shows a 4 by 4 grid of rectangles, which can show or obscure the icons when clicking. There's only one last aspect missing now, the rules for the game.

Slint Memory Game Tutorial (Rust)

Creating The Tiles From Rust