A small utility program I wrote to help download Pokémon sprites for my Champs in the Making website.
This small program uses asynchronous Rust to download multiple sprite files at a time. It works by finding the names of various pokemon using my database and then combining them with a few common URLs to download the files from PokémonDB. It is set up in such a way that it will attempt to find a Scarlet / Violet sprite first. If it can't find that, it will fall back to a Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl sprite. And if it can't find that, it will fall back to a Pokémon Home (used to be called Pokémon Bank) sprite.
The program is currently hard-coded to only do one thing, but it could easily be extended to allow for custom user input if necessary.
- Set up Rust using rustup or update if it's already installed
- Download this repository
- Run the command
cargo run
This program ended up being much more interesting than I expected. While I have done some async development in the past, this is the first time I really got to use Rust for it. I really love how the language uses Lazy Futures instead of Eager ones. For some reason, that feels more intuitive to me.
The way the Rust async ecosystem is split into a bunch of competing crates is a little frustrating, but it makes sense given that it's still kind of an experimental area. I particularly liked that the futures crate had a for_each_coconcurrent method as a part of their implementation of StreamExt. I didn't completely understand why the program failed when I didn't specify a hard number for the number of futures allowed to run at once—I suppose that aspect of it hasn't been sorted out yet. It is a little weird to use a number that feels arbitrary there—I just sort of picked something that gave me good performance without causing problems.