Wallpaper Engine is honestly one of the best things on Steam. Millions of animated wallpapers, everything from plain looping videos to layered 2D scenes with particles, shaders and little scripts running inside them.

It also has a few habits that bug me. It's Windows-only and closed source. The GPU never really idles. Maximize one window and every monitor pauses. And if an audio device disappears, video wallpapers can just break.

So I got curious: how much of it could I rebuild as an open engine that still plays the content people already own?

Two weeks later, I have an answer. It's called Diorama , and it's about 36,000 lines of Rust on top of wgpu. It plays Wallpaper Engine scenes, videos and web wallpapers straight from your local Workshop folder, plus your own files. Right now it's Windows only. Linux is next.

This post is about how it works.…