Lichen 1.5: main codebase now, demo later (in a few weeks maybe)

Hello!

I’m putting out Lichen 1.5’s main codebase now, mostly for archival purposes.

1.5 includes most of the underlying code that make Lichen tick, as well as some art and most of the soundtrack. It does NOT include the game itself, because that is not even in a demo state yet. Lichen will hopefully be in a state worthy of a demo in a few weeks. Until then, here’s some free code and assets to pick through, if that’s your kind of thing.

The rest of this text is a word-for-word copy of the changelog, which you can find in the code/lichen-1.5 folder (after you extract the .zip, of course).

Enjoy. - Nathan

Lichen 1.5 Nathanael Specht 2024 November 8

Good Parts:

• keybindinator(). Translates mouse and keyboard event codes through keybindings into game event codes. For when you want to separate game logic (ex: player-forward) from SDL_Event logic (ex: SDL_SCANCODE_W). Self-contained in lichen-input. Refer to the code in main for an example of how to use this.
• A basic .ogg audio player. For when you want to play music and sound effects, and you don’t want to deal with SDL’s audio API. Audio mixing happens in its own thread. Self-contained in lichen-audio.
• Some code for framerate-independent game ticks. Most of this is in lichen-time, and the rest is in main.
• Some code in lichen-graphics to load .png files into SDL_Surfaces.
• Some linear-interpolation code in lichen-graphics.

Not-so-good Parts:

• A very silly 3d renderer. Makes use of my own z-buffer, CPU-side alpha masks for “Textures”, and pixel-by-pixel CPU-side rendering to the window. Everything is z-buffered, including text. Does not include frivolous things like rotations, shading, color blending, or translucency. For when you want 3d rendering for your cross-platform game, but you can’t for the life of you figure out how to GPU-render on your Windows VM without everything crashing! For all other use cases, I highly suggest anything but this. In lichen-graphics.

Notes:

• All code here is mostly bug-free (I don’t have extensive tests yet, so this is mostly a “trust-me bro”).
• There’s not much of a game at this stage either, and I’m mostly releasing this for archival purposes.
• You’re free to use the code however you wish, of course.