A pack root is packed wholesale, and that is the right default - a game writes
`pack "assets"` and everything it opens is in the pack. What also goes in is
everything the game does NOT open: the preview renders a model pipeline leaves
beside its meshes, the intermediate a texture bake writes and never reads again,
the .blend the .gltf came out of. Nothing errors, nothing looks wrong, and the
app is simply bigger than the game. The only way out the manifest offered was
naming every file by hand, which is worse - a list that goes stale the day
someone adds a texture.
So `.packignore`, with gitignore's rules, because that is the file everyone
already knows. Anchored and floating patterns, `preview/` for directories only,
`*` and `?` stopping at a separator where `**` crosses one, `[a-z]` classes, `!`
re-includes with the last line winning, a deeper file beating a shallower one,
and no re-including out of an ignored directory.
The semantics are not claimed, they are checked: the implementation was diffed
against git itself over two fixtures - 35 paths, 19 patterns, nested ignore
files, directory negation, `[!0-9]` and `\#` escaping - and `git check-ignore`
and `ludic pack` agree on every path.
Two rules of its own, because a pack is not a working tree. `.packignore` is
never packed (nothing reads one at run time, and --no-ignore does not bring it
back). And it governs the project's own roots only: a package's resources - the
renderer's shaders above all - are added after the gather, so a stray `*.frag`
in a game's ignore file cannot quietly un-ship what it needs to draw anything.
`ludic pack` reports what it left out; `--no-ignore` packs everything so you can
see what a rule is costing. `ludic bundle` gathers through the same path, so the
two agree by construction.
`ludic build` produces a program. Double-clicked it opens a Terminal window, it
wears the generic executable icon, it calls itself whatever the file is called,
and it carries none of its assets. `ludic bundle` produces an application.
Everything it needs is in package.ludic, so the command takes no arguments: an
Info.plist and PkgInfo from `app` lines, an .icns built by sips and iconutil at
all ten sizes macOS asks for from a single source PNG, the asset pack in
Contents/Resources, and an ad-hoc signature - which is not optional on Apple
silicon, where an unsigned binary is killed rather than warned about. The bundle
identifier falls back to the package path reversed, so a project that never
thinks about it still gets a defensible one instead of two apps sharing a key
Launch Services hangs the Dock, saved state and permissions off.
A bundled game is moved to ~/Library/Application Support/<name> before main,
because Finder starts a .app with its working directory at "/" where no save
could ever be written. Reads come out of the pack, writes land somewhere real
and per-user, and the game's save code needs no change and no platform
knowledge.
The splash is the other half of looking like an application. A game that loads
165 MB spends a visible moment doing it with nothing on screen, which from the
outside is indistinguishable from a launch that failed. splash_show puts a
borderless window up from the same constructor that mounts the pack - before
main, so it appears while the process is still starting rather than after the
slow part it exists to cover - and reads the artwork out of the pack like any
other asset. It turns the run loop enough times to be mapped and composited
there and then; once composited the backing store survives a busy main thread,
so it stays up for the whole load.
Nothing hides it automatically. Only the game knows when its first real frame is
ready, and a splash that vanishes before that leaves the same black gap it was
covering, so the game calls App.splash_hide(). Headless there is no splash and
the call lowers to nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
