`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>
A Ludic game opened its assets by a path relative to the working directory, so
`build/mygame` ran only from the project root and there was nothing to give
anyone but "the binary, and also this whole tree". A game is not one file, but
shipping it has to be.
`ludic pack` writes a .lpak: a header, a name-sorted entry table, a name heap
and the blobs, 16-byte aligned. Entries are stored rather than compressed - PNG,
JPEG and glTF binary arrive compressed already, and a decompressor on the load
path would spend CPU to make the file no smaller.
The reader is spliced into the compiler at the one place every asset in a Ludic
program comes through: file_open. gltf_load, tex_load, Audio.load, Fs.read_text
and the renderer's own shader loads all bottom out there, so routing it through
@lp_pak_open reaches every one of them without any of them knowing. A read of a
packed path becomes an fmemopen over the mapped bytes; everything else is the
fopen it always was. Fs.exists and Fs.size consult the packs too, so a game that
guards a load with Fs.exists keeps finding its assets once they are packed.
The pack is mmap'd rather than read: 165 MB of textures costs one syscall at
boot and pages in only what is touched. @lp_pak_boot runs from
@llvm.global_ctors, before main, so a pack is mounted before the game's first
line - and it reads packs.index, a plain list, so the mount order is explicit
and a later pack shadows an earlier one.
Without a packs.index nothing mounts and every open goes to the filesystem
exactly as before, which is every `ludic run` during development. Packing is a
shipping step and is invisible until you ship.
The compiler reproduces itself byte-exactly and the C-free bootstrap from the
seed still holds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
