Chickadee 0.10.0 released

I'm happy to announce that Chickadee 0.10.0 has been released!

Chickadee is a game development toolkit for Guile. Chickadee aims to provide all the features that parenthetically inclined game developers need to make 2D and 3D games in Scheme.

This release is on the smaller side as I just haven’t had much time to work on Chickadee in the past 6 or so months, but I'm trying to stick with the routine of publishing a release before each Lisp Game Jam. The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2023 is starting on May 26th and if you're interested enough in Chickadee to read this blog post then you should considering joining in!

The biggest change in this release is not technical: Chickadee has been relicensed from GPLv3 to Apache 2.0. This change reflects the reality that copyleft isn’t a great strategy for something like a game development library because there are many options to choose from and all of the best ones use very liberal licenses like the zlib license. It used to be that there weren’t a lot of game libraries available for the Lisp family of languages, but that hasn’t been true for awhile. Most notably, Trial is a Common Lisp game engine that has been used to ship a very real and very good game called Kandria, is far more featureful than Chickadee, far more battle-tested, and is available under the zlib license. Apache 2.0 was chosen despite the bad name that really ought to be changed because it is a similarly liberal license but also covers software patent nonsense. If the GPL has been a blocker to using Chickadee for you in the past then I hope this license change fixes it.

Notable improvements and changes:

• Chickadee is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license rather than GPLv3+.
• New window event hooks added to run-game.
• Garbage generated in performance critical code has been significantly reduced (but not eliminated.)
• Syntax highlighting in manual code snippets.
• New #:smooth? argument for load-font.

Bug fixes:

• 9-patches now render texture regions properly.
• List of bundled libraries needed by chickadee bundle was inaccurate in 0.9.0 and has been fixed.
• #:audio keyword argument to make-source is no longer ignored.
• Loading unsupported types of PNG files no longer throws an exception when printing the error message.

source tarball: https://files.dthompson.us/chickadee/chickadee-0.10.0.tar.gz

signature: https://files.dthompson.us/chickadee/chickadee-0.10.0.tar.gz.asc

See the Chickadee project page for more information.

Bug reports, bug fixes, feature requests, and patches are welcomed.

Have fun!