less_retarded_wiki/anarch.md

Anarch

Poor man's Doom?

Anarch is a LRS/suckless, free as in freedom first man shooter game similar to Doom, written by drummyfish. It has been designed to follow the LRS principles very closely and set an example of how games, and software in general, should be written. It also tries to be compatible with principles of less retarded society, i.e. it promotes anarchism, anti-capitalism, pacifism etc.

The repo is available at https://codeberg.org/drummyfish/Anarch or https://gitlab.com/drummyfish/anarch. Some info about the game can also be found at the libregamewiki: https://libregamewiki.org/Anarch.

{ Though retrospectively I can of course see many mistakes and errors about the game and though it's not nearly perfect, I am overall quite happy about how it turned out for what it is, it got some attention among the niche of suckless lovers and many people have written me they liked the game and its philosophy. Many people have ported it to their favorite platforms, some have even written me their own expansions of the game lore, tricks they found etc. If you're among them, thank you :) ~drummyfish }

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screenshot from the terminal version

Anarch has these features:

• It is completely public domain free software/free culture under CC0, including all code and assets which were all made from scratch by drummyfish.
• It has extremely low hardware demands, fitting into 256 kB (WITH assets, with mods and compression even 60 kB) and requiring only about 32 kB of RAM and 50 MHz CPU. GPUs need not apply.
• It is written in pure C99 without any dependencies (not even the standard library). It uses no dynamic heap allocation and no floating point.
• It is extremely portable, written against a very tiny I/O layer. As such it has been ported to many platforms such as GNU/Linux, BSD, Pokitto, browser JavaScript, Raspberry Pi and many others.
• It is written in a single compilation unit and without any build system.
• It is created with only free software.
• It is well documented.
• Mods and configs follow suckless philosophy: mods are just diffs, config is part of source code.
• Gameplay-wise Anarch offers 10 levels and multiple enemy and weapon types. It supports mouse where available.

Technical Details

Anarch is written in C99.

The game's engine uses raycastlib, a LRS library for advanced 2D raycasting; this would be called "pseudo 3D" graphics. The same method (raycasting) was used by Wolf3D but Anarch improves it to allow different levels of floor and ceiling which makes it look a little closer to Doom (which however used a different methods called BSP rendering).

The whole codebase (including raycastlib AND the assets converted to C array) has fewer than 15000 lines of code. Compiled binary is about 200 kB big, though with compression and replacing assets with procedurally generated ones (one of several Anarch mods) the size was made as low as 57 kB.

The music in the game is procedurally generated using bytebeat.

All images in the game (textures, sprites, ...) are 32x32 pixels, compressed by using a 16 color subpalette of the main 256 color palette, and are stored in source code itself as simple arrays of bytes -- this eliminates the need for using files and allows the game to run on platforms without a file system.

The game uses a tiny custom-made 4x4 bitmap font to render texts.

Saving/loading is optional, in case a platform doesn't have persistent storage. Without saving all levels are simply available from the start.

In the suckless fashion, mods are recommended to be made and distributed as patches.

Bad Things (Retrospective)

The following is a retrospective look on what could have been done better, written by drummyfish (a potential project for someone might be to implement these and so make the game even more awesome):

• It might have been better to write it in C89 than C99 for better portability.
• Sound effects would likely be better procedurally generated just like music. It would be less code and data in ROM and the quality probably wouldn't be that much worse as the samples are shitty quality anyway.
• The palette used might have rather been RGB 332 instead of the custom palette, again less code and less data in ROM, though visual quality might suffer a bit and things like diminishing colors might require some extra code or look up tables (like in Doom).
• The python scripts for data conversion should be rewritten to C. Using python was just laziness.
• Raycastlib itself has some issues, but those should be addressed separately.
• The game is really a bit too hard (tho this can easily be changed in settings) and gameplay is not great (like explosions pushing player instantly, not too good, too few items, player often lacks ammo/health, ...), movement inertia could be in vanilla game to make it feel nicer etc.
• Some of the code is awkward, like SFG_recomputePlayerDirection was an attempt at optimization but it's probably optimization in a wrong place that does nothing, ...
• Some details like having separate arrays for different types of images -- there is no reason for that, it would be better to just have one huge array of all images; maybe even have ALL data in one huge array of bytes.
• ...