less_retarded_wiki/anarch.md

Anarch

Anarch is a LRS/suckless, free as in freedom first person 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, I am overall quite happy about how it turned out, 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 expansion 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's engine uses raycastlib, a LRS library for advanced 2D ray casting which is often called a "pseudo 3D". This method 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 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.