2.7 KiB
Licar
Licar (short for libre car), also known as the best racing game ever made, is a fully public domain, free software and free culture 3D racing game by drummyfish, highly inspired by the proprietary game Trackmania. Licar is made in similar fashion to Anarch (another drummyfish's game) but is a little more bloated: it is a fully 3D game made with small3dlib and tinyphysicsengine and although it's not the most minimalist game under the Sun, it is still very much KISS, extremely portable, not using any third party libraries etc. The git repo is currently at http://git.coom.tech/drummyfish/Licar; version 1.0 of the game was released on 25.06.2025 after 329 commits.
The game's features include a fully 3D, completely deterministic physics, software rendering, replays, ghost cars and custom maps (written in a plain ASCII text format).
Drummyfish made Licar to fulfill one of his long held dreams of making a Trackmania clone, for he used to love the game but had to abandon it once he started abstaining from proprietary software. The project also offered an opportunity to put two of drummyfish's libraries to good use and to demonstrate some of LRS principles on a bigger project -- although the game isn't truly an LRS ideal, it still shows how powerful minimalism can be, even when applied to a relatively mainstream vision of what a video game is. By this it can potentially reach more normies.
Just like Anarch, Licar adheres to basic LRS programming practices, for example it is fully written in C99, uses no build system, no third party libraries, doesn't rely on standard library, doesn't use floating point and embeds its configuration and assets right in the source code (except for optional music and external data file). The whole game was made completely from scratch, including all assets, the text font, recording own musical samples for custom sound font for the soundtrack etc. The whole code has around 25 thousand lines of code. Needless to say the game is very portable end efficient as a result: the compiled binary (including embedded assets) has usually around 300 kB, the program runs with less than 500 kB RAM on CPUs clocking even around 100 MHz. It was even run on Pokitto, albeit in an extremely limited way.
TODO: more