DESCRIPTION

Linkout is an interpreter for a programming language (called Lot) designed for creating 2D games.

The end goal of this project is to provide a language that makes it easy to create 2D games quickly, with some advanced features such as the following:

• Customizable controls.
• An integrated level editor.
• Game logic that works the same regardless of the machine or interpreter on which it is executed.
• Automatic recording of "replays" of all gameplay and level editing, which can be used to later review those actions, including the entire state of the game for the duration of the replay.

Linkout is not yet complete, and it does not yet provide those features.

LICENSE

Linkout is licensed, as a whole, under the GNU GPL version 3 or greater, which should be included as gpl.txt. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses.

In addition, a more permissive license may be available for some parts of the package.

The Nini library, which may be included in binary form, is available under the MIT license (see http://nini.sourceforge.net/license.php).

All included documentation and code written in Lot is licensed under the MIT License. The intent is that you can write a game in Lot, using any tools included in Linkout, and fully control the copyright of that game and all of its assets.

It is possible to legally distribute Linkout alongside other programs, including a program written in Lot, for which Linkout acts as an interpreter, without licensing the other programs under the GPL. This is similar to distributing DOSBox, a DOS interpreter licensed under the GPL, alongside a proprietary DOS program. Therefore, if you obtained Linkout as part of a larger package with another name, you may not have any rights to the other parts of that package under the GPL.

Also, please be advised that replays as they are recorded by default include all information necessary to run the game in the same way in another location. That means that if you record a replay of a program, the replay will contain some or all of that program's code. If that program is proprietary, this may affect your rights to distribute replays.

COMPILATION

To compile Linkout, you will need MonoDevelop, GTK#, and Nini. You should open clr/Linkout/Linkout.sln using MonoDevelop and use it to compile the package.

I have not yet included a method to install Linkout properly. I use the included create-package.sh to generate binaries that I expect to work on any system with a .NET interpreter (either Microsoft .NET or Mono) and GTK#, but you may have to modify it before it is useful to you. Also note that you must compile the program using MonoDevelop before running create-package.sh because only MonoDevelop is able to do some required processing of stetic files.

The create-package.sh script does roughly this:

• Generate binary release versions of all assemblies in Linkout, and put those in bin/.
• Add Nini.dll (compiled from the separate Nini project) and linkout.ini (included) to bin/.
• Set the 32-bit flag on LinkoutGTK.exe. This causes Microsoft .NET on Windows to always run that exe in a 32-bit process. This is necessary because GTK# on Windows only functions in 32-bit.
• Write a string identifying this revision in Git to a file named REVISION.
• Add the directories named bin, specs, prototypes, and tests, and the files at the top level, to a zip file.

CONTENTS

All of the code for the Linkout interpreter is included in the clr/ subdirectory of the source code. It is divided into the following namespaces:

• Linkout.Lisp: A generic library to encapsulate the non-game-specific functionality of the interpreter. It was not designed to be a shared library, and therefore it lacks documentation and a stable interface.
• Linkout: A library including the game-specific functionality of the interpreter.
• LinkoutConsole: A simple command-line interface to the Linkout interpreter.
• LinkoutDrawing: A library containing code for rendering a frame using System.Drawing. This will likely be deprecated and replaced with OpenGL, as System.Drawing performs very poorly so far.
• LinkoutGTK: A GTK+ interface to the Linkout interpreter, which unlike the console interface is usable for playing games.

The specs/ directory contains documentation of the Lot language, for implementors (mostly me).

The tests/ directory contains Lot code that I use to test the interpreter.

The prototypes/ directory contains random Lot demos that might be possible to develop into a game.

CONTACT

See https://github.com/madewokherd/linkout2

The author of this project is https://github.com/madewokherd