Crash BASIC 1.37.0 Release Notes

written by Crash-tan

THE "YOUR GAME GETS ITS OWN .EXE NOW" UPDATE

Big one. Until today, "packaging" your game meant wrapping your
.crashcart next to a copy of the generic CrashPlayer and calling it a
day — your game launched through my player. Functional! But it was
never really yours. It had my name on the binary, my icon, my launcher
script holding your hand to the cart.

No more. As of 1.37.0, crashplayer package will compile a real,
standalone executable for your game — named after your game, wearing
your icon, opening its cart and nothing else, with no launcher script
in sight. And if your cart is sealed with an encryption key, the player
bakes that key in — so the executable and the cart are
cryptographically married. Your game can't be pried open by a stray
player, and your player won't run anyone else's cart. Tidy.

It "just works" the moment you have Rust installed. No setup, no flags,
no incantations. I notice cargo, I compile. You don't have one? Fine —
I quietly fall back to the old bundle-the-prebuilt-player path. No
toolchain, no problem; you just don't get the shiny custom binary.

crashplayer package, reborn

Same command you already know:

crashplayer package mygame.crashcart "My Game" -o dist/

…but when Rust is on the machine, the output is different — and better:

The window settings you pass — --window-size, --fullscreen,
--no-escape-exit — get compiled into the player now, instead of being
shouted at it from a launcher script. The icon comes from the icon.png
you embedded in your cart (the IDE already puts it there); --icon is
still around if you want to override it.

And on Windows that icon is now embedded in the .exe itself, so
Explorer and the taskbar show your art instead of a generic gear.

Locked players: one game, one key, one executable

This is the part the commercial folks have been waiting for.

Seal your cart with a 32-byte key, hand that same key to the packager,
and the compiled player embeds it:

crashplayer package mygame.crashcart "My Game" --key <64-hex-chars> -o dist/

Now:

• The player is the only thing that can decrypt and run that cart —
  the key never ships as a loose file, it's compiled into the binary.
• A cart sealed with a different key won't open in your player. A
  different player can't open your cart. Bound, both directions.
• The "Powered by Crash BASIC" splash and your license stamp still ride
  along inside the runtime where nobody can skip them. (Nice try.)

No key? Then nothing's locked — you get an ordinary compiled player for
an ordinary cart, and everything's all-zeros under the hood like always.
The key locks; it isn't the on-switch. cargo is the only on-switch.

The launcher learned about keys

The GUI packager (the 📦 Package tab) grew an Encryption key
field, because here's the thing about a locked cart: I can't even read
it to pull out the name and icon without the key. So now, when you drop
a sealed cart onto the Package tab and I can't crack it, I'll tell you:

🔒 This crashcart is encrypted — enter the key it was sealed with to read and package it.

Paste the key in, and watch the name and icon snap into place as I
decrypt it live. Then package away. Same key, two jobs — opening the cart
and getting baked into the player.

Under the hood (for the curious / the embedders)

To make all this possible without recompiling the entire universe every
time you package a game, the whole desktop runtime — window, splash,
interpreter, renderer, the lot — got lifted out of the player binary into
a proper reusable library (crashcore::desktop_runtime). The generated
players don't rebuild me from scratch; they link a prebuilt runtime
library that's published to the CDN alongside every CrashPlayer release,
one per platform. The exe your cargo build spits out is a tiny shim;
the 40-megabyte brain rides along beside it.

That library has a stable little C ABI too (crashcore-ffi), which means
"embed CrashBASIC inside your own native app" is now a real, if
early-days, thing. More on that another day.

Known issue (honesty corner)

If you leave the launcher window (not a game — the launcher itself)
sitting open for a long time on an older Intel integrated GPU, the
Intel OpenGL driver can throw a wobbly and crash (ig9icd64.dll, an
access violation). It's the launcher's GUI toolkit going through Intel's
crusty old GL driver, not anything in your game — games render through a
completely different path and are unaffected. Low-impact, on the list,
getting fixed in a patch. Until then: don't use my menu as a screensaver. 💤

Go make something. Lock it up. Ship it. — Crash-tan