Crash BASIC 1.22.0 Release Notes

written by Crash-tan

THE "SHIP IT YOURSELF" UPDATE

Cross-platform game packaging, built right into CrashPlayer — plus a couple of runtime quality-of-life fixes that came out of wiring it up.

New crate: crashpackager

One library, two entry points, one set of bundle outputs.

• crashplayer package <crashcart> — new subcommand on CrashPlayer itself. Auto-fills the game name from the crashcart's manifest, uses your currently-running CrashPlayer as the bundled binary for your host platform (skipping a CDN roundtrip), downloads artifacts for other platforms from the CrashPlayer CDN on demand.
• crashpackager — standalone CLI with the same flags. Drop-in for CI/GitHub Actions, no dependency on the full CrashPlayer player.
• New "📦 Package" tab in the CrashPlayer launcher GUI — drop a .crashcart onto the window, pick platforms, hit Package. Live step log, same output as the CLI.

Outputs per platform:

• Windows: folder with crashplayer.exe, your crashcart, a .cmd launcher, icon.ico (if you supplied a PNG), and a README.
• macOS: proper .app bundle with Info.plist, launch shim, dylib symlinks wired up. Icon conversion via sips/iconutil when building on macOS.
• Linux: folder with the binary, .sh launcher, .desktop entry for menu integration, optional icon.

Packager reads icon.png out of the crashcart when the GUI is used and auto-fills the icon field — no separate step to export an icon if you embedded one.

One architectural tradeoff worth being explicit about: packaging for macOS requires being on macOS (DMG extraction uses hdiutil). Rather than silently degrade, the packager returns a clean SKIP: packaging for macOS requires a macOS host on non-macOS hosts. Answer for cross-platform CI: use a macOS GitHub Actions runner for the macOS leg of your matrix.

Window title reflects the game

Window title is no longer hardcoded to "CrashBASIC" / "CrashCore" / "CrashGFX Text Mode" depending on which code path initialized the screen. Instead:

• At crashcart load, the in-header manifest's game_name is read and installed as the GraphicsBus's default window title.
• init_default_screen (no SCREEN call), SCREEN w, h without a title arg, and SCREEN TEXT all use that name as their default.
• Programs that pass an explicit title to SCREEN still win — user intent trumps default, and the title can still be updated mid-run because winit's window.set_title is called on subsequent CreateWindow commands.
• Splash phase also uses the game name (fixes the "splash window flashes 'CrashBASIC' then updates" flicker on supported platforms).

Launcher GUI rebuild

The launcher window was 1024×576 with a single-row of controls crammed along the bottom. Now it's 1024×340 with:

• Header artwork embedded as the backdrop (the whole window IS the art).
• Tabbed interface: ▶ Play and 📦 Package.
• Both tabs use a 2-column label/control grid with consistent spacing so they read the same.
• Window size + fullscreen live on both tabs — pick once, applies to whichever action (launch or package) you take.
• Drag-and-drop a .crashcart onto either tab; the Package tab also auto-extracts and uses the embedded icon.png if there is one.
• Title bar reads CrashPlayer v1.22.0 dev © 2026 Crash Continuum LLC inline instead of two separate overlays.

macOS launcher hang fix

Launching crashplayer with no args from a terminal on macOS used to hang silently — the Finder-AppleEvent capture path calls NSApp.run(), and the scheduled performSelector:afterDelay: stop message doesn't reliably fire outside a proper .app bundle. The launcher reached eframe::run_native only when the binary was Finder-launched from inside the bundle; terminal launches sat in the Cocoa run loop forever.

Fixed: the AppleEvent capture now checks stdin.is_terminal() first. If you're at a TTY, no Finder event is coming, so we skip the capture entirely. Finder-launched .app bundles still hit the capture path normally.

Misc

• Eight new unit tests for packager platform helpers (sanitize_name, etc.), CDN manifest parsing, host-binary detection.
• build-dist.sh / build-crashplayer-dist.sh untouched — still the source of truth for producing release artifacts that then get bundled by the packager.

Cumulative changelog for 1.20.0 → 1.21.4 (the preceding arc) lives in docs/CHANGELOG_1.20.0-to-1.21.4.md if you're catching up.