Pixel Art Library

Introduction

PAL is a portable graphics/sound library mainly intended for creating modern 2d games (yes, they do still exist) with Common Lisp. Altough it is built on top of SDL and OpenGL it is not just a wrapper for those but provides an easy to use, higher level API that doesn't require any knowledge of the underlying libraries. So, if you want a full SDL or OpenGL bindings you might want to look here or here.

Pixel Art Library uses CFFI to interface with the native libraries and it should work with all Common Lisps that fully support it. It is mostly tested on SBCL and CLisp on Windows and Linux.

PAL is released under MIT license

News

• 31.10.2007 PAL v1.1 released, PAL-GUI v0.1 release. Some work done on the manual.
• 28.07.2007 PAL v1.0 released, lots of fixes and improvements, API is now frozen. Read it all from the changes.txt.
• 03.07.2007 Release 3, "stable beta". New home at common-lisp.net.

Downloads

You can check out the latest version from CVS. Also browsable here.

Latest PAL release can be found here.

Documentation

Currently there is only a draft manual available, so if you have problems please ask in the mailing list.

Some bugs and limitations

• There seems to be problems with Linux + some graphics cards when trying to open and close PAL several times in the same lisp session, see the readme.txt for more info.
• You need to use HGE's bitmap font builder to create the fonts resources. This is annoying and should be fixed at some point.
• Under Windows you should use the included SDL_mixer.dll, there seems to be some bugs in the latest version.
• Not tested on OS X. Probably doesn't work, contributions welcome.

Mailing lists

• PAL-dev, bug reports, patches and questions welcome.
• PAL-announce, news about latest releases.

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