So I’ve been giving some thought as to how I would approach allowing people to bundle their games up as self-contained executables for sale/distribution. Would like to share my thoughts on this.
One idea I had was to simply ship a “redistributable” version of TM-16, where you’d just throw in your game, modify a skeleton script to boot your game instead of the shell, and then modify the EXE itself (adding a new icon, etc). For a couple of reasons, though, I don’t really like that idea. It seems a little messy.
The other idea I’ve had was to turn the VM into an embeddable library. This is also a bit of a challenge. Thing is, the core VM save for a couple of native dependencies is written in D. I could make it be a D library: a simple D container could consume this without a whole lot of effort, but other containers (like C/C++/Rust) would have a little more trouble as they would also have to worry about embedding and initializing the D runtime libraries.
I’m kind of leaning towards the latter, but wonder if anyone else has opinions on how this should work.