So how does one talk about GameDev these days?

ObPreface: I'm an old-school gamedev/coder, that has never found an IDE beneficial so far yet, still hand-write my Makefiles instead of using autoconf, etc. Because I've never actively sought out 'invasively cross-platform' support, if it wasn't on x86 or arm running a modern *NIX-like, DOS, or eventually Windows, I flat didn't care.

To the point that my 'gamedev' for a Windows game in 2024? Uses the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run MinGW locally on the system and cross-compile back out of Linux into Windows binaries again. A fun aside: Windows binaries run just fine inside of WSL instances, so you don't even need to copy things out to run when testing things, just run it in place in the build output directory no problem. And add an exception to Windows Defender for the appropriate directory underneath \\wsl.localhost\ for whatever Linux distro you go with.

( That said... let's start talking about status, plans, and progress. )

With that out of the way I'll go into archive formats in my next post, because that will be better suited to discussing theory and options before we start poking at actual implementation details.