prosperon/website/content/features/_index.md

title

title
Features

Compositor-Driven Rendering

Prosperon separates what to draw from how to draw it. Your game registers sprites, shapes, text, tilemaps, and particles with film2d. At render time, the compositor queries these drawables, organizes them into planes and layers, applies effects, and produces a command list that the GPU backend executes.

This means:

• Automatic batching — sprites sharing a texture and material are drawn together
• Layer sorting — explicit ordering, y-sorting, or engine-optimized ordering per layer
• Effects pipeline — bloom (threshold + multi-pass blur), masks, custom shader passes
• Presentation modes — letterbox, integer scale, or stretch to window
• Inspectable — the render plan is plain data you can log and debug

Duck-Typed Everything

Prosperon's API uses duck typing throughout. If an object has type: 'sprite', a position, and an image, it's a valid sprite. No base classes to inherit from, no interfaces to implement.

This extends to the entire engine: anything that "looks like" a camera can be used as one. Anything with an on_input method can be possessed by a player. This makes prototyping extremely fast — you can test ideas with plain objects before committing to any structure.

Actor-Based Game Logic

Games are written in Pit, an actor language where:

• Each program (.ce) runs as an actor with its own heap
• Actors communicate via message passing (send, $receiver)
• Work is scheduled with $delay (one-shot) and $clock (periodic)
• Actors spawn children with $start and terminate with $stop
• Modules (.cm) return frozen values — shared, immutable APIs

This gives you concurrency without threads, isolation without overhead, and a natural way to structure game systems.

Multi-Device Input

The input system normalizes keyboard, mouse, gamepad, and touch into named actions. A default action map handles common UI actions (up/down/confirm/cancel), and you define game-specific actions on top.

Features:

• User pairing — automatically pair devices to players, or explicit assignment
• Control stacks — possess entities, push/pop UI layers, block input propagation
• Emacs-style keybindings — C-a for ctrl+a, M-x for alt+x
• Gesture recognition — swipe detection on touch devices
• Device-aware icons — show the right button prompts for the current input device

Asset Management

Prosperon finds and loads assets by name. Ask for "slime" and it searches the path for slime.png, slime.qoi, slime.ase, etc. Supported formats:

Category	Formats
Images	PNG, QOI, GIF, JPG, Aseprite
Audio	WAV, FLAC, MP3, QOA
Fonts	TTF

Assets are cached after first load. The virtual filesystem (PhysFS) supports mounting ZIP archives for mods and DLC.

Audio

Simple audio playback with PCM caching and voice mixing:

var audio = use('sound')
var voice = audio.play("explosion.wav")
voice.vol = 0.5
voice.loop = true
voice.stopped = true  // stop it

Decodes to a uniform sample rate on load. Multiple voices mix independently.

Text-Based Everything

Prosperon projects are entirely text:

• Game logic: .cm and .ce script files
• Config: plain JavaScript objects
• No binary scene files until you ship

This means git diffs are readable, merges are clean, and AI tools can understand your entire project.

Tiny Footprint

Prosperon is a single executable. No installer, no SDK, no 2GB download. Drop it in your project folder and run. Version it alongside your code. Build on any machine with the same binary.