Chickadee 0.7.0 released

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

Hi again everyone,

I've just released Chickadee 0.7.0! Chickadee is a general purpose
game toolkit for Guile.

Major changes:
* Improved tile map rendering. Maps now render faster and support tile
flipping and animations as specified by the Tiled map file format.
* Improved 9-patch rendering. In previous releases, rendering a
9-patch took 9 GPU draw calls, but now it only takes 1. Additionally,
the scaled parts of the 9-patch may be tiled instead of stretched.
* Improve blending support. The blend mode API now supports specifying
the full range of possible OpenGL blending configurations rather than
just a few hardcoded ones.
* The game window is now resizable.
* Chickadee now uses SDL2's high resolution timer resulting in more
accurate timing measurements.
* Rendering engine overhaul. Under the hood, the system that manages
OpenGL state has been completely rewritten to be more maintainable.
* New dynamic geometry API for packing OpenGL vertex buffers. Another
under the hood change for maintainability. Everything that generates
geometry dynamically (sprites, particles, vector paths, etc.) now uses
this API instead of each having their own special algorithm with its
own special limitations and bugs.

Chickadee is alpha software, and as such this release contains some
breaking API changes. Most notably, 9-patch rendering has been moved
from the sprite module to its own dedicated module, so any calls to
draw-nine-patch need to be replaced with calls to draw-9-patch in the
(chickadee graphics 9-patch) module.

More information can be found on the project homepage:
https://dthompson.us/projects/chickadee.html

Download: https://files.dthompson.us/chickadee/chickadee-0.7.0.tar.gz
Signature: https://files.dthompson.us/chickadee/chickadee-0.7.0.tar.gz.asc

P.S. - The 2021 Spring Lisp Game Jam
(https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2021) is starting on April
16th! It's a 10 day event where participants create a game using their
preferred Lisp dialect. If this sounds interesting to you, consider
making a game with Leo Prikler's visual novel engine Tsukundere
(https://gitlab.com/leoprikler/tsukundere) or Chickadee.

- Dave