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Welcome to the Pixie Game Engine

Click here to browse the online documentation for the Pixie Game Engine.The Amazing Adventures of Kassandra, a little RPG using Pixie.

Colossus is proud to present Pixie, a small but powerful C++ library for making simple games and graphics applications. It is especially suited for pixel art, as it is optimized for palettized bitmaps (256 colors each, and up to 65 000 colors simultaneous on the screen). The graphics engine even takes extra care to display the final screens with no distortion or blurring of the pixels, to keep all that pixel art nice and crisp.

 

Feel the Beat

There is more to Pixie than just graphics. It also support music playback, in OGG format for great sound with great compression, as well as the MOD format and its variations (S3M, XM, 669 etc) and even YM (for playing back music from the Atari ST, great stuff!).

 

Baby Viking and the Alien Invasion, an arcade action game using PixieRun it Here, There and Everywhere

Pixie is also written for maximum compatibility. All rendering is performed in software, which gives maximum flexibility and good performance, using DirectDraw 3 to present the final image to the user. If DirectDraw does not exist or fails in some way when being used, Pixie  will fall back to use the Windows GDI interface to draw to the screen. Sound is being done through DirectSound 3, and supports streaming sound from file. All of this is done through a carefully crafted platform abstraction layer, specifically designed to be easy to work with and very easy to convert for other platforms.

 

So What's This Going to Cost Me?

Midwinter Rites, an oldschool text adventure using Pixie.Poser Content Manager, an application using Pixie.Maybe one of the best points of Pixie is its pricing and licensing. Here's the deal: Pixie and  its source code is free, free as in speech, free as in beer, simply free :-) It is placed in the public domain, so you can do what you want with it and use it for any purpose, even commercial, and you are free to create any derivative work you feel like. (A note: the YM playback code is used under a GPL license, and is not public domain.)

Hope you will enjoy it, and feel free to contact me if you want to comment on or discuss anything to do with Pixie.

 

 

Tutorials

Pixie Tutorial 1 - Hello World

Pixie Tutorial 2 - Bouncing Ball

Downloads

Midwinter Rites Source Code - 967 KB. The source code for Pixie and Midwinter Rites.

Baby Viking Source Code - 923 KB. The source code for Pixie and Baby Viking and the Alien Invasion.

Kassandra Source Code - 938 KB. The source code for Pixie and The Amazing Adventures of Kassandra.

Poser Content Manager Source Code - 1735 KB. The source code for Pixie and Poser Content Manager.

Pixie Game Engine -  905 KB. The full source code for Pixie along with an empty template project.