Now With the Power of Rhythm
A faithful launcher for composable games.
Team Rhytick is joining the development of Alicorn, favoring its performance and design philosophy. We're adjusting the future design of Alicorn as a response.
Tip
Rhytick is a club focusing on presenting open and fun music games (which explains quiet a lot why they want Alicorn for launching support — the charts!).
TL;DR: It's no longer block-game-only.
We're extending Alicorn to become a general-purpose launcher framework to support distribution, maintenance and community integration for composable games & applications. "Composable" here refers to products that require many components (e.g. libraries, mods, assets) to be assembled together before they can be run. Such products are usually customizable and benefit from launcher features.
In the future, Alicorn will focus on providing hardened, performant and size-efficient launcher infrastructure, while allowing users who wish to deploy their product to customize it using protocols and modules.
The main change will be stability and update frequency. In particular, commits will be first added to an internal repo, and will be mirrored to the GitHub only after being audited. This means that nightly commits might not be immediately, but will be eventually, available to all.
Another major change will be less specialization. For example, you might no longer see a pixelated block-style welcome screen in the future. Instead, Alicorn may present a list of built-in games for you to select.
Alicorn will stay:
- Free as in freedom. Alicorn will continue to be open & libre to all, with no hidden or proprietary features. Rhytick release their games with the same vision, so we're betting on them!
- Open and friendly. We still process issues, pull requests and discussions actively.
- Clean and safe. No ads, no hidden trackers, no data collection for marketing.
- Here. So long as Sparklight's account stay available, we won't move this repository elsewhere.
- Standalone. Rhytick is collaborating with, rather than acquiring, Alicorn. Alicorn won't subject to code of conduct, confidentiality rules, contribution requirement or other management policies of Rhytick.
Note
Alicorn may, however, present the name or logo of Rhytick in a fair form according to their contribution.
Warning
Contrail is currently incomplete.
We're actively developing towards it. However, before this alert is removed, content written below may not be fully represented in the application.
Want to get things landed faster? Get involved by opening issues or pull requests!
"Contrail" is the codename of Alicorn 4.x (aka. Alicorn R). It's a major rewrite of the codebase aiming to improve the performance and stability of Alicorn. Highlights include:
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Bye bye, Electron.
Electron has been our good old friend since the first day Alicorn is built. Fairly speaking, Electron is suitable for almost any desktop app but game launchers. Chromium eats memory and takes up space in modpacks, and while not necessarily making Alicorn slow, it's indeed one of the major blockers of extending the use cases.
As part of Contrail, Alicorn is phasing Electron out progressively, and will completely drop it at completion. A new native framework, plus some helper crates, will serve the UI of Alicorn.
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Fewer errors.
What Rust brings to Alicorn is not only memory safety, it's the philosophy "be prepared for it or forbid doing so". Problems shall happen much less often in Contrail, and at the very least, Alicorn can quit with a proper reason when something goes really wrong.
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Human checked.
Vibe a launcher is easy. Vibe a checked one is not. Starting from Contrail, each line of code in Alicorn will be reviewed and audited much more carefully, in order to prevent bugs and hidden costs.
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Always here.
Each feature previously included in Alicorn will continue to be supported, surviving refactors and rewrites. Time files, people changes, but Alicorn will always be here.
Alicorn covers all platforms that the game it launches officially runs on. For a particular subset of unsupported game configurations, Alicorn can also try to run them on unsupported platforms or architectures, but it's highly experimental and brittle.
See BUILDING.md.
- Copyright © 2021-2022 Andy K Rarity Sparklight ("ThatRarityEG")
- Copyright © 2024-2026 Ted Gao ("skjsjhb")
- Copyright © 2026 Team Rhytick
This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3, or a later version published by the Free Software Foundation, at your opinion.
Alicorn is a work collaborated with Team Rhytick. No other affiliations. Apart from official Team Rhytick products, Alicorn is unofficial with regard to other games & applications, together with their vendors.
Absolutely no warranty.