A fullscreen splash-screen wrapper for launching a game or app. It displays an image (or a fallback black screen), starts your executable, and closes when the process exits or loses focus after launch.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/22da49b4-0f1f-4208-8d0b-9eeef14e35e5

Features

Fullscreen, borderless splash screen with hidden cursor (SDL2)
Displays a supplied image via SDL2_image or video via ffmpeg (fallback to black if load fails)
Launches the target executable and exits when it finishes
Hides on focus loss after the game starts or closes on Esc

Build Requirements

C compiler (GCC or Clang)
make
pkg-config
SDL2
SDL2_image
ffmpeg (libavformat, libavcodec, libswscale, libavutil)

Install

Arch Linux users can install the latest development package from the AUR using an AUR helper like yay or paru:

yay -S gsplash-git

Alternatively, you can build it manually using the provided PKGBUILD:

cd packaging/arch
makepkg -si

For other distributions, build and install manually:

# Build the binary into build/
make

# Install system-wide (defaults to /usr/local)
sudo make install

# Staged install (useful for packaging):
DESTDIR=/some/staging/path make install

Usage

gsplash [options] <image_or_video_path> <game_executable> [game_arguments...]

Example:

gsplash assets/splash.jpg /path/to/game --fullscreen --profile=default

# Video splash (supported formats depend on ffmpeg build)
gsplash assets/splash.mp4 /path/to/game --fullscreen --profile=default

Gsplash allows you to configure how the image or video is displayed with 3 modes:

center (default): letterbox
crop: fill screen by cropping
stretch: Distort to fill screen

You can set these by using the -m or --mode flag:

gsplash [--mode=stretch|center|crop] <background> <executable> [args...]

gsplash -m stretch|center|crop <background> <executable> [args...]

You can optionally protect the splash screen from dismissing on focus changes for a given number of seconds using -i or --ignore-focus=SEC. This is useful if the game process itself brings up a short-lived focus window before the main game window opens:

gsplash --ignore-focus=2.5 <background> <executable> [args...]

gsplash -i 2.5 <background> <executable> [args...]

Testing

Gsplash includes several testing utilities to ensure proper functionality without requiring a heavy game binary.

Automated Testing

Run the automated test suite (which includes a headless smoke test and CLI argument validation) using:

make check

Interactive Visual Testing

To physically test the splash screen rendering modes (stretch, center, crop) with a real image, use the interactive test script. It launches gsplash with each mode and prompts you to confirm if it displayed correctly:

./tests/test_interactive.sh path/to/your/image.png

(Tip: You can place your test images in the tests/assets/ directory).

Dummy Game Utility

For manual testing, a dummy_game binary is built alongside gsplash. It mimics a real game by sleeping to simulate startup time, creating an SDL window to trigger gsplash's focus loss detection and exiting cleanly.

./build/gsplash path/to/image.png ./build/dummy_game

# Test with a custom 10 second simulated game load time
./build/gsplash path/to/image.png ./build/dummy_game 10

Contributing

Please go through the CONTRIBUTING.md guidelines if you'd like to contribute to gsplash.