The Jak games are written in GOAL, a programming language Naughty Dog built for them. goalc is its compiler, and also a console: a developer types code into it, and it compiles that code and sends it straight into the game while the game runs. Anyone working on the games spends hours a day looking at it.
Until September 26th, goalc still greeted every session with upstream's orange OpenGOAL logo.
The new welcome
It now opens with the Seal of Mar in gold. Under it, one line names the compiler's version, the game it is working on and the revision of the code. A short table says what the session is connected to: the project, the game's disc image, where it looks for files, the port an editor connects on, and the target. Then come the commands a session usually starts with.
The prompt shows the game's name in that game's color from the launcher, the help describes the same commands in three sections, and an editor that connects is greeted in Phaethon's name.
One shape for every log
The quieter change matters more day to day. goalc's status messages used to print however each part of it pleased. Now they print as log lines in the same shape as the runtime's, each tagged with where it came from: goalc, listener, make or compile. A build log and a boot log read alike, which makes a long session easier to scan and to search.
Alex (maintainer, and a mechanical engineer by trade)