A shader could only be judged by placing it on a sprite and running
the scene. The shader tab now shows its effect next to the graph, on
the image the user picked last, without a picker to maintain.
- The preview follows the last selection that has an image: a placed
sprite with its overrides, size and tint, a sprite asset, a texture
or a frame. Clicking the shader, a node, a behavior or a scene keeps
the picture.
- Without such a selection, or when the picked image is deleted, a
built-in 64 px test image is shown. Its colour runs with u and v, a
checkerboard shows where a UV lands and the border fades for alpha.
- Each property gets a slider. The sliders belong to the preview and
never write to the project. They start at the sprite's values when
it carries this shader, otherwise at the default.
- The preview has its own clock. Hold and Restart are only enabled
when a Time node is in the graph.
- The graph | splitter | panel layout of the particles tab moves into
PreviewSplit, and both tabs use it.
- A nine-sliced frame is previewed unsliced. This is documented.
Findings:
- The slider row stayed squeezed to a few pixels when the properties
changed while the tab was hidden. The layout was triggered one level
too high. The slider check in block 28n holds this.
- The graph canvas is narrower now, 385 px at a 1280 px window, the
same as in the particles tab. Block 28b clicked at a fixed x+420 and
now uses the measured width.
Tests:
- ./check.sh: 132 files, 1952 tests (was 131 / 1941), exit 0
- npm run build: exit 0
- GM_STEPS=28,31 freshly seeded: ALL PASSED, 105 checks
- 11 new unit tests in tests/editor/shader-preview.test.ts
- 7 new e2e checks in block 28n
- Counter-probes: start values ignoring the sprite fail 1 unit test,
a preview ignoring the selection fails 2 e2e checks
- Check total 1209 in README is computed (1202 + 7), CI measures it
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The suite spent 88% of its step time asleep: 564 s of steps, 496 s of
them in sleep(n) - fixed spans estimated by hand and then copied from
step to step. That is why it was slow, and why it flickered.
The signal is afterFrames(count, timeout) in ui/render.ts, exposed as
__gm.afterFrames(). It wakes the loop itself, because an editor that
draws nothing would never redeem a promise of a frame, and it gives up
after a timeout instead of hanging the run. settle() in the harness
waits two drawn frames (~32 ms) instead of 150-300 ms and falls back to
sleep(150) when the hook is missing (an old build): silently not
waiting would make every later check a coin toss.
Every action goes through it now - click, doubleClick, wheel, drag,
dragAsset, press, typeText, select, mutate, undo, redo - and with that
about 550 sleep() calls behind those actions became redundant, helpers
that are nothing but a mutate in a coat included. What a frame cannot
answer got its own condition instead: waitUntil(expr), play()/stop()
waiting on __gm.state.mode rather than on 300 ms, saved() for the
autosave (the two hand-written polling loops sampled at 300 ms for
something that arrives after a second), and showTab() as a real tool -
47 places called evaluate("__gm.showTab(...)") raw, and 24 of them
waited for nothing at all and read the old panel.
564 s -> 243 s of step time, the waiting share 88% -> 76%. Three kinds
of wait were kept, and each one bit when it was taken away: loading
bytes (textures, fonts), game time that a repaint cannot stand in for
(time scale, shader and particle clocks, the live values a running
graph carries), and the inertia the scroll step measures on purpose.
Two things the new speed uncovered, both real: 25-animation read the
frame menu unfiltered and had frozen an incomplete list (the CI failure
on c990dbc), and 33-render-on-change measured idleness while the
autosave of the step before was still painting - it waits for
saveStatus to leave dirty/saving now, so it measures that nothing
happens any more instead of that it waited long enough.
#63: a shader Property node named "width" quietly took over the sprite
row of the same name. isSpriteProp lives in PropertySchema now and is
derived from FULL_SCHEMAS.sprite instead of being a second list that
drifts. isValidPropertyName rejects those ten names, and the compiler
reports it at the node as its own problem: "width" is a sprite
property, told apart from "not a word" and from a duplicate.
#64: Divide emitted (a / b) and handed NaN to the driver. It emits
divide(a, b) now, with the guard in the prologue next to straight(),
scalar and per channel: zero divided by zero is zero. That was already
the house rule in the behavior and particle graphs - only the shader
had never been told. Clamp comes along as a shader node for the same
reason: the behavior catalog has had it all along.
Particle age and shader time each read performance.now() off their own
library, and the world got the frame's delta straight from the ticker. Three
clocks, so a global time scale would have been three multiplications and a
pause three separate freezes.
core/time.ts holds one clock instead: it accumulates dt x scale per frame
rather than reading the wall clock, and Editor.tick hands the very step it
took to the play session, the editor run and the animation preview. Delta
time, particle age, shader time and that preview are the same quantity now,
so the scale is a single multiplication and a pause is that scale at 0 —
nothing underneath needs rebasing, because the clock itself stands still.
The Math.min(dt, 0.1) caps in PlaySession and EditorRun are gone: the cap
(MAX_FRAME) now sits on the raw frame before scaling, and capping twice would
make the world run slower than the particles at scale 2.
A pause gates the scale rather than overwriting it — effectiveScale() answers
0 while paused, and for anything that is not a positive finite number, while
gameClock.scale keeps its value. A slider later survives a pause that way;
the issue asks for none yet.
The clock goes back to zero at both ends of a run, so a run is reproducible
from second 0 and the scene view looks freshly loaded after Stop. Resetting
only on Stop would not do it: the editor clock runs on afterwards, and the
next Play would start at "seconds since the last Stop".
The trap in that: ParticleField keeps its origin as an absolute second of
this clock, so after a reset it lies in the future and every particle would
age backwards. One line in sync() starts such a field over, which covers the
scene, the game and the tab preview at once — and fixes an older bug of the
same shape, where releasing a particleTime() freeze left the preview empty
for good.
Found while measuring that: ParticlePreview stood at second 0.5 by computing
the clock reading that would mean 0.5 since the field started. Over 200000
random origins the round trip misses the last bit in 18.8% of them and shows
one particle too few in 9.4%, because floor(0.5 * 20) comes out 9. The check
had been flaky since it was written. The panel hands the field the age itself
now (ParticleField.hold), and the faked clock is gone.
833 checks (824 + 9), 931 unit tests (921 + 10).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The default of the Edge param and the address mode the shared sheet physically
carries were the same constant; changing the value would have turned every
sentinel with it and given each shader sprite a full copy of its texture.
SHEET_EDGE ('mirror', what TextureLibrary uploads) is now separate from
DEFAULT_EDGE ('clamp'). A graph whose Sample reads nothing but its own pixel
draws with the plain sheet whatever the Edge says, so the common shader costs
no second copy.
Without a shader the quad's coordinates never leave 0..1, and mirror-repeat
reads like clamp within a texel - so clamp is what a sprite shows anyway.
A font asset holds a file and nothing else, the twin of a texture: the server keeps it
content-addressed under data/fonts/{sha256}.{ext}, with the format read from the file's own
four-byte signature (finfo reports fonts inconsistently across libmagic versions). A text
wears one through its ordinary Font property, so overrides, reset, undo and the Properties
node come for free; no font means the editor's own typeface.
The picker lists everything the server holds and renders each row in the face it offers.
The family name is gm-font-<hash16>, never the name inside the file, so two "Regular" cannot
collide. WorldViewport.syncText is the single place that draws it, which covers scene, game
preview and play at once.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
shaderFingerprint(graph) covers node id/type/params/ports and edge endpoints only;
x/y, collapsed, folded and edge ids stay out. ShaderLibrary keys on it and counts
compiles (__gm.shaderCompiles()). Measured before: one compile per preview step of a
node drag (12 for a harness drag); after: 0, a param change exactly +1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four new rows on sprite, text, collider and container (block TRANSFORM):
scale, rotation in degrees clockwise, mirrorX, mirrorY. As properties they
get override/reset/apply, loading of old projects, write-back after play and
the Properties node for free; camera and behavior have none.
The hierarchy composes T*R*S per level (composeAlongChain replaces
sumAlongChain), so children rotate and scale with their parent. Reparenting
and grouping keep the look (carriedTransform). Drawing goes through
placeNode, the gizmo is a polygon, cull and objectRect use the AABB, drags
are computed in the parent's system.
Colliders are oriented boxes: SAT for box/box, box-circle in the box frame;
exitDistance replaces axisSeparation/axisCorrection, moveAndSlide moves along
the object's own axes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fragment-side coordinate nodes instead of vertex nodes: the quad stays the
quad, a UV read plus a sample at a computed coordinate covers flip, scroll,
wave, pixelate and scanlines. Time is a uniform only when a Time node reaches
the Output; a viewport that drew a Time shader redraws from the ticker so the
Scene tab animates without a running world. Edge (Mirror/Repeat/Clamp) is a
second texture variant in TextureLibrary because WebGL binds no TextureStyle
resource of the shader. The compiler now emits #version 300 es first: Pixi
only compiles as ES 3.00 when the fragment says so, and textureSize needs it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A sprite's picture is now a Mesh (unit quad, sibling of its Graphics node, which keeps
only the hit area); a worn shader replaces Pixi's fragment in that draw, so there is no
intermediate texture and no extra render pass. Measured on the HD 630: 400 shaded
sprites hold 60 fps (was 34), 800 hold 56 (was 20).
Two Pixi facts the code leans on: a mesh's texture is bound only for Pixi's own shader,
so GraphShader.wear hands it over; and MeshPipe caches whether a mesh batches and
re-checks it only in a frame without structure changes, so switching a shader on or
off calls mesh.unload().
The console panel mirrors console.group/groupCollapsed/groupEnd and fills the %s %d
%o %c directives, so Pixi's deprecation warning shows its head, not only its stack.
E2E 12 guards against the addChild-on-Graphics warning, 28 counts shaders instead of
filters.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The wiki carried an estimate ("fine for dozens, not for thousands"). Measured
on the Intel HD 630 that CI uses, 48x48 sprites in a 640x360 camera, neutral
values, three runs agreeing to 1 fps:
sprites 25 50 100 200 400 800
fps 58 56 54 48 34 20
The same scene without shaders holds 60 fps at every one of those counts, 800
included. Quadrupling the sprite area (96x96) measures the same, so the cost is
the render target switch, not the pixels: roughly 20 us per pass up to 200,
40 us at 800.
tools/perf-shaders.mjs drives it (not run in CI, frame times are machine
dependent). New hook __gm.filterCount() counts visible nodes carrying a filter
and proves one pass per sprite; e2e 28 checks it.
Two traps the tool guards against, both cost a wrong answer first: the median
frame time is useless here (the distribution is bimodal under vsync, so the
rate comes from frames/duration), and --disable-gpu-vsync has no effect in
headless, so what is measured is the point where the frame rate breaks down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
No input, one Value param (step 0.05, drawn on the node), output `value`
as a float literal via floatLiteral (2 -> 2.0, NaN -> 0.0). No uniform,
no sprite row - that is the difference to Property.
The e2e negative check for "no behavior node in the palette" now uses
Boolean as its marker, and step 28 types the palette search first
because the palette scrolls from twelve entries on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Output gains a number input `alpha`; unconnected it reads the texel's
alpha, like `color` reads the texel. The epilogue premultiplies with the
resolved alpha. New `Texture alpha` node exposes texel.a for maths.
PortDef.inline=false keeps the alpha port without an inline field: every
number port is inline by default, and a typed default of 0 would have made
every shaded sprite invisible. The compiler's texel fallback is typed:
colour ports get rgb, number ports get texel.a.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The shipped shader graph gains a `brightness - 1` offset node, so 1 stays
neutral and brightness lifts every channel by the same amount; contrast keeps
multiplying, saturation keeps mixing with the luma. Fixture, seeds, unit and
e2e expectations follow (twelve nodes, 1.25 -> #80c0ff).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A shader is an asset carrying a node graph (Texture color, Output, Property,
Color, Add/Subtract/Multiply/Divide, Mix, Luminance) that compiles to the GLSL
fragment of a Pixi filter. The Shader tab reuses the Behavior canvas; a sprite
wears a shader through its Shader picker, and the rows below it are the
graph's Property nodes. Property schema, resolution and deviation take the
project because a sprite's rows now live in another asset. The built-in
registry of the prototype is gone; "Adjust colors" ships as a graph in the
fixture and the three example games.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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