adminandClaude Opus 5.5
23bdc3f775
Patterns and songs (#333, #334) have to play sample-accurate in time,
whatever the frame rate does. What is counted in game time runs away
from the sound. This lays the ground: musical time, a scheduler that
plans notes ahead on the audio clock, and a player that starts and ends
a note at a given second. Nothing in the editor plays a sequence yet,
the check scripts drive it through `__gm.music`.
- Ticks, 480 to the quarter as in MIDI files (decided in #332).
Triplets and quintuplets land on whole ticks. Any meter, a beat being
the note value under the line. The tempo always counts quarters.
- `core/music/sequence.ts` is a pure rule: the notes starting in a
window of playing time. Across the end of a loop it looks into the
next round, so the seam has no gap. A note past the loop end ends
there. Windows are whole ticks, and the seam is stepped exactly, so
no rounding can drop the first note of a round.
- `core/music/Scheduler.ts` plans the next 100 ms every 25 ms through a
host, so it is tested with a clock of its own. The first note sounds
50 ms after the start. Changes to the sequence are heard from the
next window on. Stop and seek fade what it started. A new tempo or
loop counts from what is planned, and the playhead keeps its old
pace until the clock gets there.
- The position is the audio clock less `outputLatency`, as bar, beat
and tick.
- The beat comes from a Web Worker (`viewport/musicTimer.ts`), which
keeps its pace in a hidden tab.
- The sound library starts a note at `timing.at`: a buffer source by
`start(when)`, the pitch worklet by counting down inside the render
block it falls in. A note's end is set on the clock at once, its
fade to the sample. Leaving a loop still waits for the page.
- Delay synced to beats (decided in #332, noted from #327): a setting
`Sync` (Seconds / Beats), `time` then in quarter notes, held to the
2 s of the line. Play sound and Play note have an input `tempo`,
120 BPM where nothing is connected. A scheduled note carries the
tempo of its sequence.
- Swing is left for #333/#334, as decided.
Also fixes the red suite of 6f1f315 (task 526). Three checks in e2e 34
waited on the page's clock for things that run on the audio clock. In
CI the voice was already 0.7 s old when first seen, and the 0.3 s note
of Play note was over. `stats().last` now says when a voice started on
the audio clock, and the Quad, Step and Play note checks hold every
reading against it.
Tests:
- music.test.ts (new): 17 tests, time, windows, loop seam, scheduler
with a jittery timer, stop, seek, tempo change
- sound-library +4, soundfx +1, node-catalog +2 (tempo inputs)
- Counter-checks: an unclamped note length, a window that never moves
on, a buffer source ignoring its start time and a Delay ignoring
Beats each turn 1, 6, 1 and 2 tests red
- e2e 34 on melektaus-atx: ALL PASSED, 47 checks (+2). Nine notes of a
looped bar at 150 BPM exactly 0.4 s apart, each planned 89 to 91 ms
ahead. The position matched the clock less 32 ms latency to the
tick. Offline the worklet started on samples 590, 12000 and 15200.
- Gate on melektaus-atx: CHECK EXIT 0, 244 test files, 3786 tests
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game Maker
A browser-based tool "one step before a game engine": create assets (scenes, cameras, sprites), place them into scenes, tweak their properties in an inspector and press Play – all in one program, all drawn inside a single WebGL canvas.
Live: https://nockal.com/game-maker/ · Widget playground: https://nockal.com/game-maker/?playground
The documentation is the wiki: https://git.nockal.com/meleki/game-maker/wiki – every concept, node, tab and shortcut, plus the architecture and the development workflow. This file is the short way in.
In one screen
- An asset is a named, typed thing (scene, camera, sprite, text, behavior, variables, struct, collider, rigidbody, joint, container, clip area, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, animation, curve, tile, tilemap, state machine, shader, shader function, font, sound, particles) with properties and no position.
- A scene object places an asset: position, sparse overrides of its properties, an optional parent. Only what differs from the asset is stored; the inspector paints it gold and offers ↺ / ↑.
- A container is a reusable group edited once and placed many times; its content is resolved from the template on every read. A screen is a container switched on and off.
- A behavior is logic as a node graph, placed like anything else and parented to the object it acts on. Play has no built-in behaviour – everything that happens is a graph.
- An account owns projects: the editor asks for a user name and a password first, and each account sees only its own projects. The Account menu at the far right of the toolbar changes the password and signs out.
- Play runs a throwaway copy of the project; every panel stays usable and Stop brings back exactly what was saved. Release… shares a link that plays the saved game on its own, without the editor and without signing in.
Quick start
Node 22 is required.
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:5175/game-maker/dist/ – API calls are proxied to production
npm run check # typecheck + lint + format:check + unit tests – the gate CI runs too
npm run build # writes dist/ and regenerates index.html; the folder is what nginx serves
The browser suite and the three example games need a machine with a GPU:
node tools/seed-e2e.mjs && node tools/e2e.mjs # the editor, 1744 checks (GM_STEPS=20 for one step)
# every tool signs in first – see the Accounts page
node tools/seed-jumprun.mjs && node tools/smoke-jumprun.mjs
node tools/seed-tetris.mjs && node tools/smoke-tetris.mjs
node tools/seed-actor.mjs && node tools/smoke-actor.mjs
Every push runs all of it on the Gitea runners – the gate as one job, build and suite as another beside it – so locally take the gate plus the step your change touches and leave the full run to CI. Details, the GPU requirement and the detached runner are in Development.
Documentation
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Concepts | Assets, scene objects, overrides, play mode, the camera, the console |
| Accounts | Signing in and out, the accounts, who a project belongs to, what the check tools need |
| Scenes | The edited scene, the start scene, and switching scenes from a graph |
| Scene editing | Placing, z-order, hierarchy, the editor offset |
| Behaviors | Node graphs: variables, the node set, structs and lists, loops, nesting, editing |
| Structs | Struct assets: a named shape that struct variables, fields and Pack/Expand follow |
| Colliders | Shapes (box, circle, capsule, polygon), collision events, blocking movement, one-way colliders and raycasts |
| Physics | Rigidbodies, the collider material, gravity, the fixed step, joints |
| Textures | Images, frames, nine-slice, the filter, upload limits |
| Vector art | Pictures drawn from shapes: the pen, curves, gradients and texture fills, combining shapes |
| Pixel art | Pictures painted pixel by pixel: the palette, the tools, layers and frames |
| Fonts | Font assets, the picker, what a text falls back to |
| Sounds | Sound assets and Play sound |
| Animations | Animation assets and the Animation tab |
| Curves | Easings drawn by hand, the Curve tab, using one on a key or a Lerp |
| Shaders | Shader graphs that sprites, texts, particle fields and cameras wear, their node set, passes, shader functions |
| Particles | Particle graphs: a particle as a function of its age |
| State machines | The asset, named transitions, State branch, Set state and State transition |
| Containers | Templates, instances, screens |
| Tiles | The tile asset, plain tiles and the two autotile kinds, the pictures as animation steps, the Tile tab |
| Tilemaps | The tilemap asset, painting in the scene view, layers, what it looks like in the game |
| Plugins | Extending the editor: the plugin file, how it is loaded, switching one on and off, API v1 |
| Keyboard | Every shortcut |
| Architecture | Stack, source layout, the rules that keep it organised |
| Development | Commands, the e2e suite, the example games, CI |
| API | The PHP JSON API and the project document |
Ideas, gaps and bugs
They live in the issue tracker: https://git.nockal.com/meleki/game-maker/issues. What is not there yet is listed on the wiki's Home page.