adminandClaude Opus 5.5
32a0af6e2c
On a screen scaled to 125 % or 150 % the editor looked soft beside a page the browser draws itself. The layout counts in whole CSS pixels, and most of those fall between two device pixels there. The GPU averages both: text loses its edges, and a 1 px line becomes a pixel and a half of mixed colour. Now text and boxes are rounded to device pixels, and a line is one device pixel wide. - ui/pixelGrid.ts holds the rule. crispText() makes a text with Pixi's roundPixels, crisp() does the same for a Graphics of upright boxes, and hairline() is the width of one device pixel. - Every text of the interface is made with crispText() instead of new Text(). - crisp() only rounds where the scale is not a whole number. At 100 % and 200 % nothing changes. - drawControlBox, drawHeaderBar and drawSectionBand draw their lines a hairline wide and flush with the edge. The widgets that draw lines of their own do the same. - Two bands share exactly the line they draw, and a column still ends on a whole pixel. - The stage is nudged by 1/32 px where the scale is not whole. At 150 % every odd pixel is an exact half, and without the nudge one band came out a row shorter than its neighbours. - Curves, icons and everything of the game stay unrounded. Rounding their points would bend them. - The harness takes deviceScaleFactor as an option, and the hooks deviceColumn, edgeContrast and pixelGrid read the frame as the screen gets it. Not in here: the subpixel smoothing a browser gives its own text. Pixi draws a text into a transparent picture first, and there only greyscale smoothing is possible. Measured at 150 %, edge contrast before and after: top bar 31.5 to 47.8, the lists on the left 68.6 to 86.4, inspector 27.6 to 38.4. At 100 % it is 46.5, 90.1 and 37.9, and the picture there is the same as before pixel for pixel, apart from the fps display. Tests: - Gate on melektaus-atx: 206 files, 3114 tests (3104 + 10), exit 0 - Full run on melektaus-atx: 1655 of 1656 checks passed, smokes 24/19/21. The one that failed was a condition of the new step 62 itself: it scrolled an inspector that had nothing to scroll. The step now makes the window lower for that reading. - e2e 61,62 after that fix: 14 checks. The full run was not repeated, and CI is switched off for now. - Ten unit tests, nine in tests/ui/pixel-grid.test.ts - Eight e2e checks in the new step 62, which runs at 150 % - Eleven unit counter-probes fail tests - Four browser counter-probes fail their checks. They ran before the fix to step 62 and were not repeated for it. - Screenshots looked at for 125 % and 150 % 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, container, clip area, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, animation, curve, tile, tilemap, state machine, shader, 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, 1656 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 runner – 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 |
| 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 a sprite wears, their node set, the properties they declare |
| 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.