adminandClaude Opus 5.5
4c7861b5b8
Painting on the 60x60 map of a project with fifty objects dropped the editor to 20 to 39 fps. A profile of a brush stroke showed four causes, none of them the brush itself. - Each frame of a stroke previews the model. The asset and hierarchy panels then built every row anew, so every label became a new text and a new upload to the GPU. One run spent 46 % of the main thread in those uploads. ListView.setItems now keeps a row whose item draws the same (sameListItem) and builds only the rows that changed. - The brush drew the whole scene on every pointer event, on top of the preview. Now the preview draws what the stroke changed, once a frame. The rectangle tool asks for one drawing a frame for its box. - An animated tile made the view draw in the tick and the preview drew it again in the same frame. animate now asks just before the frame is drawn and stays out when the view was drawn since the tick began. - layoutSymbols ran on every drawing and costs up to the cube of the symbols. SymbolLayoutMemo keeps the spots while no anchor moves. - A painted cell made the map read every "x,y" key again, and once more for each of the eight neighbours of every cell. layerCells reads a layer once per content into an index by place. layerTiles and the blocking cells take their neighbours from there (neighboursIn). parseCellKey reads a key without split, with the same results. The test hook sceneRedraws counts how often the scene view was drawn. Not done: a painted cell still works out the tiles and blocking cells of the whole map again, so that part grows with the map. Tests: - Brush stroke on a copy of the project (stein2, Chrome): 20 to 39 fps before, 47.5 after, 55 to 57 without painting. Labels drawn again during the stroke 2012 before, none after. Scene drawings per frame 1.32 before, 1 after. - One painted cell, headless: 28 to 16 ms on 60x60, 109 to 49 ms on the same map doubled to 120x120. - frame-preview: 2 new, red with the old pointer redraw. - tilemap: 3 new (key reading, index, refresh), list-ping 1 new, symbol-layout 1 new. 5 single reversals turned each red. - e2e 39,40 (melektaus-atx): ALL PASSED, 107 checks (1 new, a fast stroke: 6 drawings in 6 frames, no label drawn again). With the row reuse and the pointer redraw reverted it fails: 24 drawings in 3 frames, and the panels draw their labels again. - Gate (melektaus-atx): CHECK EXIT 0, 260 files, 4038 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.