A painted cell worked out the tiles and blocking cells of the whole map again, so painting got slower the bigger the map. One cell cost 16.8 ms on 60x60 and 54.6 ms on 120x120. Now it costs what is around it: 3.5 ms and 4.0 ms, against 3.4 ms without painting. - The brush, the paint command and its undo name the keys they changed. Each new version of the cells keeps them for the last 16 versions (cellsChangedSince). - The cell index, the tiles of a layer and the blocking cells patch only the changed cells and their eight neighbours. Everything else stays the same object as before. - Both lists are in cell order now, so a patch is one walk that keeps every other entry. - The rectangles are merged row by row. A patch joins again only the rows around it, one row further than the changed cells, and stacks the rest as they were. - A writer that names no keys costs one walk over the cells. A replaced cell object (load, resize, edits at run time) is worked out in full as before. - The tiles a map names come sorted by id. Two trigger tiles on one cell now keep that order, whichever way they were painted. - resolveTilemap walked all tiles every frame, even without painting. It now does so only when the list changed. Found on the way: deleting an outlined autotile can turn the one below into a full box, which cuts a scaled box two rows further down. Merging only the patched rows missed that. It is a test of its own now. A brush stroke on the map doubled to 120x120 runs at 42 fps instead of 28, p95 of a frame 52 ms instead of 92 ms. What still grows with the map is the mesh of a layer, which is built again on every paint. Tests: - tests/core/tilemap-patch.test.ts (new, 7): 400 random steps on two layers with every kind of tile, each compared with a fresh full run - Unit, tilemap and viewport: 1284 green in 57 files - e2e 39 + 40 (atx): ALL PASSED, 107 checks - Gate (atx): 312 files, 4831 tests Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Feuerwerk
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/feuerwerk/ · Widget playground: https://nockal.com/feuerwerk/?playground
The documentation is the wiki: https://git.nockal.com/meleki/feuerwerk/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, sound FX, instrument, pattern, song, bus, 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/feuerwerk/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, 2088 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 clips, Play sound, buses and the Master routing, sound FX |
| Instruments | Instruments as node graphs, Chips and presets, the keys of the Instrument tab, Play note |
| Patterns | Patterns and the piano roll, playing one in a loop or from a game |
| Songs | Songs, their tracks and items, routing, recording, playing one from a game |
| 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/feuerwerk/issues. What is not there yet is listed on the wiki's Home page.
