A game should be able to stop a video on a sprite, jump to a spot in it and start it again, and react when it has run out. Until now a video on a sprite either ran free on its own or followed a composition, and no behavior could touch it. - Five new nodes: Play video, Pause video and Seek video (time in s from the clip start), On video finished with a Video field, and the data node Video time with time, length and playing. - Play, Pause and Seek act on the owner when object is not linked. - On video finished with an empty field hears every video. A chosen video also hears its clips. - A new VideoSystem keeps a clock for every sprite with a video. It counts from the moment the sprite appears, as long as it is on. For a Driven sprite the clock is its Video time. A paused game holds all clocks. - A free sprite that one of the nodes touches gets the clock "steered" at run time. It then has its own player, and other sprites with the same clip play on. Pause of the game and sound go the existing Driven way. - On a Driven sprite and in the editor run the nodes do nothing and write a line to the log. - Until its own player has a frame, a steered sprite shows the frame of the shared player. Without that it would blink out on the first Pause video. - Play at the end of a clip without loop starts it from the start. The issue does not say, this is my choice. Found, not fixed: with a Driven sprite in the scene the run waits up to 3 s for its frame at the start. The world does not tick then, but the free videos already play. Their clocks lag behind the picture by that wait, so On video finished comes that much late. Tests: - Unit: 23 new (video-steer 16, node catalog 7), affected groups 4820/4820. - Counter-probes: 16 bends, all red. - e2e 66 on atx: ALL PASSED, 39 checks. New 66s: Pause at 0.15 s held its own player at 0.2 s, the picture stayed red for 1 s. Seek landed on 0.5 s exactly, green, held. Play showed green, blue, white, and white stayed at the end. On video finished came once. Without the clock "steered" all three 66s checks are red. - Gate on atx: CHECK EXIT 0, 336 files, 5199 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, video, composition, 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/; API and data 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, 2090 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 |
| Videos | Video assets and clips, wearing one on a sprite, recording the game view or the editor |
| 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 |
| Compositions | Objects, videos and sounds laid out in time, the Composition tab, playing one in a game |
| 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.
