admin
bc57f61c91
game-maker / suite (push) Successful in 10m46s
The renderer is taken off the ticker; the ticker itself keeps running, so the clock, a live world and the panels still get their step. Drawing now happens inside a 200 ms trailing window that every pointer, wheel and key event, every Widget.invalidate/resize, every Stack.relayout, every EditorState.emit and both library onChange hooks reopen. The window rather than a single frame is what makes the ~70 direct redraw() calls that never pass through invalidate() safe, along with repaints an event only starts: a microtask, a texture upload, a resolved font. Editor.movesByItself() keeps asking for every frame while Play or an editor run is on, a time shader is on screen, or the particle or animation preview is showing. The FPS counter now counts drawn frames over the time the renderer was awake. Idle seconds are not slow seconds, so it answers "how smooth while it moves" and holds its last answer instead of falling to 0 at rest. Measured on the built stand, 20 s per variant, CPU of all chromium processes from /proc: kept awake 75.5 % of a core at 60 fps, render on change 8.8 % with 0 frames drawn, awake again 83.9 % as an order probe. No colour check can see a missing repaint: pixelAt extracts from the stage on demand and is just as green on a screen frozen a minute ago. Step 33 watches the new __gm.renderStats() counter instead.
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, collider, container, texture, animation, state machine) 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.
- Play runs a throwaway copy of the project; every panel stays usable and Stop brings back exactly what was saved.
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, 862 checks (GM_STEPS=20 for one step)
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, 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 |
| Scene editing | Placing, z-order, hierarchy, the editor offset |
| Behaviors | Node graphs: variables, the node set, structs and lists, loops, nesting, editing |
| Colliders | Collision events and blocking movement |
| Textures | Images, frames, the filter, upload limits |
| Animations | Animation assets and the Animation tab |
| State machines | The asset, named transitions, State branch, Set state and State transition |
| Containers | Templates, instances, screens |
| 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.