adminandClaude Opus 5.5
d48f174caf
A video becomes an asset like a sound: uploaded once, converted to one format by a worker of its own, cut into clips in its tab, and worn by a sprite through its Texture row. Only Chrome is a target, without alpha. - Server: POST ?r=videos queues the upload under the hash of its bytes, so the MP4's name is known at once. The worker (VideoWorker over VideoFormat) writes H.264/AAC, yuv420p, constant frame rate, a keyframe every 15 frames, at most 1920x1080, with a poster and the details beside it. A failed job says why and is tried again on the next upload. - An upload may be up to 2 GB. It is streamed from the request to disk and hashed there, so php-fpm holds none of it in memory. The other routes keep their 256 MB. - The worker runs in the container game-maker-video on stein2, a compose project of its own (tools/video/), and in CI beside the PHP server. The CI image has ffmpeg for it. - Model: asset type video with size, length, frame rate and sound, and clips like a sound's. The clip helpers and commands serve both. - A sprite's Texture row offers videos and clips after the pictures. resolvePicture names a playing video by a key, and the texture library hands it to a VideoLibrary with one player per key. - The editor shows a placed video as a quiet preview. Play starts it over at its clip's start and lets it be heard through the master bus, a pause holds it, Esc makes it quiet again. - Video tab: the picture, a ruler, the clip strip and a track on the Sound tab's time axis. A drag spans a clip, a handle moves an edge, Play plays the picked clip. - The picker shows a video on its way with its progress and adopts an upload from it once it is ready. Dropping a video file does the same. Decided on my own: - Two sprites wearing the same clip share one player and show the same picture. Control per instance belongs to the follow-up with nodes. - A video plays in real time, the game's time scale does not slow it. - The container may use 3 of the 4 cores of stein2. Findings: - The first real upload (279 MB) got 413: the API's own ceiling of 256 MB for every request, not nginx or the Brandmauer. - Chrome has no picture of a video that never played, and a Pixi VideoSource drawn before the first frame stays empty for good. The texture is made in the first frame callback (openVideo). - A player nobody asks for in 2 s is let go. The inspector's PREVIEW asked only on an edit, so with the sprite not on screen its texture was destroyed under it and the batcher threw on every frame. The preview now redraws every frame while it shows a video, like a Time shader. A let-go texture keeps an empty source instead of none. - VideoSource.load() reloads the element and cuts off an earlier play(). Playing starts after loadeddata. Tests: - PHP videos.test.php: 68 checks, with the real ffmpeg - 300 MB upload through Brandmauer and nginx: 201 in 21 s, php-fpm at 13.7 MB RSS at most - Unit videos.test.ts: 20 tests - e2e 66 (stein2, atx was off): ALL PASSED, 18 checks; e2e 04 with the new asset count green - Gate (atx): 294 files, 4520 tests. serialize.test.ts used video as its example of an unknown type and now uses a made-up one. - Counter-checks: a keyframe gap of 30 fails the PHP check, a key that keeps the video's end fails 2 unit tests, a clip without its end fails "plays only its stretch" in e2e 66 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, 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/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, 1994 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/game-maker/issues. What is not there yet is listed on the wiki's Home page.