A particle source can wear a shader asset the way a sprite does, and it is the
cheapest place in the editor to wear one: a shaded sprite gives up its batch and
costs a draw call of its own, while `ParticleContainerPipe` breaks the batch for
every field regardless. Five hundred shaded particles are the one call five
hundred plain ones were.
The fragment the compiler emits needed no change, only a second vertex stage:
Pixi's particle vertex is GLSL ES 1.00 and ours is ES 3.00, so it is translated
rather than invented. What it sees is a particle's picture, not its life — the
buffer carries five fixed attributes and takes no sixth, so age, index and seed
stay on the graph, which is what the graph is for.
Two things the issue did not ask about:
`Shader.resources` is an accessor over the names its constructor declared, so a
slot that is not declared becomes a loose JS property and is never bound. The
adaptor writes `uTranslationMatrix` into whichever shader the container names —
without an empty block for it the vertex gets no matrix and the particles land
elsewhere.
`schemaOf` in serialize.ts hung on `schema !== schemaFor('sprite')`, an identity
check a source never satisfies, so its shader values would have been dropped on
save.
A source is the one asset drawing rows from two graphs, so a name can arrive
twice. Its own row wins and the uniform keeps its default; nothing is rejected
on the shader's side, because the collision exists only at this one wearer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
4.1 KiB
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, 837 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, State branch and Set state |
| 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.