adminandClaude Opus 5.5
e191dc4b2e
A game can now film itself. A behavior starts and stops a take, and the editor turns it into a video asset with the run's picture and the sound the player hears. The exported game hands the file over as a download, since there is no project to keep it in. - New action nodes `Start recording` (Name, Resolution, FPS) and `Stop recording`. An empty name becomes `Recording <timestamp>`. - Resolution is `Game view`, `720p` or `1080p`. For the fixed sizes the height is set and the width follows the camera. - The picture is the camera only, without hints, overlays or the letterbox. It is drawn into a render texture of the target size, so a smaller window still gives full 1080p. - `PictureReader` reads the texture back through pixel buffers with a fence. The editor never waits on the GPU, and a frame with all three buffers busy is dropped and counted. - Nothing of the take reaches the visible canvas. A first version drew tiles into it and copied them out, and with the low-latency canvas that midway state flickered on screen. - The sound is tapped behind the master limiter in the FX worklet and encoded as Opus. - H.264 is chosen when the browser has it, VP9 otherwise. A small own Matroska writer packs both tracks, no new dependency. It names the frame rate and BT.709 so ffmpeg keeps both. - A second `Start recording` is ignored with a warning in the log. A take goes on through `Load scene` and a restart, pauses with the editor and is saved when the run ends. It stops at 2 GB. - The editor uploads the take on the existing video route and makes the asset once the run is over. The video tab gets a Download button for the converted MP4. - `downloadBlob` in `src/ui` replaces the song editor's own copy. Findings: - `On start` runs before the game screen knows the world. A take therefore fixes its size on the first frame that has a camera. - Without a frame rate in the file, ffmpeg turned 30 fps into 59.94. - The worker's poster JPEG is off in colour for every upload (red 255 comes out as 229, BT.601). Not touched here. Tests: - Unit recording + matroska: 21 green, plus the node catalog cases. The Matroska test reads the file back with its own EBML reader. - e2e 67 (new) on melektaus-atx: ALL PASSED. 1080p30 from a 1280x800 window gives a 1920x1080 MP4 with sound and no dropped frame. Every 4th pixel is checked, a green quarter catches an upside-down picture. A take ended by Esc is saved with the timestamp name. - e2e 60j: the exported game downloads an `.mkv` with EBML magic. - The flicker is gone on the user's machine without `?vsync`. - Gate on melektaus-atx: CHECK EXIT 0, 299 files, 4586 tests. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
7.6 KiB
7.6 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, 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, 2016 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.