A stinger has to start on the next beat or bar of the song that is playing, not whenever the frame happens to run. Play sound, Play note and Play pattern now take the number of a song or pattern playback and plan their start on the audio clock, as the music is heard. - New inputs sync (a playback number) and quantize (Next bar by default, decision 6) on Play sound, Play note and Play pattern. - The landing is worked out in Playbacks (landOn), on the next beat, bar or marker of the playback as it is heard. SoundLibrary and the audio switch only pass it on, and only on the clock the stinger plays on. - A pattern with sync plays in the tempo of the playback. It takes its bake only when both tempos match. - Without a link, or when the playback is not heard, the node starts at once as before. - The sync ports live in their own module musicSync.ts. Putting them in songSync.ts would have made an import cycle through Play song. Tests: - Unit: 8 new (6 in song-play, 1 each in sound-library and audio-switch), all green. - Counter-probes: 12 bends, all red. - e2e 65 on atx: ALL PASSED, 74 checks. New 65k4: the pattern (own tempo 100) started exactly 8 beats after the song and played at the song's 120 BPM. Without sync it is red (6.2 beats, 100 BPM). - Gate on atx: CHECK EXIT 0, 334 files, 5152 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.
