adminandClaude Opus 5.5
f03ca0d382
A Blur stops at radius 8 in one pass, and bloom needs a softened copy of the picture beside the original. A Pass node cuts the graph: what feeds it is drawn into a picture of its own first, and the nodes that read a picture read that one when it feeds them. - Pass has color and alpha like the Output, a Resolution setting (Full, Half, Quarter) and a picture output. Texture color, Texture alpha, Sample texture, Blur and Texture size get a picture input. Unconnected it is the wearer's own picture, so the original stays readable beside any pass. - picture is a port type of its own. It plugs only into a picture input, not even into an any port. - The walk shared by the compilers can stop at a node (cut). The shader compiler draws each Pass it meets as a fragment of its own, earlier passes first. A ring through a picture says Feeds itself, and more than 8 passes say so at the node. - A pass draws untinted. The tint comes on when the last part reads a picture, so a particle source draws its passes once for all of its particles (user decision). - A pass's picture is the wearer's picture and its Padding, at the pixels of the picture times Resolution, at most 2048 per side. It is read with the picture's own filter and continues past its frame as the Output's Edge says. - PassPictures keeps one render texture per pass and wearer. It draws again only when picture, size, Padding or a uniform changed. A field's picture is a render texture that changes under the same id, so a field draws its passes every time. - Sprite, sliced sprite, text, particle source, field shader and the Shader tab's preview all draw passes. syncShader takes a fixed picture for a 9-slice, which holds its corners but keeps the margin. - texelAt and blur take the sampler they read. Existing shaders compile to the same program apart from that argument. - A field shader's Blur and Texture size count a pixel as a unit of the frame (uPixelScale), not of the screen. Before, a field's blur grew when zooming out and shrank when zooming in. This came with #170 and #300 and is fixed here because passes inherit it. - tools/perf-shaders.mjs and tools/perf-field-shaders.mjs measure two passes with GM_PERF_PASSES=1 and GM_PERF_PASS_RESOLUTION. Below Full an open Pass shrinks the picture first, as the wiki's recipe does. Found on the way: - Destroying the pictures before the shader made Pixi warn that a texture was still bound. The shader goes first now, and a picture of a new size is resized rather than replaced. - Two passes in a row could draw plain white the first time. Pixi builds the code that binds a program's resources once and finds them by position. A pass of one graph is often the same program as a pass of another with fewer slots, so it bound a placeholder. Every shader now declares all 8 pass slots and its uniform group. Tests: - Gate on melektaus-atx: 225 files, 3480 tests (3467 + 13), exit 0. - e2e 28 and 31 on melektaus-atx: 97 checks (94 + 3) and 44 checks (43 + 1), all passed, no Pixi warning in the console. - 28l-vii: a Blur across, a Pass and a Blur down draw the 5x5 spot of a Blur of Both (difference 0.000). On a grey sprite a pass's picture added to the original is 231/60/60, each tinted once. Two Passes in a row after a graph with one show red and green, not white. - 31v-iii: a Blur of 8 fades a field's frame edge over 8.0 units at 50 % and at 200 % zoom. - Counter-checks: a tinted pass fails 1 unit test. Pictures never bound fail both e2e checks (spot 0.20 instead of 0.04, 243/158/158). Pass slots by the number of passes draw #ffffff, and a field without its pixel scale ramps over 16 and 4 units: exactly the two new checks fail. - e2e sum 1716 is counted, not yet measured (1712 + 4). - Measured on stein2 (HD 630, one run per row): 50 field shaders at radius 8 go from 11.4 to 41.3 fps in two passes, 44.4 at radius 16 (three passes at Half). 800 sprites at radius 8 go from 13.9 to 24.5 fps. At radius 4 one pass stays faster from 400 sprites on. 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, container, clip area, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, animation, curve, tile, tilemap, state machine, shader, font, sound, 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, 1716 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 runner – 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 |
| 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 Play sound |
| 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 a sprite wears, their node set, the properties they declare |
| 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.