With a large sheet the texture tab stalled on every mouse move. A
profile over a pan with 1728 frames showed two causes. Half of the time
went into convexPieces, which split every outline into convex pieces
only to pick its colour. And every pointer move during a pan rebuilt
and re-tessellated the whole overlay geometry.
- TextureCanvas draws on two layers. `sheet` holds every frame except
the selected one and is rebuilt only when the zoom, the selection or
one of those frames changes. `overlay` holds the selected frame, its
handles and the rubber band of a new frame.
- Both layers are drawn without the pan. A pan only moves the
container and places the name labels again.
- SheetCanvas has a new hook `panned()`. By default it calls `redraw()`
as before, so Pixel Art and Vector Art are unchanged.
- The validity of an outline is remembered per outline and comes from
polygonProblem, with the same result. This works because the model
replaces an outline list on every change and never edits it in
place, the same as frameOutline.ts already relies on.
- The name plates stay below the outlines and the texts on top. Checked
on a screenshot: the corner handle next to a label sits on top.
- New debug hook `__gm.texture.drawInfo()` with the rebuild count, the
outline count and the screen positions of outlines and names.
Measured with a throwaway probe, 1728 frames, 120 moves, main thread
time per move, before and after in the same browser:
- Middle-click pan: 76.9 ms -> 4.7 ms (4.4 ms without frames)
- Dragging a frame: 51.7 ms -> 10.1 ms
- Wheel zoom: 52.2 ms -> 30.9 ms
- Selecting another frame: 67.6 ms -> 41.0 ms
Findings:
- Wheel zoom and selection still rebuild `sheet` once on purpose. That
stays a single hitch per notch or click on very large sheets.
Tests:
- ./check.sh: 148 files, 2214 tests, CHECK EXIT 0.
- e2e 1-16,37,39-43 on the final build: ALL PASSED, 641 checks.
- Three new checks in 42c-ii. A corner drag does not rebuild the other
frames. An undo on an unselected frame reaches the picture (1 -> 2
outlines). A pan moves outlines and names by exactly 40/25 px without
a rebuild.
- Counter-checks: a missing outline in the cache key and a pan that
does not move each fail at their check. The selected frame in the
key fails alone with 9 rebuilds during an 8-step drag.
- Check total 1333 -> 1336 (confirmed by CI at ceaa44e, task 259).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
6.4 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, rigidbody, container, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, font, sound, animation, state machine, shader, particles, variables, tile, tilemap) 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.
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, 1336 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 |
| 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 |
| 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.
