Author Archives: Vadym

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GameMaker: ‘strategy’ unit selection

Today I've made a simple example for strategy-like unit selection.
That is, selecting units (instances) with mouse, with selection rectangle and selected units being displayed accordingly.
Example is well-commented and should be easy to use.
Principle of work is simple - to detect units that overlap selection rectangle, game should cycle through them, performing collision_rectangle checks. Amount of calculations and code complexity is cut here by local variable usage (if you did not know, local variables 'var' will be available inside of with constructions without any prefixes).

Download GMK

Source code follows,

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GameMaker: Taking screenshot of area larger than screen


Above: in-game view. Below: taken screenshot of entire room

This is an example that I've actually made a long time ago, but apparently it remains a common unresolved problem.
For multiple cases you may need to take a screenshot (or copy to surface) entire room, while only portion of it can be seen at once (window/screen size limitations).
A perfect work-around for this is to force screen drawing into a surface of chosen size, after adjusting view settings.

Download GMK

Minecraft: Sometime, modding

I was playing Minecraft often in past days, and once again have came to thoughts that start from phrase "I wish there was...".
As result, I've got to 'playing around' with source of Zombe's ModPack.
This mod already adds some nice additions for single-player and survival multi-player, and most of my edits turned out to be experimental, or something that only I might see use of.
So, these are...

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Time is Ticking (gadget for windows vista/7)


Looks of gadget on desktop, in according pane, and on it's settings screen.

So I've randomly found out that Windows 7 (and Vista too) gadgets are written in HTML+JS+CSS.
Next thing I did was writing my own gadget. So this comes.

'Time is Ticking' is a minimalistic stopwatch. As such, it's purpose is to allow measuring for how long you were doing (or not doing) specific thing. Can be motivating.
Gadget can be considered optimized (does operation and a redraw once per second when on, is entirely idle when off), features customizable backgrounds with ability to specify your own (navigate to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\TimeIsTicking.gadget\image and add 160x32 PNG images to be able to chose them by-name in settings), and is pretty nice-looking overall.
For best experience it is recommended that you have font Dejavu Sans Mono installed, so digits would display appropriately.
To avoid accidental triggering, pause\restart buttons require double-clicking them to react.

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CPP – [busy] sleep() function via time.h

As you may know, there are multiple ways to create a sleep\delay function in C++.
These may appeal more or less to you depending on system and libraries available.
The following short function uses functionality of time.h header, which makes it useful for cases when dos.h is missing and you do not want to include windows.h just for a single function.

void sleep(int ms) {
	clock_t target = clock() + ms;
	while (clock() < target) { }
}

AS3: MinimalFramework


Trivia: Compiled SWF seen on this image takes less space than an image of it.

I made this tiny "framework" some time ago and successfully used it for a handful of jam games, including those with size restrictions (such as Pipe10).

Structurally it is inspired by FlashPunk, and includes a 04b03 lookalike font compressed into 1.3KB worth of data.

See code (Gist)

GameMaker: Dungeon generation


Fairly big, fairly maze-y, has some rooms, and takes little time to generate

This is a small update to my 2010 dungeon generator example.

The main change is that it now treats high values of "cut dead end" parameters correctly, no longer placing unconnected rooms even if there's enough space to allow that.

Also there's now a small demo on how to use the resulting data, placing some walls and a player to wander around as.

Download GMK

Update: Also see this post about this approach to dungeon generation.

GameMaker: Surfaces and scrollable content

In some cases, a moment comes when you need to display specific content in a area smaller than itself, thus requiring scrolling.

GameMaker does not support 'clip rectangle' type of command for its reasons, however it is easy to 'clip' area to be drawn by using an 'buffer' surface to draw content in, before drawing that to screen.
Attached example illustrates sample implementation of such.

Most often, content of such would be text. And maybe an image. Or two.

Since images would require a bit more code, example does simple and efficient - long long text is rendered into a surface, which is later drawn into an other 'buffer' surface to display it as part of window on screen.
Also there is a scrollbar, which obviously can be improved, if it needs to serve purposes other than displaying position of 'window'.

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