Category Archives: GameMaker

Notepad++: Syntax highlighting for GameMaker ≤ 8.1

Similar to other few posts about Notepad++ on this blog, this one also contains a user defined language for said program. As you can guess from title, it's for pre-Studio versions of GameMaker Language (GML).
I've made this UDF file a while ago actually, but wasn't publishing it, since it seemed that there is at least one more solution existing for this. Apparently not anymore.

This language definition supports all standard language structures of GameMaker. As well it highlights all existing functions, constants, and "special" variables (like global/self/other). Colour "conventions" are kept to ones of GameMaker. User-defined script and constant names are not automatically detected, unfortunately, but you may include these in Keyword Group 6 manually for them to be highlighted.

Download UDF

And if you are looking for GameMaker: Studio syntax highlighting, there's a UDL for that as well.

GameMaker: Android hardware button handling

Standard set of 4 Android hardware buttons

One of common questions about GameMaker: Studio include "How do I detect presses of hardware buttons (Home, Menu, Back, Search)?".
Despite of common assumptions, usage of these in GameMaker: Studio is pretty straight-forward - mentioned button events are automatically mapped to according keyboard button events. So, handling these is as easy as adding standard keyboard events.
More information about each follows,

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GameMaker: Recursive folder copying

In some situations you may want to copy a folder from your GameMaker game. And it would seem trivial but not that easy. file_copy can only copy files, and folder functions only allow you to create, check, and search folders for files. However, given these standard functions, implementing a folder copying routine is fairly easy.

Idea used here is to find a list of files and folders via file_find_*, and then go through them, checking whether they are files or folders, copying or recursively calling recursively function script accordingly. Sure that poses a potential problem if you were to copy entire disc contents to other location, but you are probably not going to be doing that via GameMaker... right?

Attached example contains the function and brief demonstration of functionality (you have to input source/destination paths as text).

Download GMK

Code follows,

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GameMaker: Basic 3d bone animations

This example demonstrates how to create fairly basic bones for use in GameMaker 3d games fairly easily. Such can be used for character and environment animations, provided that they can be split in rotatable parts to some extent.

Advantages

As you may know, GameMaker does not quite support vertex animations. That means that models have to be either composed on-fly (which is a slow method), or "baked" as a number per-frame models (which takes amounts of memory proportional to how smooth you want your animations look). Bone animations, on other hand, work fast (since only transformation calculations need to be done), and require small amounts of memory.

Implementation

Idea of bone transformations is that you have so called bones, which can be attached to other bones, which makes them rotate together. That means, to find transformation matrix (position, rotation, and scale) of any given bone, you need to go through all of its "parent" bones, combining matrices. Normally this would be a slightly tricky task (especially if engine of choice does not have matrix operations built in), but, fortunately, GameMaker includes a set of functions to manipulate matrices (d3d_transform_).

Attached example includes a minimal system for linking bones together, drawing them, and a sort of procedural animation example.

Download GMK

GameMaker: Shadow casting in platformer games

This is a very old example of mine actually (creation timestamp says Sep 2010), which I've recently fixed & improved at request.

It demonstrates a simple algorithm to cast shadow from instance in platformer game. So when player jumps, shadow is displayed on ground below (realism!).

For the sake of simplicity and performance, shadows are checked against bounding boxes by default. Pixel-perfect checking is added as a separate condition, requiring affected objects to be children of obj_complex.

If you're interested in how this works behind-the-scenes, here's an illustration:

Outlined instances are ones used for finding top-most position below the player (which shadow will be cast onto). Red line is a number of point checks to indicate top-most point on objects with precise masks.

As another random visual tweak, there's a piece of code added to make shadow shrink as caster gets further from ground. A small touch, but these add up over time.

Download GMK

GameMaker – Substitution “cipher”

This example provides a function to substitute all characters in a string, which present in first set of characters, by characters from second set. This can be used to substitute l/e/a/s/t/o characters in a string by 1/3/4/5/7/0 accordingly, turning your "Hello World" into "H3110 W0r1d" in single script call, or to replace/swap characters with completely irrelevant ones, providing simple "encryption" (e.g. Caesar cipher or various substitution methods) to challenge the player.

Functional part is presented by a single script, named string_subst(string, from, to), which returns string with all characters from set from replaced by according characters from set to. As long as both from and to are of equal length and do not contain repeating characters, output can be "decrypted" by passing parameters in swapped order, e.g. 

var asrc, adst, source, encr, decr;
asrc = "0123456789"; // source "alphabet"
adst = "3456789012"; // destination "alphabet"
source = "51"; // source text
encr = string_subst(source, asrc, adst); // "encrypted" text
show_message(encr); // Displays "84;"
decr = string_subst(encr, adst, asrc); // "decrypted" text
show_message(decr); // Displays "51;"

Attached example demonstrates both "encryption" and "decryption", and has nice buttons.

Download GMK

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GameMaker: Cycling random funky text

The idea behind this effect is simple enough - for every string character that should be randomized, replace it with any other character that has same width (so that the drawn string would not wiggle chaotically).

It uses 3 scripts total - one for general initialization, one for per-font init (creating a map of lists for what glyphs any given one could be replaced with), and one for actual string processing.

Can be handy for various abstract pieces, or as an interesting way to censor text.

Download GMK Live demo

Text versions follow,

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