Into the yellowsphere!
This is a small blog post about a thing that I've now explained so many times that it became obvious that it needs a blog post.
People are constantly asking about how built-in alarms work and how they could be replicated with custom GML code (for having >12 alarms, organization, or else).
Quality of explanations and equivalent code often varies, so here I explain both.
Continue readingAs you might know, last year I made Nuclear Throne Together, which is a mod for Nuclear Throne that adds online multiplayer, fixes some bugs, improves the cooperative mode, and otherwise is very nice.
Just about this time last year, Nuclear Throne update 98 has released, which remains the most recent official update of the game.
Today I've released what is the largest update to Nuclear Throne Together to date.
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Since people have asked, I wrote another tiny GameMaker extension.
This one allows you to display "progress" on the game's taskbar button (Win7+ feature).
You can change status (none/unknown/active/paused/stopped) and set the current/total progress.
The feature is intended to be used for displaying progress of continuous operations, such as showing download progress, file operations, and so on.
There are numerous unexpected uses too - for example, personally I'm guilty of [mis]using it to display battery charge, since taking a glance at the taskbar button is much easier than making out percentages from the tray icon, and a button turning yellow/red in taskbar is easier to notice as well.
Much akin to the previous published one, this extension provides exactly one function with a number of constants for various options. And there's C++ code included too, if you're curious.
The extension can be obtained from itch.io or GameMaker: Marketplace. The demo project shown on the GIF is included in both packages.
Have fun!
Today I wrote a tiny GameMaker extension that allows to "flash" the game's window and/or it's taskbar button.
This is most often used to notify the user of something happening in the game while they don't have the window focused - for example, if you have some sort of matchmaking system in a multiplayer game, you'd want the user to become aware that someone joined their game even if the game window is currently minimized.
The extension is incredibly straightforward (a single function with "flags" for options), is documented, and includes C++ source code for ones curious about it.
Time to time I see people come up with increasingly strange solutions for a simple problem of splitting a string into multiple substrings on a delimiter.
So here's a post about the algorithm and with code samples for all existing versions of GameMaker.
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Time to time people come up with strange, slow-ish methods for drawing text with shadows in GameMaker. This is a tutorial about how to achieve the best effect without any of those struggles.
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Time to time I see questions being asked about whether it's possible to set variables prior to instance' Create event being executed or otherwise passing values into the freshly created instance.
Most often, people will say that, no, you can't do that, but here's a bunch of strange workarounds instead (executing in alarm event \ moving all Create code into a user event).
Now, as you might be suspecting by the title of the post, that is not quite correct - there's a bunch of substantially more valid methods of approaching the problem. This post covers them.
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Today I have published an extension that offers a wide variety of functions for working with INI files in GameMaker.
In doing so, it also does a better job than the built-in functions in many aspects.
This is a blog post detailing the advantages and technical details.
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This is an average-length post covering the aspects of reading/writing variables by their name (as string) in each version of GameMaker.
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For a little while now, I was working on a new thing - a program that would allow to test GameMaker code right in your browser. It is now complete, published, and is pretty cool.
You can either check it out right now or continue reading for development details and a bunch of demonstrations of it in action.
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