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While developing HTML5 games using GameMaker Studio, it may eventually come to your attention that the game does not render at native resolution, depending on the device, looking variously blurry as result. This small post is about fixing that.
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(mouseover/click to play GIF)
Click here for full-sized version.
If you follow me on one or other social network, you might have seen me post this gif on April 1st.
Most readers were quick to suspect something, but what if I told you that it was more real than you might have thought?
This small post is about that.
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Illustrating why you should escape your URL parameters
If you are using HTTP requests in your GameMaker projects, you may need to encode parameters in URLs accordingly to prevent your requests from becoming accidentally (or less accidentally, if user input is involved) malformed.
With some luck you may have already found the script on YYG helpdesk, but there's a minor caveat - as of writing this post, it does not support Unicode, so any non-Latin glyphs will be lost in process. Also it's not as fast as it could be, coming from pre-GM:S days and all.
I have at one point implemented URL encoding for sfgml and have now made a cleaner-looking, single-script version of the function. This post is about that.
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About 3 years after GMS2 release I decide that it might be a good idea to make a GMS2-specific UDL for Notepad++ instead of using my GMS1 UDL.
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In this third-of-a-series post, I go over existing issues in GameMaker's data structure functions (some of which you might not have been aware of), and how to fix them.
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Computer mice these days tend to have additional buttons on sides/ and people periodically wonder whether they need to do anything particular to poll these buttons.
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This post serves as a collection of descriptions and links to various GameMaker-related assets and extensions that I have published over time.
Back when publishing it in 2017, I thought it was longer than expected, but it had since grown about twice in size. At least the blog has that "navigation" sidebar now.
Also should answer the "how do I support your work" question that some readers have.
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It seems that questions about whether (and if so, to what extent) GameMaker: Studio and GameMaker Studio 2 games can be decompiled are being asked at a constant pace, and yet there are still no resources to clear up these questions. So I've decided to make a small post on the matter.
(originally published in May 2015, updated in 2019)
Continue readinglabel hello: select dialog("Hello! What would you like to do?") { option "Count to 5": for (var i = 1; i <= 5; i = i + 1) { wait(1); trace(i + "!"); } return 1; option "Nothing": jump yousure; } label yousure: select dialog("You sure?") { option "Yes": trace("Well then,"); return 0; option "No": jump hello; }
Example of supported syntax
As some might remember, earlier this year I have published a small guide on writing interpreters, which went over the process of implementing a basic interpreter capable of evaluating expressions consisting of numbers, operators, and variables.
This continuation of the guide further expands upon concept, outlining how to support calls, statements, and branching - enough for a small scripting language.
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Some things are numbers, some aren't
GameMaker Studio 2.2.2 released few days ago, bringing, among improvements, "GML consistency", which changes how automatic type conversion works in corner cases.
A little less known thing, together with that it also changed how GameMaker's string-to-number conversion function (real) works, having it throw an error if your string is definitely not a number.
A slight inconvenience, given that there is not a function to check if a string is a number before attempting conversion.
But, of course, that can be fixed.
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