Hosting HTML5 games on Google Drive

Hosting HTML5 games on Google Drive for free

Being able to quickly upload a HTML5 game to the web is important.

It's not just a more comfortable format for sharing, but sometimes a requirement, since games created with GameMaker: Studio, Construct 2, Haxe+OpenFL and many other tools may not necessarily fully function when launched locally due to browsers laying restrictions over local file access (meaning that sending a ZIP with game files may not quite work).

While it used to be possible to host HTML5 games on Dropbox for free (or, rather, it still is possible, but only if you have enabled the public folder before the late 2013, else it'll cost you some), you can still host HTML5 games freely on Google Drive.

And this article explains the process of hosting your games on Google Drive in detail.

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Adding thousand separators

string_thousands

Often, games and applications may display numbers. Sometimes, large numbers. In some cases, numbers with so many digits that you aren't even sure about most suitable notation.

And that's where use of thousand separators is handy. Since delimiter symbols (normally commas) appear in fewer quantity than digits, they are easier to count, and user can tell the order of magnitude easier.

This post covers detail of doing that, both in algorithm and code.

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BitFive: Now with multitouch

This is only a small thing out of everything I need to make/finish/release in next months, but...
So there is now multi-touch support in openfl-bitfive, which is an alternative OpenFL HTML5 backend with focus on blitting and compatibility across platforms.
Usage is identical to Flash/AIR - you add an according event listener to your desired DisplayObject, and handle the TouchEvent objects it catches: 

stage.addEventListener(TouchEvent.TOUCH_BEGIN, function(e) {
	trace("Touched at (" + e.stageX + ", " + e.stageY + ")");
});

And, same as it goes for mouse events, the rest is handled behind the scenes - events are routed automatically, and you don't need to worry about browsers and devices with partial or glitchy support.
You can even have your mouse events converted into touch events for ease of testing if you want (see bitfive_mouseTouches flag).

Addition is already live at both repository and haxelib, there's a demo available (probably want to view it from mobile device), and this post contains some extra details on what it took.
Also, if you needed this for some time, you can pretty much thank Ozdy (which is also the largest supporter of backend) for suggesting the feature.

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Introducing: Spelunky SD!

If you've been following me on the social networks, you may already know, that for the past three months I was working on a Spelunky Classic modification called Spelunky SD. It is a pretty broad project, implementing a number of fixes and improvements to the original game, and, most importantly, adding a 2-player cooperative online game mode.
Today, I am proud to announce the first public release of this project.
And this is a blog post about my experiences.

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GameMaker: trace/log function

A scribble reads "trace(x,y)"

Debugging games can be fun! Or not fun. Depends on what your definition of "fun" is.

Either way, starting with GameMaker: Studio, GameMaker has a proper debugger with breakpoints, step-by-step execution, watches, profiling, and other conveniences.

There is also an Output panel, to which you can write messages using show_debug_message. This can be preferable if you need to inspect order of execution or are in a hurry - after all, throwing a quick look on the panel is fast. You know what's not fast though? Using show_debug_message to do so.

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Haxe: Simplistic .properties parser

If you have ever been using Java, you may already be familiar with .properties file format. This is a simplistic configuration file format, somewhat similar to INI: 

# Comment
key = Value

For ones not liking that, there's also alternative syntax: 

! Comment
key: Value

Where leading/trailing spaces are optional and are trimmed in parsing process.

Since I've seen people ask about this kind of thing, and also have seen people invent ridiculous (and non-functional) regular expressions to parse this file format, I thought that I may as well make an implementation that works "just right".

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GameMaker: GM8 code editor color scheme for Studio

If you are using GameMaker: Studio and find default dark theme to be odd, you probably have already switched to lighter "GM8" theme via File - Preferences dialogue.

But, alas, switching to "GM8" theme does not change code editor color scheme, and you still get the default dark gray-orange theme in middle of your light-colored IDE.

So I thought that it would make sense to publish a GM8-esque color scheme that I've made and am using locally for a while now.

This color scheme follows GM8 style closely, with few exceptions like displaying resource names in teal instead of yellow (which grants higher contrast and generally looks better).

To import a color scheme, go to File - Preferences - Scripts and Code, click Import button, and pick the obtained file.

It is hard to make a large post about thing as small, so here's the file:

Download COL

Alternatively, file' contents (to be saved as gm8x.col and imported into GMS): 

<Colours>
  <Color0>0</Color0>
  <Color1>8388608</Color1>
  <Color2>16711680</Color2>
  <Color3>32768</Color3>
  <Color4>128</Color4>
  <Color5>128</Color5>
  <Color6>128</Color6>
  <Color7>8388736</Color7>
  <Color8>11171870</Color8>
  <Color9>16777215</Color9>
  <Color10>14744314</Color10>
  <Color11>10512464</Color11>
  <Color12>5988454</Color12>
  <Color13>16120058</Color13>
  <Color14>255</Color14>
  <Color15>2633011</Color15>
  <Color16>11913437</Color16>
</Colours>

Have fun!

GameMaker: Testing two game instances at once

If you are using GameMaker: Studio to create multi-player games (via not-so-recently added network_ functions or by utilizing existing DLLs) without separate projects for server and client, you might have stumbled upon one annoying limitation - you can't run two instances of game from IDE.

From a glance, this looks like a small issue, but it gets tedious really fast - to run a second instance, you have to either compile the game (takes time and monotonous file dialog actions), or find a compiled .win file in depth of temporary directories (or otherwise retrieve it's location via means of WinAPI), and pass it to the runner via command-line, like 

...\AppData\Roaming\GameMaker-Studio\Runner.exe -game (path to *.win file)

But that's no fun, right?
At least I've found so.
So I took a bit of time and made a small GML snippet to lift this unfortunate limitation.

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GameMaker: Windows-specific functions for Studio

While working on one of recent projects, I've stumbled upon few common issues that many meet - even if you are only targeting Windows in GameMaker: Studio, you cannot access files outside the game's AppData directory (not even in program directory). Neither you can order system to open a file, meaning no external "readmes" to be easily hooked up with game, nor portable configuration files, and some other limitations.
So I took an evening and made a simplistic DLL library to bring equivalents to some functions (sleep, execute_shell, non-sandboxed I/O) back for Windows target. Function list is as following:

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