⚂ And what do you sync about it
The fascinating Flash. One moment it works, the other things go odd, and then you have no idea how did it even escalate to that.
One of those moments was encountered by me when reimplementing flash.net.URLVariables class yesterday for OpenFL-bitfive, and this is a bit of a blog post about that.
As you may know, there's a program called Construct 2. You can make games with it. While I'm generally not a huge fan of built-in scripting system (scene editor and idea of behaviours are pretty great though), some people make nice games with that.
Also there's Game Jolt. Game Jolt is a site you can host your games, devlogs, and related media upon. It's great. I'm not sure which of Saturn's moons you are living on if you haven't heard of it by now.
Then when two come together... you can upload Construct 2 games to GameJolt, but you cannot use any of it's quite so nice Game APIs (such as high score tables, trophies, data stores...), since, well, noone made a plugin for that so far.
Seeing that, I thought that I may as well fix that part (a bit). So I have devoted a bit of time over few days and have made a plugin that provides basic functionality, such as sending scores and trophies. Everything is pretty straight-forward and easy to get hang of.
Installation is simple also - download ZIP file below, and unzip contents (a folder called "gamejolt") into HTML5 plugins directory (Construct 2\exporters\html5\plugins) in your Construct 2 installation. Upon next launch of program, GameJolt plugin will be available in "Platform specific" category alongside of Kongregate, Scirra arcade, and other items.
That's pretty much it, I guess. Download links are below. If there are any questions, feel free to ask.
GameJolt page (demo+downloads)
Extension has been updated to include additional functions. So have been links in this post and files on GameJolt.
Some time ago I've introduced a Notepad++ syntax highlighting file for GameMaker 8.1 and earlier versions. At the time, making a GameMaker: Studio version seemed slightly less senseful, since dynamic scripting functions are no longer supported, and code in XML files is escaped slightly, but then... oh do wait, extensions!
Extensions in GameMaker: Studio are imported into each project locally, permitting easy modification of their files. Of course, this also implies ability to edit GML files in them. Which in turn permits editing them with external editor of choice without having to deal with XML conversions.
So I took those several minutes needed, and updated UDL (user defined language) file for GameMaker: Studio. It contains all functions, variables, and constants present as of version 1.2.1264 (released January 22, 2014). Apart of new keywords, it now sticks to editor style better as well.
Oh, and you can fold code with comments (//{, //}). Foldable sections are awesome.
(or grab source from PasteBin, if Dropbox is somehow inaccessible)
... and if you prefer Sublime Text, there's GameMaker plugin for that too (by Cycododge).
For me this morning started with just another bit of code, some of which has granted BitmapData.noise() function support for my OpenFL backend OpenFL-bitfive, proven to be a more interesting process than expected, and, given that it's otherwise hard to tell what I am working on, I thought that I could write a post about this:
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Hello again. It've been a short while, but I have some news - today I'm proud to present you with... Terrasavr! Terrasavr is a web-based profile viewer & editor for Terraria (video game). You can either take a look at it from that last link, or read the full post for more details.
Continue readingYou can't make good HTML5 games in Haxe
- A phrase usually popping up when it comes to a discussion about HTML5 and Haxe. Which is complete nonsense. Not just that it is nonsense, but it's also a good measure of how little (read: none) research the author of phrase has made on the topic. I'm quite tired explaining to people, why their opinion about this is incorrect, so I've decided to group key points into a post,
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It've been a long long time. How have you been?
Meanwhile I have been studying, working on some things (you can also see from the finally linked Works page), some of which I am going to highlight in next few days here.
One for today is the Haxe-made JavaScript minifier+obfuscator, called HaxMin. You could just navigate to it's Github repository or read the full post below.
Today I'm going to tell a bit about implementing "click and drag to scroll" type of effect in GameMaker. This particular thing is useful for strategy games (and normally bound to middle mouse button), applications (where visible area may exceed available window space), and various mobile games and applications (where visible area may be panned by tapping and dragging the finger).
Effect itself looks like this:
Today I'm officially releasing OpenFL-bitfive, an alternative backend to OpenFL-html5. Similar to standard backend, OpenFL-bitfive assists you at creating HTML5 games (apart of standard Flash, Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, [...] ones) with use of comfortable Flash-like OpenFL API. A difference is that while focusing only on certain feature set, OpenFL-bitfive reaches quite higher performance and compatibility in its niche, also making it possible to develop mobile HTML5 games using the framework. This post goes in-depth about it.
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One of first questions ever when starting with GameMaker: Studio is how does one open pre-Studio GameMaker projects (such as GameMaker 8.1, GameMaker 8.0, 7, 6.x, 5.x...). If you got here from search, you probably already tried opening these by dragging them over the program window or attempting to pick these from "Open" menu which does not allow to switch file types. Thus you are probably thinking something in the lines of this now:
But no, of course it isn't that bad (why would someone do this to you?), and you can get your projects running in GameMaker: Studio by importing them. This posts explains how and why.
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