This is a blog post about aiming ahead to hit moving targets! It has interactive elements.
Continue readingIntroducing: A pixel font generator!
I released a new tool today! It takes pixel font "tilesets" and converts them into actual TTF fonts! It is also 100% web-based, meaning that you can try it out right now. And this post details the development process for it. Also it doesn't have a catchy name for now since I've not come up with a good pun yet.
Continue readingGrid-based contour traversal
This is a small post about the algorithm I wrote for the recent pixel font tool to establish paths of shapes and holes on the image.
Continue readingGameMaker: Supporting high-density screens in HTML5 games
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.
Continue reading“GMLive for Unity3D” breakdown
(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.
Continue readingGameMaker: Escaping URL parameters
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.
Continue readingNotepad++: syntax highlighting for BB code
It came to my attention that no one published a user defined language mode for Notepad++ that would allow you to view BB code tags in the editor relatively comfortably, so I decided to correct that omission by publishing mine.
As far as technical details go, there isn't anything of particular complexity here - various tags are defined as delimiters and URLs use the same trick that the built-in Markdown UDL uses.
Continue readingTXR part 1 in Haxe
This is a small note that I have made a quick Haxe variant of the first part of my "small guide on writing interpreters". You can see an interactive Haxe-JS demo above, and find the Haxe source code on bitbucket.
2019 in review
I was randomly asked whether I was going to write a summary-of-the-year post or anything, and I thought "sure, why not", and proceeded to spend a day doing that.
Continue readingNotepad++: Syntax highlighting for GameMaker Studio 2
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.
Continue reading