This is a small post on how to conveniently and optimally pack an arbitrary number of incoming script arguments into an array.
Continue readingWebsite updates and a bit of retrospective
Finally getting to the important features
As you might have noticed, things are suddenly slightly different - the blog's design suddenly looks a little less 2012, big posts get a "table of contents" widget, and there's a dark theme switch!
In this post I take a look back on how my website originally came to life and how it changed over time.
Continue readingGameMaker: sprite_add_sprite in Studio / Studio 2
On this fine day[1], we're[2] proud to announce that we're bringing back everyone's[3] favourite GameMaker 8.x function!
That's right, we're bringing back sprite_add_sprite! 🎉
Now, you might be thinking either "this is not what I've expected" or "this is exactly what I expected [after reading the title] and I only have more questions now". You see, there's not always justification for things happening, sometimes they just do.
Should you actually need this function or if this introduction got you curious, take a seat and let me tell you a story (and some code),
Continue readingSmall Haxe questions & answers
Sometimes I have one or other semi-obscure Haxe question, find nothing via search, and think "I feel like I asked about this before somewhere". And sometimes it turns out that yes, I did, but it usually takes a while to find what project houses the solution code, or where did I ask it.
This post is a small dump of such questions, mostly eventually self-answered.
Continue readingHow to make mods for Nuclear Throne Together
a half-reference to a drawing which is a reference to this one comment
As you may or may not know, one of the key features of my "Nuclear Throne Together" mod is it's ability to load other mods. People made a number of these (older mods; itch.io category).
This post houses a small collection of links and FAQs on the subject.
Continue readingGameMaker: draw_sprite_ext_skew
(click to interact)
(mouseover/click to play GIF)
Drag sliders and click things (if JS is enabled)
draw_sprite_ext - maybe you want to apply skewing/shearing to the sprite, or scale it after rotating it, or use a 2d matrix transformation.
The built-in function isn't made for that, but, with a little bit of math and draw_sprite_pos, you can have a script for this.
GameMaker: Formatted date output
(click to interact)
This is a small post about a replica of the strftime function seen in PHP, C standard library, and a handful of other APIs. Such a function takes a date-time and prints it according to the given format string.
The script supports the common formats and those that mapped reasonably to GML functions.
Continue readingGameMaker: Microtester
And other reasons to avoid overusing reflection
On this fine day I have published the project that I use to compare relative performance of different approaches to algorithms. It aims to get a few things right with this:
- Tested scripts are re-shuffled between runs to lower execution order/CPU cache bias.
- Script call time can be excluded if you are comparing approaches rather than actual scripts.
- Easy to use - you add scripts that you want tested to the project, specify how you want them to be called, and that's it.
The project can be found on GitHub.
GameMaker: Simplest possible instance methods
After seeing series of increasingly strange uses of "user events" in GameMaker games for object-bound actions, it came to my attention that most people are only vaguely aware of other ways of doing things, so I decided to write a small blog post on the matter.
There are many uses for these - for example, you might want to have a "take X damage" method on your enemy objects so that it can be varied depending on requirements - some enemies might just take damage, some should retaliate on being hit, some might have a fancy damage reduction formula. Being able to comfortably define/redefine methods on per-object-type basis can help a lot.
Continue readingVariable references in GameMaker
Sometimes you might want to pass an instance variable by reference rather than by value - to have a script modify instance variable(s) passed to it without having to return them, or have an instance save a reference to variable(s) that it should change on other instance, or doing anything else that would usually imply using pointers.
But it might seem like GameMaker does not support such things... or does it? Well, we'll make it.
Continue reading