Sometimes people ask me what programming languages I know / started with / have worked with in past, so this is a small post about that that I could link later.
Continue readingA yellow accent skin for GameMaker Studio 2 (and how to make your own)
(click for full-window version)
As it becomes increasingly more apparent that many people are completely unware of GameMaker Studio 2 having a light skin and fail to recognize it as being GameMaker as such, I have decided to stop using it for screenshots in my assets/blog posts.
However, the default dark skin is a little boring, so I decided to make a custom one with a familiar yellow tone for accents. This also doubles as a general explanation on how to make skins.
Continue readingGameMaker: getting the arguments-array
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.