Tag Archives: gamemaker

GameMaker: Compacting Studio project files

If you have ever inspected directories of newly created projects for GameMaker: Studio, you may have noticed that even the seemingly empty project does "weight" a bit. 4 megabytes, to be precise (or 2 and half if zipped). Now you could say that it's not a lot nowadays, but it does stack, and those extra megabytes now and then could have came useful somewhere else (especially if keeping multiple backups of same project or periodically sending it over to someone). And, overall, it's a bit more than you'd logically expect from something that doesn't do anything (yet).
Reason of this is that upon creation your project looks roughly like this:

That is, most of space is occupied by Configs folder. It, in turn, mostly contains data and placeholder images for entire variety of platforms that GameMaker: Studio supports.
A thing is that far not many of those are actually needed in most situations, since splash screens and icons are commonly replaced with game-specific ones, and items left unmodified are commonly not used at all.
This post goes a bit into "optimizing" GameMaker: Studio projects a bit to reduce filesize drastically.

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GameMaker: Window sliding effects

Window sliding example for GameMaker

This post is about creating window sliding effect such as seen in my old program called GMConveter. Program itself was a bit of joke actually, since at the moment of it's publication the only actual difference between GM80 and GM81 formats was a version byte in file header, which GMConverter would change, making files compatible again. Not too bad of functional part for something that was downloaded over 4 thousand times over course of two years, right?
Apart from inner simplicity, it also had nice visuals, including a nice window sliding effect used on start and end of program. And that's what this article is about.

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GameMaker: Troubleshooting strange outlines on images

Strange outlines around images in GameMaker and fixing them
With the glitch (left) and without (right)

If you've ever tried to scale imagery (sprites / backgrounds) up while having texture (/pixel) interpolation turned on, you might have encountered some drawing artifacts. These normally look like the left part of above image, being either random black/white dots or a whole semi-transparent outline around the image. This article goes a bit in-depth about why these occur and how to fix them.

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Vector: GameMaker: Studio logo in Windows 8 style

GameMaker: Studio logo in Windows 8 style

This vector icon was originally drawn by me as illustration for one of discussions I was participating in at end of April, which rolled from discussing GameMaker: Studio functionality to discussing it's current logo to making guesses how it could be made better and particularly if Windows 8 - like style would have worked for it. I'm not sure whether this is a good logo generally, but I think it could be useful at times when current 3d-looking Studio logo does not quite fit aesthetically.
To maximize ease of adaptation, scalable vector source file (SVG) is also included here.

Download SVG Download PNG Download HD PNG

(note: as of 2014 or so, GameMaker no longer uses this particular icon, but you can still use this I guess)

Also I've made a GameMaker: Studio HTML5' loading bar extension out of this logo, which looks like this:

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Notepad++: Syntax highlighting for GameMaker ≤ 8.1

Similar to other few posts about Notepad++ on this blog, this one also contains a user defined language for said program. As you can guess from title, it's for pre-Studio versions of GameMaker Language (GML).
I've made this UDF file a while ago actually, but wasn't publishing it, since it seemed that there is at least one more solution existing for this. Apparently not anymore.

This language definition supports all standard language structures of GameMaker. As well it highlights all existing functions, constants, and "special" variables (like global/self/other). Colour "conventions" are kept to ones of GameMaker. User-defined script and constant names are not automatically detected, unfortunately, but you may include these in Keyword Group 6 manually for them to be highlighted.

Download UDF

And if you are looking for GameMaker: Studio syntax highlighting, there's a UDL for that as well.

GameMaker: Android hardware button handling

Standard set of 4 Android hardware buttons

One of common questions about GameMaker: Studio include "How do I detect presses of hardware buttons (Home, Menu, Back, Search)?".
Despite of common assumptions, usage of these in GameMaker: Studio is pretty straight-forward - mentioned button events are automatically mapped to according keyboard button events. So, handling these is as easy as adding standard keyboard events.
More information about each follows,

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GameMaker: Recursive folder copying

In some situations you may want to copy a folder from your GameMaker game. And it would seem trivial but not that easy. file_copy can only copy files, and folder functions only allow you to create, check, and search folders for files. However, given these standard functions, implementing a folder copying routine is fairly easy.

Idea used here is to find a list of files and folders via file_find_*, and then go through them, checking whether they are files or folders, copying or recursively calling recursively function script accordingly. Sure that poses a potential problem if you were to copy entire disc contents to other location, but you are probably not going to be doing that via GameMaker... right?

Attached example contains the function and brief demonstration of functionality (you have to input source/destination paths as text).

Download GMK

Code follows,

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GameMaker: Basic 3d bone animations

This example demonstrates how to create fairly basic bones for use in GameMaker 3d games fairly easily. Such can be used for character and environment animations, provided that they can be split in rotatable parts to some extent.

Advantages

As you may know, GameMaker does not quite support vertex animations. That means that models have to be either composed on-fly (which is a slow method), or "baked" as a number per-frame models (which takes amounts of memory proportional to how smooth you want your animations look). Bone animations, on other hand, work fast (since only transformation calculations need to be done), and require small amounts of memory.

Implementation

Idea of bone transformations is that you have so called bones, which can be attached to other bones, which makes them rotate together. That means, to find transformation matrix (position, rotation, and scale) of any given bone, you need to go through all of its "parent" bones, combining matrices. Normally this would be a slightly tricky task (especially if engine of choice does not have matrix operations built in), but, fortunately, GameMaker includes a set of functions to manipulate matrices (d3d_transform_).

Attached example includes a minimal system for linking bones together, drawing them, and a sort of procedural animation example.

Download GMK

GameMaker: Shadow casting in platformer games

This is a very old example of mine actually (creation timestamp says Sep 2010), which I've recently fixed & improved at request.

It demonstrates a simple algorithm to cast shadow from instance in platformer game. So when player jumps, shadow is displayed on ground below (realism!).

For the sake of simplicity and performance, shadows are checked against bounding boxes by default. Pixel-perfect checking is added as a separate condition, requiring affected objects to be children of obj_complex.

If you're interested in how this works behind-the-scenes, here's an illustration:

Outlined instances are ones used for finding top-most position below the player (which shadow will be cast onto). Red line is a number of point checks to indicate top-most point on objects with precise masks.

As another random visual tweak, there's a piece of code added to make shadow shrink as caster gets further from ground. A small touch, but these add up over time.

Download GMK