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Yesterday I've made an interactive mock-up of "Extra Ordinary" comic #337. I think it carries the point pretty well. A link to the comic is available from the page (view after page to avoid a micro-spoiler). This blog post, on other hand, covers a few technical/process details, just in case you're curious.
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Often, games and applications may display numbers. Sometimes, large numbers. In some cases, numbers with so many digits that you aren't even sure about most suitable notation.
And that's where use of thousand separators is handy. Since delimiter symbols (normally commas) appear in fewer quantity than digits, they are easier to count, and user can tell the order of magnitude easier.
This post covers detail of doing that, both in algorithm and code.
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If you've been following me on the social networks, you may already know, that for the past three months I was working on a Spelunky Classic modification called Spelunky SD. It is a pretty broad project, implementing a number of fixes and improvements to the original game, and, most importantly, adding a 2-player cooperative online game mode.
Today, I am proud to announce the first public release of this project.
And this is a blog post about my experiences.
Debugging games can be fun! Or not fun. Depends on what your definition of "fun" is.
Either way, starting with GameMaker: Studio, GameMaker has a proper debugger with breakpoints, step-by-step execution, watches, profiling, and other conveniences.
There is also an Output panel,
to which you can write messages using show_debug_message.
This can be preferable if you need to inspect order of execution or are in a hurry -
after all, throwing a quick look on the panel is fast.
You know what's not fast though? Using show_debug_message to do so.
If you are using GameMaker: Studio and find default dark theme to be odd, you probably have already switched to lighter "GM8" theme via File - Preferences dialogue.
But, alas, switching to "GM8" theme does not change code editor color scheme, and you still get the default dark gray-orange theme in middle of your light-colored IDE.
So I thought that it would make sense to publish a GM8-esque color scheme that I've made and am using locally for a while now.
This color scheme follows GM8 style closely, with few exceptions like displaying resource names in teal instead of yellow (which grants higher contrast and generally looks better).
To import a color scheme, go to File - Preferences - Scripts and Code, click Import button, and pick the obtained file.
It is hard to make a large post about thing as small, so here's the file:
Alternatively, file' contents (to be saved as gm8x.col and imported into GMS):
<Colours> <Color0>0</Color0> <Color1>8388608</Color1> <Color2>16711680</Color2> <Color3>32768</Color3> <Color4>128</Color4> <Color5>128</Color5> <Color6>128</Color6> <Color7>8388736</Color7> <Color8>11171870</Color8> <Color9>16777215</Color9> <Color10>14744314</Color10> <Color11>10512464</Color11> <Color12>5988454</Color12> <Color13>16120058</Color13> <Color14>255</Color14> <Color15>2633011</Color15> <Color16>11913437</Color16> </Colours>
Have fun!
If you are using GameMaker: Studio to create multi-player games (via not-so-recently added network_ functions or by utilizing existing DLLs) without separate projects for server and client, you might have stumbled upon one annoying limitation - you can't run two instances of game from IDE.
From a glance, this looks like a small issue, but it gets tedious really fast - to run a second instance, you have to either compile the game (takes time and monotonous file dialog actions), or find a compiled .win file in depth of temporary directories (or otherwise retrieve it's location via means of WinAPI), and pass it to the runner via command-line, like
...\AppData\Roaming\GameMaker-Studio\Runner.exe -game (path to *.win file)
But that's no fun, right?
At least I've found so.
So I took a bit of time and made a small GML snippet to lift this unfortunate limitation.
While working on one of recent projects, I've stumbled upon few common issues that many meet - even if you are only targeting Windows in GameMaker: Studio, you cannot access files outside the game's AppData directory (not even in program directory). Neither you can order system to open a file, meaning no external "readmes" to be easily hooked up with game, nor portable configuration files, and some other limitations.
So I took an evening and made a simplistic DLL library to bring equivalents to some functions (sleep, execute_shell, non-sandboxed I/O) back for Windows target. Function list is as following:
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).
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:
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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