⚂ Make frequent backups!
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.
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(click and drag to adjust rectangle size/position/rotation; distance to a circle is shown)
Suppose you have a rotated rectangle and a basic shape that rotation doesn't matter for (such as a point, circle, or a line segment), and you want to check whether the two are intersecting - be that for collision handling, hit testing, or whatever else.
On a glance this might seem like a bother because things are rarely too simple with rotated rectangles, but in this case it isn't - because you can "unrotate" the rectangle.
This small post is about that.
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(click to interact)
(mouseover/click to play GIF)
(spaceship graphic by Kenney)
Nowadays, most development tools provide ways of setting pivot/center point for imagery - that is, the relative point around which the image will rotate and usually be positioned relative to.
However, ability to define multiple pivot points per image remains relatively uncommon, despite being something that you want to have projectiles fire from a correct point of a sprite, display weapons/attachements at right relative points, or do anything else that demands relative offsets.
This small post is about that.
Continue readingThis is an average-length (~10 pages) blog post about how to write a parser, AST builder, bytecode compiler, and a bytecode interpreter - in general, and in GameMaker specifically.
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(mouseover/click to play GIF)
Sometimes, you may want to draw a copy of the game's screen into itself - usually for a purpose-specific effect (proper name is Droste effect) like TV screens.
This small post explains the process of doing so.
This post is about implementing custom timelines in GameMaker.
Admittedly, timelines remain to be one of the more dated features of the software, designed for a specific purpose and kept in their original form for compatibility.
Time to time you'll see someone stopping by on forums to write a big rant about how these are a mess, do not do what they expect them to do, and should be redesigned immediately.
People will usually also argue that doing these things by yourself is too hard.
Since it is far easier than people claim, I decided to write a post about this.
This post is about modifying configuration files for Wacom drivers to have a Wacom One tablet function in portrait orientation despite the option not being exposed in configuration UI.
Update: apparently the same applies to Intuos and Bamboo product lines, likely for the entire "generation" of tablets using the same drivers.
Update 2: for One/Intuous, the newer version of driver (6.x) has these options exposed in UI.
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Mouseover to activate, click to reposition the clipping star.
This is a tutorial about pretty much everything related to clipping drawn graphics in GameMaker.
That is, having drawn graphics only display inside a certain ("clip") area, be that a rectangle (UI regions, minimaps, etc.), circle, or a completely arbitrary shape (pictured above).
Also I'm trying new things so this post is nicely stuffed with interactive demos and snippets.
Continue readingThis is a small blog post about a thing that I've now explained so many times that it became obvious that it needs a blog post.
People are constantly asking about how built-in alarms work and how they could be replicated with custom GML code (for having >12 alarms, organization, or else).
Quality of explanations and equivalent code often varies, so here I explain both.
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Time to time I see people come up with increasingly strange solutions for a simple problem of splitting a string into multiple substrings on a delimiter.
So here's a post about the algorithm and with code samples for all existing versions of GameMaker.
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