Script News & Announcements
February 2, 2025GMLscripts.com 3.8 Transition (part 3)
This update marks the addition of a new client-side search engine. The
search page is accessible from the site's global navigation, currently at
the top of every page. Simply type your query and see the search results
instantly. The search corpus is composed of script pages. Search results may
be improved with the addition of tags. Implicit tags are already being used
but it is possible tags will be explicitly added to script pages to improve
results.
Returning to the site is the reporting of recent script changes. A list of script changes is included on the landing page and decorators are now added to script definitions wherever they appear on the site.
Improvements have been made to news navigation but more work is required. The two major changes needed are the pagination of the news index and the creation of news summaries. These will require some thought.
Minor visual changes and optimizations have been made that are probably not noticeable. Further optimizations are anticipated and a full visual overhaul is on the horizon.
January 14, 2025GMLscripts.com 3.7 Transition (part 2)
Work behind the scenes continues. The site is now statically generated by
an entirely new fully offline system I've written in Python. This is my
first major Python project which has been quite a learning experience. Much
of the code is based on the old PHP dynamic page generator, but now the
site is generated in only five seconds compared to the 15 minutes it took
using wget to crawl a locally hosted dynamic version.
The new build process includes a templating engine that takes many cues from Jekyll to empower a simple news blog, which was a fun programming task. More work is needed to fully realize my needs. All material is now referenced from the same single sources, so all pages and repo files should stay in sync automatically. With any luck, there shouldn't be much visible difference from the previous version.
More obvious changes have been made to the script submission process. This includes a new contribution guide and updated style guide.
The next update should include a search engine, improved news navigation, and a return of the recent changes list and script decorators.
December 21, 2024GMLscripts.com 3.6 Transition
This update represents one of the biggest changes to GMLscripts.com to
date and it has been a long time coming. I wasn't sure how to introduce the
changes but fate took an unfortunate turn. Some personal upheaval resulted
in the site going offline for a couple of months which somewhat forced my
hand. The site is back and at first glance, things appear the same.
However, there are two major changes.
First, the forums are no longer accessible. I'd been wanting to wind them down for a few years because they were never very active and the forum software itself is no longer maintained by its developers. Even when it was being supported, keeping the software up to date required a lot of manual, error-prone effort because of all the modifications I've made over the years. However, I think GitHub can help us out, and I intend to open Discussions there soon and script submissions can still be made via Pull Request.
Second, the site is no longer dynamic. This has less of an effect on you than on me. Until now, all script pages were generated from a pair of source files which are found in the GitHub Script Repository — the GML script itself and an extended Markdown document. This was a nice system because script updates in the repo automatically appeared on the site. However, that is over. No more PHP, no more MySQL — at least here. The emergency "static mirror" is now the only version of the site. I still locally generate the static version of the site using the same dynamic backend but I'm looking into new site generation options.
At the moment things are in transition and less than ideal. I have more tidying to do and I want to develop a fresh trajectory soon.
Good luck to you all in 2025.
November 1, 2018Massive Update - GMLscripts.com 3.5
I've just uploaded a massive update to the inner workings of the site.
With any luck, you will not notice any major changes (ie. broken stuff).
Hopefully the site is easier to read, a little nicer looking, and it
should load a bit quicker.
The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript have been completely overhauled and streamlined. Heavy dependencies have been eliminated and minor ones have been consolidated. Server software has been updated across the board.
In all, since the last update, Git tells me:
134 files changed, 5364 insertions(+), 1761 deletions(-)
This has been a big job and it is good to be finishing it. It also means that a new big job is ahead of me: updating all scripts on the site to GameMaker Studio 2 standards.
Onward and upward!