March 1, 2015Irregular Monthly Update for March

Another four weeks and a lot of progress. Not as much as I'd hoped but doing well.

On the site side of things, most of the changes have been minor tweaks, both visual and semantic. The only major new feature is a system for identifying recently changed scripts. Any script changed or added in the last 30 days will display an icon (currently a lightning bolt). Along with this, I've added a section to the landing page which displays the most recently updated scripts.

As far as the scripts themselves go, I think all remaining scripts have been ported to GM:Studio. More documentation and demonstrations have been added and there will be much more to come. Some optimizations and bug fixes have made it into the mix as well.

Some new scripts which have been added include:

• draw_sprite_halfpixel — Draws a sprite transformed about the center of its origin pixel instead of the top-left corner.

• ds_grid_draw — Draws the data of a given grid at a screen location.

• ds_grid_filter_gaussian — Performs a Gaussian convolution on a given grid.

• ds_grid_filter_gaussian_wrap — Performs a Gaussian convolution on a given grid, wrapping around the boundaries of the grid if needed.

• ds_grid_get_bicubic — Returns the bicubic interpolation of the sixteen grid cells surrounding the given fractional coordinate.

• ds_grid_get_bilinear — Returns the bilinear interpolation of the four grid cells surrounding a given fractional coordinate.

• string_nato — Returns a given string as expressed by the Nato phonetic alphabet.

There are many more new scripts in the pipe.

I wish I had been able to do more but recent events have taken focus off of the site.

I'm now lead engineer on SilverQuest: Gaiden, a game in Steam Early Access. I've been working full-tilt to get up to speed with the vast amount of code that's been dropped into my lap. It's a bit like reverse engineering, figuring out how things work, which is something that greatly appeals to me. But, it's also been a monumental chore cleaning up code so that I can more easily understand and manage it. As I write this, almost all of the legacy code is now formatted to my liking but there is still much to learn about the way this game does things. In the long view, I can see a lot of refactoring will need to be done to improve performance and facilitate more features and more robust modding.

In another week, once a few more bugs have been squashed and a new update has been pushed onto Steam, I should be able to make more time for the site.

Stats from February

Website: 25 commits, 17 files changed, 88 insertions(+), 2214 deletions(-)

Scripts: 125 commits, 111 files changed, 1379 insertions(+), 212 deletions(-)

posted by xot

February 1, 2015Irregular Monthly Update for February

OK, so it's been a month since the relaunch. Things look about the same but an awful lot has been going on behind the scenes.

Lots and lots of little tweaks to the site and forum. Mostly visual and semantic. I've also added a couple of forum mods, such as BBCode buttons to assist in posting and some more video posting options. I still need to test a few things but things seem to be working well. I've also updated many news posts with fresh images to match the site. But you don't care about that stuff.

On the script end, I've done a huge amount of labor that is almost completely invisible. But it's laid some necessary groundwork to improve script documentation, including examples and live demos. Over the next couple of months I hope to have fully documented most existing scripts and added many new ones.

To help manage all of the changes, I'm using Git to maintain source files for the site and for the scripts. Diving into Git is the smartest thing I've done in a long time. It's making updates so much saner and has saved my butt more than once. It's also made me panic more than once because I'm still a noob.

I'm also tracking tasks with Trello, which is proving to be helpful, while making the true scope of things terrifying. I have well over 600 tasks and expect to add another 200 or so during the next couple of weeks.

Stats from January

Website: 103 commits, 409 files changed, 4025 insertions(+), 4982 deletions(-)

Scripts: 74 commits, 254 files changed, 2895 insertions(+), 149 deletions(-)

posted by xot

January 1, 2015GMLscripts.com 3.0

Happy New Year!

It's a new year and that means I'm currently rolling out the new iteration of GMLscripts.com. This has been a long time coming, and I've broken many promises along the way, but it's finally here.

There are a number of changes to talk about.

Obviously, the skin has changed. When I say this is a long time coming, I'm not kidding. This visual design was created over two years ago. I was never very satisfied with it but it is functional. You may need to clear your browser cache or refresh with Shift-F5 in order to see things properly. This look may not be entirely new to you if you've ever seen the static version of the site. That's the site I've redirected to a few times when I've had hosting issues.

More important than the look is the content. All of the scripts have been updated for GameMaker: Studio. The old scripts are no longer accessible. An informal Twitter poll of GMLscripts.com users agreed universally there was little point in supporting old versions of GameMaker. That certainly makes things a lot simpler to maintain. However, it's not all rainbows. There are a few scripts which still need to be tested and fixed. There are some that are completely absent. There are some which have been deprecated. I'll be ironing out these wrinkles over the next several days.

The back-end of the site has been completely overhauled. This is the main reason the update has taken so long. I tried a lot of complicated approaches that I didn't really like. I spent a lot of time and energy on systems that were inferior and redundant. In the end, the new system is similar to the old system but is simpler, more streamlined, more standardized, and more richly featured.

The forum has also received an update which will require a good deal of manual tweaking. The many modifications to the forum have not carried over to the new version. Posts that used these features will be fixed.

As this is a beta release, bugs and other problems are expected and will be dealt with as they are discovered.

posted by xot

March 19, 2014Big News from GDC 2014

OK, this a pretty big one-two punch from the good folks at YoYo Games.

The huge, huge news that was announced at GDC today is GameMaker: Studio on Sony PlayStation. New export modules will soon be available for PS4, PS3, and PS Vita delivery. As some have already seen, a number of GM games have made their way onto Sony already. To date, according to YoYo Games head of development Mike Dailly, all of these games have been expensive ports to other frameworks. Starting in the next few weeks, getting on Sony will be a whole lot easier. To prove it, YoYo Games is demonstrating 19 well-known games running on Sony platforms at their GDC booth right now. And it won't just be easy — it will be free. Sony and YoYo Games are partnering to provide free export modules to any licensed Sony developer. YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan says Sony are "big fans of GameMaker" and indicates it was the proliferation of GameMaker games on their platforms that fostered this partnership. Sony are taking indie development very seriously this generation and seem to be doing everything they can to make their platforms as accessible as possible. These are exciting times to be an indie developer and GameMaker: Studio user. Who knows what the future holds for Microsoft and Nintendo platforms? When asked about these possibilities, Duncan's response was interrupted by the sighting of nearby squirrels.

In other news, GameMaker: Studio v1.3 beta was released a few days ago. This is a significant upgrade from v1.2. Many of its new features have been available to those participating in YoYo Game's recently launched early access program. Among the changes and additions are:

• a revamped IAP system

• native code extensions for iOS, Android, and Mac

• push notifications for iOS, Android, and Tizen (and Windows later)

• a powerful new debugger

• improved handling of aspect ratios across devices

• the application_surface which acts a dynamic back buffer target for all drawing / view compositing

• new terse operators for accessing data structures

• SWF and Spine support.

Check out the YoYo Games Tech Blog for more information.

posted by xot