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1
Announcements / An update on sales tax
« on: June 11, 2020, 01:41:02 pm »
Hi everyone,
I wanted to give you an update on some changes that we’ll be seeing which may affect some of your pledges. Due to new laws passing in several countries and US states, Patreon will be required to start charging sales tax on some pledges starting July 1st.
Less than half of all patrons will be charged sales tax, and for most, the amount will be very small. For example, sales tax rates in the US range from 4% to 11%, so on a $5 pledge, that would be between 20 cents and 55 cents.
Whether or not you will be charged sales tax depends on your location, and what is considered taxable there. Not every pledge is taxable, not all benefits are taxable in every location, and sometimes only a fraction of a pledge will be taxable. The money that Patreon collects as a result of these laws are paid directly to local governments.
I’m working closely with Patreon to ensure I’m able to save you as much money as possible when it comes to sales tax - which is not something that’s possible with other platforms.
If you’re in a location where sales tax will be required, you should expect to receive an email from Patreon with more information about this very soon, but I wanted to make sure you were aware of these changes way ahead of July 1st when they go into effect.
If you have questions, you should be able to find answers here. If you still have questions, the best place to get an answer is from Patreon’s customer support team, here.
Thank you for all of your support!
I wanted to give you an update on some changes that we’ll be seeing which may affect some of your pledges. Due to new laws passing in several countries and US states, Patreon will be required to start charging sales tax on some pledges starting July 1st.
Less than half of all patrons will be charged sales tax, and for most, the amount will be very small. For example, sales tax rates in the US range from 4% to 11%, so on a $5 pledge, that would be between 20 cents and 55 cents.
Whether or not you will be charged sales tax depends on your location, and what is considered taxable there. Not every pledge is taxable, not all benefits are taxable in every location, and sometimes only a fraction of a pledge will be taxable. The money that Patreon collects as a result of these laws are paid directly to local governments.
I’m working closely with Patreon to ensure I’m able to save you as much money as possible when it comes to sales tax - which is not something that’s possible with other platforms.
If you’re in a location where sales tax will be required, you should expect to receive an email from Patreon with more information about this very soon, but I wanted to make sure you were aware of these changes way ahead of July 1st when they go into effect.
If you have questions, you should be able to find answers here. If you still have questions, the best place to get an answer is from Patreon’s customer support team, here.
Thank you for all of your support!
2
Announcements / Amazing Box Puzzles & Defense of the Realm
« on: July 10, 2019, 09:30:29 am »
Every now and again I like to share some exceptional games from ENIGMA's EDC or the community. Two games I've recently spotted are by community member Hugh Greene.
Amazing Box Puzzles is a fun and challenging puzzle game similar to Mystery Mansion and other titles he's released with new and refined mechanics.
https://enigma-dev.org/edc/games.php?game=99
Defense of the Realm is a more traditional side-scrolling shooter that's fast paced and involves finer-tuned reflexes to succeed.
https://enigma-dev.org/edc/games.php?game=98
If you enjoy these genres, please do check out his games. He not only puts a lot of effort into them, but I can personally vouch for their quality. Consider leaving him some reviews and feedback so he knows how to get even better. He's on his way to becoming a master game developer!
3
Issues Help Desk / LateralGM High DPI Workaround
« on: May 05, 2019, 09:13:17 am »
I've had this issue with LGM on my high DPI 2K monitor for a while now. I even have the issue running LGM under Java 9. I finally did some research and found a workaround I'd like to share.
https://superuser.com/a/1207925
I tried that on my installed "javalocation/bin/java.exe" but it didn't work at first. So what I did was ask the MSYS2 console where java is.
I then went there and applied the fix to that exe and it worked. You just right click the exe->Compatibility tab->"Change high DPI settings" and override the DPI scaling factor. I set mine to "System (Enhanced)" to get the results below.
DPI System (Enhanced)
DPI Unaware/Broken
https://superuser.com/a/1207925
I tried that on my installed "javalocation/bin/java.exe" but it didn't work at first. So what I did was ask the MSYS2 console where java is.
Code: (bash) [Select]
$ where java
C:\ProgramData\Oracle\Java\javapath\java.exe
I then went there and applied the fix to that exe and it worked. You just right click the exe->Compatibility tab->"Change high DPI settings" and override the DPI scaling factor. I set mine to "System (Enhanced)" to get the results below.
DPI System (Enhanced)
DPI Unaware/Broken
4
Announcements / New LateralGM Stability Releases
« on: April 23, 2019, 03:15:50 am »
This may come as a welcome surprise to many of you, but I wanted to announce a few LateralGM releases that I've made recently. Yes, we are still working on a new IDE, but are not yet ready to completely drop LateralGM so I don't mind making a few stability changes and healthy fixes for the project to placate everybody in the interim. The main point of these changes is not to introduce radical changes to LGM, but simply make maintenance a little easier, including some custom error dialogs that facilitate users solving certain issues themselves rather than posting them to our GitHub.
As always, you can obtain the new releases on GitHub. The installation scripts in enigma-dev have also been updated to refer to the latest LateralGM release.
https://github.com/IsmAvatar/LateralGM/releases/tag/v1.8.53
Summary of Changes
1) New event selector based on a mockup by Josh which is a critique of the GameMaker 5 event selector.
2) Fixed translations that already existed but where the keys have been renamed. Also provided new translations where possible using Google Translate.
3) Cleanup of the GMX writer including refactoring of group writing.
4) Memory leak fix in the GMX and GMK readers.
5) Fixed some inconsistent use of certain icons.
6) Fixed some action list behavior including exceptions around clipboard options and empty selection.
7) Fixed clipboard copying of actions using a deep copy addressing the linked actions issue.
8) Fixed resource name completions in the code editor.
9) Fixed default sprite transparency which addresses issues with loading GMX projects after GMK projects.
10) Improved external editor error handling with custom error messages directing users how to resolve desktop editing failures themselves.
11) Made it easier to import multiple sprite sheets to the same sprite by making the "Add Spritesheet Subimages" button not clear the sprite's previous subframes first.
5
General ENIGMA / Poll: New LGM Event Selector
« on: April 21, 2019, 06:32:37 pm »Hey guys. I want everyone's feedback on a new event selector we are proposing for LGM.
https://github.com/IsmAvatar/LateralGM/pull/404
I know many of you have had frustration and find the current event selection unintuitive. Because of that, Josh created a mockup which is a critique of the GM5 event selector which I used to design the one in the pull request. You can download a prerelease jar of the changes in a zip from my pull request. I want to know what you guys think and whether I should merge it or if we should move forward with the event selection we already have.
I had previously been criticized by Josh for combining the Add/Replace/Duplicate options into "Modify" which is synonymous with "Edit" and thus confused him. I am taking a poll now to avoid making similar mistakes. The only way I can conceive of every imaginable criticism before merging this is to simply ask the community. So this is your chance to let your opinion be heard. Please let me know how you feel about this, thanks!
NOTE: Please understand that I am already aware the "Context" (previously "Object Window") resource menu breaks when you load a project. This is not a regression and exists in lgm16b4 too. I've filed a separate issue for this because I don't want to conflate it here. It will be fixed later on.
6
Announcements / New Dependency on Google Protocol Buffers
« on: February 02, 2019, 09:54:42 pm »
I wanted to make sure to cover this with an announcement to keep everyone in the loop. We have now rearranged the backend to the compiler so that it now uses Protocol Buffers directly. EnigmaStruct is now deprecated and should not be used for building new command line or frontend tools that integrate with ENIGMA.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/a1aa34d57d91e438bf937a39d902a6556932eaec
We also had to come back and address a few regressions from this change in several games. With this, there have been no other new regressions discovered.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/090d1a92fa377e0f9a851ebdaa3daa325b76a497
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/36de74c8d44871ea260506a8f8e27d684aee4253
EnigmaStruct is deprecated rather than obsolete because it is still used by LateralGM. It will likely remain that way as my development attention is staying focused at RadialGM now which uses the new Protocol Buffers directly for its data model. One advantage to the new Protocol Buffers interface is that binary compatibility can be maintained when changing the protos. This is not true of the old EnigmaStruct, and thus, tools that use it will be subject to frequent breakage as a result of the lack of binary compatibility.
Long story short, you will now need to install Google Protocol Buffers when setting up ENIGMA or the next time you update an existing installation.
I have also updated the Ubuntu/Linux installation instructions as well as the easy method script with the help of TKG. You will need a newer protobuf version which is why we recommend installing the dependency from Maarten Fonville's PPA which is where our Travis CI build obtains it.
https://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Install:Linux
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/issues/1527
You will also need to do a clean build of the compiler.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/a1aa34d57d91e438bf937a39d902a6556932eaec
We also had to come back and address a few regressions from this change in several games. With this, there have been no other new regressions discovered.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/090d1a92fa377e0f9a851ebdaa3daa325b76a497
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/36de74c8d44871ea260506a8f8e27d684aee4253
EnigmaStruct is deprecated rather than obsolete because it is still used by LateralGM. It will likely remain that way as my development attention is staying focused at RadialGM now which uses the new Protocol Buffers directly for its data model. One advantage to the new Protocol Buffers interface is that binary compatibility can be maintained when changing the protos. This is not true of the old EnigmaStruct, and thus, tools that use it will be subject to frequent breakage as a result of the lack of binary compatibility.
Long story short, you will now need to install Google Protocol Buffers when setting up ENIGMA or the next time you update an existing installation.
Code: (bash) [Select]
# MSYS2 64-bit
pacboy -S protobuf:x
# MSYS2 32-bit
pacboy -S protobuf:i
I have also updated the Ubuntu/Linux installation instructions as well as the easy method script with the help of TKG. You will need a newer protobuf version which is why we recommend installing the dependency from Maarten Fonville's PPA which is where our Travis CI build obtains it.
https://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Install:Linux
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/issues/1527
Code: (bash) [Select]
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maarten-fonville/protobuf
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler
You will also need to do a clean build of the compiler.
Code: (bash) [Select]
make clean
make -j4
7
Announcements / MSYS2, Pacboy, and Virtual Packages
« on: October 01, 2018, 07:53:45 pm »
I want to take a quick minute to explain a little bit about Pacboy because Hugar brought a user's installation issues to my attention over Discord. You can consider this post to be a sort of technical explanation and not really an announcement, but I want to try to clarify this for everybody and not just the one person.
The user was having a problem installing git using Pacboy because I forgot a colon on the install page for Windows. The [snip]git[/snip] package in MSYS2 is actually what's called a "virtual" package.
https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/Using-packages#installing-a-package
Because the package is virtual, when you install it with Pacman, you only need to specify [snip]git[/snip] without any [snip]x86_64[/snip] or [snip]i686[/snip] suffix. Now what Pacboy is, is it's a bash script written by the MSYS2 people that makes it easier to install Pacman packages so you don't have to specify the long package suffixes.
https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/Using-packages#avoiding-writing-long-package-names
Long story short, with Pacboy the [snip]:x[/snip] is for x86_64 (64 bit) and [snip]:i[/snip] is for i686 (32 bit) just as our instructions said before, but a plain [snip]:[/snip] after the package name, like [snip]git:[/snip], should be used for virtual packages.
I've updated our Windows installation instructions to clarify all of this.
https://enigma-dev.org/docs/wiki/index.php?title=Install%3AWindows&action=historysubmit&diff=31845&oldid=31833
The user was having a problem installing git using Pacboy because I forgot a colon on the install page for Windows. The [snip]git[/snip] package in MSYS2 is actually what's called a "virtual" package.
https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/Using-packages#installing-a-package
Because the package is virtual, when you install it with Pacman, you only need to specify [snip]git[/snip] without any [snip]x86_64[/snip] or [snip]i686[/snip] suffix. Now what Pacboy is, is it's a bash script written by the MSYS2 people that makes it easier to install Pacman packages so you don't have to specify the long package suffixes.
https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/Using-packages#avoiding-writing-long-package-names
Long story short, with Pacboy the [snip]:x[/snip] is for x86_64 (64 bit) and [snip]:i[/snip] is for i686 (32 bit) just as our instructions said before, but a plain [snip]:[/snip] after the package name, like [snip]git:[/snip], should be used for virtual packages.
Quote from: Pacboy Terminal Prompt
Pacboy 2016.6.24
Copyright (C) 2015, 2016 Renato Silva
Licensed under BSD
This is a pacman wrapper for MSYS2 which handles the package prefixes
automatically, and provides human-friendly commands for common tasks.
Usage:
pacboy [command] [arguments]
Arguments will be passed to pacman or pkgfile after translation:
For 64-bit MSYS2, name:i means i686-only
For 64-bit MSYS2, name:x means x86_64-only
For MSYS shell, name:m means mingw-w64
For all shells, name: disables any translation for name
For all shells, repository::name means repository/name
I've updated our Windows installation instructions to clarify all of this.
https://enigma-dev.org/docs/wiki/index.php?title=Install%3AWindows&action=historysubmit&diff=31845&oldid=31833
8
Announcements / New Dependency on OpenGL Mathematics (GLM) Library
« on: October 01, 2018, 12:16:25 am »| OpenGL1 | OpenGL3 | Direct3D9 | Direct3D11 |
 |  |  |  |
We've made it to yet another massive cleanup of ENIGMA's graphics. This one is a pretty big deal that I wanted to make sure to let everyone know about. I've rewritten all the old transform and matrix code using a single dependency, GLM, to eliminate all of the old duplication. This is not only less code but also brings improved consistency across the four graphics systems that ENIGMA currently provides. There were several reasons for choosing GLM over various other alternatives that exist, but I'm fairly certain we've made the right decision.
You can see in the above table that the transforms in the Animation Platform Example sent to me by DarkAceZ are consistent in all four graphics systems. Direct3D11 does still have noticeable rendering bugs, but this is unrelated to the transforms and has to do with render states and unfinished D3D11 features we will need to take care of later. But regardless, the game does perform more consistently as a result of these changes.
You will now need to download GLM through your package manager when setting up ENIGMA or pulling the latest master on all platforms.
Code: (bash) [Select]
# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install libglm-dev
# MSYS2 32-bit
pacboy -S glm:i
# MSYS2 64-bit
pacboy -S glm:x
You can see that the changes have already been merged:
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/4e8ad7c3857794f490610c621ae64ae54b3456b0
The full details of these changes can be found in the original pull request comments:
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1396
9
Announcements / RadialGM Releases, MSVC, Vertex Buffers, and EGM
« on: September 02, 2018, 10:26:30 am »
RadialGM is currently 
If you like the progress we've been making, please consider supporting us on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=10889206
It's been a while since I've updated everyone on the current progress around here. I am going to cover a couple of different topics, some related and some not.
First, I want to talk about how we've added MSVC & CMake building support for the enigma-dev command line tools as well as RadialGM. This is in huge part thanks to fundies whose proved himself to be a master of build systems once again. This has allowed us to create a static build of Qt using vcpkg and use it to deploy RadialGM on the GitHub releases page. Some of you watching us on GitHub may have already noticed you can download 4 builds of RadialGM already (permutations of x86, x64, Debug, and Release).
Please consider this an early alpha as we are still hard at work to bring our other ideas to fruition. Only GMK and GMX loading work right now and some editors are incomplete. Functionality is basically equivalent to the current emake used in CI testing. Actually running a project also does not work yet out of the box and I'm not going to bother explaining yet how to integrate it with your enigma-dev setup.
RadialGM Releases: https://github.com/enigma-dev/RadialGM/releases
You may or may not need to download and install the MSVC 2017 runtime as the only prerequisite dependency, everything else is statically linked into the release and ABSOLUTELY NO Java is required.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads
From here on, we are hoping that later we can spread CMake & MSVC support to the engine as well as provide static releases and installers for additional platforms. This is just the start of many great things to come.
The next topic I want to cover is vertex buffers and recent graphics changes in the engine. I've been doing a massive overhaul to a lot of the sprite/primitive batching and model code to make it more abstract and eliminate duplication in the engine. I have also been benchmarking, regression testing, and fine tuning the API to perform well. You will find that tiles now work in Direct3D9 the same as they do in the OpenGL systems. You will also notice that the [snip]vertex_*[/snip] API of GMS is now 100% supported in ENIGMA. It is used as the basis of our new 3D model class and used to implement the tiles generically so they work the same in all systems. This has led to not just better performance and less code but improved consistency across the graphics systems.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/8876f6141c575b7ee45dab3adea1fccfb7688331
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/5fa7fcecbd0aaf493103149407c88a13105280a5
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/21dce9bcc32963b788547db96c2215579970993a
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/4e05f616fa7bb02b5d6c7c2d9eb589ada494deee
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/c5a87764affa2fb9141aabfe0c711a859d06f45e
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/d490b5067a8b6f256c135e21ea187705fa414c9e
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/16807a76050455a379d2c434047dc7db12fb4bfc
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/42b7d98efe9930acb3ade71205b3778108892730
There will be even more graphics changes to come. The next thing that I am working on is using GLM for matrices in all of the graphics systems. This will fix all of the current transform issues we have and may also improve performance. I already have Direct3D11 using GLM in private tests to pass various rendering tests.
Finally, I want to close by covering some of the things we are doing with the new EGM format that RadialGM will be using for serialization. We only know a few things for sure at this point in time. One thing we do know is that the format will still be based on YAML for the serialization. This time, the entire format will be YAML, and there will be no mix like having binary rooms and yaml objects like the old EGM format did. This will make projects much less likely to be corrupted and easier to recover.
We have already adopted a code-only model that converts the old drag and drop format to GML for backwards compatibility and will later work on a new Drag & Drop action interface. Events of objects will be stored in separate [snip]*.edl[/snip] script files where objects and timelines will be a directory. We hope that this will make it easier to edit the projects externally as well as add to git revision. RadialGM will facilitate external editing by detecting changes to the code files on the filesystem and reload them accordingly.
That said, I hope you are as excited as I am for RadialGM to reach the stability we want it to be so we can start making games with it. Now I am off to work with fundies on the EGM, please stay tuned for more updates!
If you like the progress we've been making, please consider supporting us on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=10889206
It's been a while since I've updated everyone on the current progress around here. I am going to cover a couple of different topics, some related and some not.
First, I want to talk about how we've added MSVC & CMake building support for the enigma-dev command line tools as well as RadialGM. This is in huge part thanks to fundies whose proved himself to be a master of build systems once again. This has allowed us to create a static build of Qt using vcpkg and use it to deploy RadialGM on the GitHub releases page. Some of you watching us on GitHub may have already noticed you can download 4 builds of RadialGM already (permutations of x86, x64, Debug, and Release).
Please consider this an early alpha as we are still hard at work to bring our other ideas to fruition. Only GMK and GMX loading work right now and some editors are incomplete. Functionality is basically equivalent to the current emake used in CI testing. Actually running a project also does not work yet out of the box and I'm not going to bother explaining yet how to integrate it with your enigma-dev setup.
RadialGM Releases: https://github.com/enigma-dev/RadialGM/releases
You may or may not need to download and install the MSVC 2017 runtime as the only prerequisite dependency, everything else is statically linked into the release and ABSOLUTELY NO Java is required.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads
From here on, we are hoping that later we can spread CMake & MSVC support to the engine as well as provide static releases and installers for additional platforms. This is just the start of many great things to come.
The next topic I want to cover is vertex buffers and recent graphics changes in the engine. I've been doing a massive overhaul to a lot of the sprite/primitive batching and model code to make it more abstract and eliminate duplication in the engine. I have also been benchmarking, regression testing, and fine tuning the API to perform well. You will find that tiles now work in Direct3D9 the same as they do in the OpenGL systems. You will also notice that the [snip]vertex_*[/snip] API of GMS is now 100% supported in ENIGMA. It is used as the basis of our new 3D model class and used to implement the tiles generically so they work the same in all systems. This has led to not just better performance and less code but improved consistency across the graphics systems.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/8876f6141c575b7ee45dab3adea1fccfb7688331
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/5fa7fcecbd0aaf493103149407c88a13105280a5
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/21dce9bcc32963b788547db96c2215579970993a
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/4e05f616fa7bb02b5d6c7c2d9eb589ada494deee
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/c5a87764affa2fb9141aabfe0c711a859d06f45e
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/d490b5067a8b6f256c135e21ea187705fa414c9e
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/16807a76050455a379d2c434047dc7db12fb4bfc
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/42b7d98efe9930acb3ade71205b3778108892730
There will be even more graphics changes to come. The next thing that I am working on is using GLM for matrices in all of the graphics systems. This will fix all of the current transform issues we have and may also improve performance. I already have Direct3D11 using GLM in private tests to pass various rendering tests.
Finally, I want to close by covering some of the things we are doing with the new EGM format that RadialGM will be using for serialization. We only know a few things for sure at this point in time. One thing we do know is that the format will still be based on YAML for the serialization. This time, the entire format will be YAML, and there will be no mix like having binary rooms and yaml objects like the old EGM format did. This will make projects much less likely to be corrupted and easier to recover.
We have already adopted a code-only model that converts the old drag and drop format to GML for backwards compatibility and will later work on a new Drag & Drop action interface. Events of objects will be stored in separate [snip]*.edl[/snip] script files where objects and timelines will be a directory. We hope that this will make it easier to edit the projects externally as well as add to git revision. RadialGM will facilitate external editing by detecting changes to the code files on the filesystem and reload them accordingly.
That said, I hope you are as excited as I am for RadialGM to reach the stability we want it to be so we can start making games with it. Now I am off to work with fundies on the EGM, please stay tuned for more updates!
10
Announcements / Graphical Fidelity Testing and Engine Cleanup
« on: June 29, 2018, 07:23:13 am »
Note: The two images are intentional false positives I did for the purposes of demonstrating the bot and to verify its behavior.
Hey guys! I've been busy for a few days working on a side improvement to the engine code base that I want to share with you all. It is closely related to the SDL changes fundies recently announced as well as us adding support for Direct3D11 and modern OpenGL ES. We have basically extended our continuous integration to perform an image analysis on graphics tests to improve graphical fidelity both between the graphics systems as well as between ENIGMA and GameMaker. This is still a work in progress but I just this morning got it fully working to where we can successfully screencap the game in the Travis CI virtual machine (minor bug in our test harness taking the screenshot directly after game start and before any draw events were processed).
You can see what we're up to on the pr here:
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1291
We expect to have it merged soon and will then be adding drawing tests from here on out.
I've also cleaned up the tile drawing code and optimized them on top of the vertex buffer functions I added for GMS compatibility. They are slightly different though because I use an index buffer to render them more optimally as an indexed triangle list. Regardless, from my benchmarks we can see that the tiles are not only more consistent now but also build and render much faster. When me and fundies get these image comparison tests merged into master, I will add a tile drawing test to prevent future regression of the functions and finally merge in the new tile code.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1238
I will be following up those changes by rewriting the model classes as well:
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1289
The whole point of this changeset is to have less duplicate code by using proper abstractions of vertex and index buffer concepts, while essentially providing both to the user. This not only improves what ENIGMA already provided, but will bring new features and functions that users have desired. With all of that in place it will be super easy to finally have OpenGL ES working again as well as Direct3D11 because building a graphics system then simply consists of making each graphics system have working vertex functions.
I hope everyone likes these changes and will find that it's going to significantly improve the project. Open to comments/feedback/suggestions as always.
11
Announcements / Announcing Patreon
« on: May 20, 2018, 01:21:16 pm »
In this post, I want to talk a little about where ENIGMA is headed and what we are trying to achieve.
As many of you saw, I recently announced that RadialGM is being developed and that I have intentions of making it a fully-featured IDE. Accomplishing what we have so far has not been an easy task. It has already taken several months to develop the new architecture and continuous integration platform. As I've said, I'm very happy with the results, and I think that when the IDE does become stable, it is going to be a tool that once ENIGMA users try it, they won't want to ever go back to the way things were.
YouTube demonstrating emake, libEGM, and libProtocols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bWMx1Uhxc
Just since this video was made a few of the bugs mentioned have been fixed and for the first time in years ENIGMA has an issue count in the double digits (at this moment 84).
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/cd7ffc26fbc16355599305848b6d1310aa9ecafb
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/6196449e986765f568098ede47e6a62621701a3f
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/e853744cbb79bf3b22df8ce9dfd783bf4b495fec
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/f574a63563d2523ba46a0e782f17c16edd0a76be
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/53d9a2f71c82404c3a41d7a54841e6c6e4f0e19b
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/4c20a1915a5129493fa946c0088dab38b3dc7c7c
Proposed, but not yet merged:
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1279
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1288
There are a number of tasks left to be completed before I believe the IDE and new setup can really be rolled out to everyone. I also believe that this work is going to require a few months of development. I've been preparing to launch a Patreon page for the community to get involved and help support the project: https://www.patreon.com/radialgm
We chose Patreon in particular because we did not want to pressure anybody into funding the project, but we value donations and contributions from the community and feel that they should be rewarded. Through Patreon's platform, we will be able to transparently fund the new IDE and give the community things like special Discord roles, recognition in the new IDE, and early and privileged access.
As many of you saw, I recently announced that RadialGM is being developed and that I have intentions of making it a fully-featured IDE. Accomplishing what we have so far has not been an easy task. It has already taken several months to develop the new architecture and continuous integration platform. As I've said, I'm very happy with the results, and I think that when the IDE does become stable, it is going to be a tool that once ENIGMA users try it, they won't want to ever go back to the way things were.
YouTube demonstrating emake, libEGM, and libProtocols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bWMx1Uhxc
Just since this video was made a few of the bugs mentioned have been fixed and for the first time in years ENIGMA has an issue count in the double digits (at this moment 84).
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/cd7ffc26fbc16355599305848b6d1310aa9ecafb
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/6196449e986765f568098ede47e6a62621701a3f
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/e853744cbb79bf3b22df8ce9dfd783bf4b495fec
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/f574a63563d2523ba46a0e782f17c16edd0a76be
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/53d9a2f71c82404c3a41d7a54841e6c6e4f0e19b
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/commit/4c20a1915a5129493fa946c0088dab38b3dc7c7c
Proposed, but not yet merged:
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1279
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1288
There are a number of tasks left to be completed before I believe the IDE and new setup can really be rolled out to everyone. I also believe that this work is going to require a few months of development. I've been preparing to launch a Patreon page for the community to get involved and help support the project: https://www.patreon.com/radialgm
We chose Patreon in particular because we did not want to pressure anybody into funding the project, but we value donations and contributions from the community and feel that they should be rewarded. Through Patreon's platform, we will be able to transparently fund the new IDE and give the community things like special Discord roles, recognition in the new IDE, and early and privileged access.
12
Announcements / Removing Glew from the Repository
« on: May 12, 2018, 07:48:47 pm »
Fair warning, I'm about to remove glew from the repository and from now on it will be obtained via your package manager like the rest of ENIGMA's dependencies.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1226
Josh felt it appropriate to warn everybody, and I agree. If you update to master now you will need to have glew installed:
This is important because ENIGMA should not distribute its dependencies this way. For one, they are not our code and distort the code coverage, and second they end up getting really old and crufty (like the current glew) which also leads to security vulnerabilities.
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/pull/1226
Josh felt it appropriate to warn everybody, and I agree. If you update to master now you will need to have glew installed:
Quote from: Ubuntu apt-get Glew
sudo apt-get install libglew-dev
Quote from: Arch Pacman Glew
pacman -Sy glew
Quote from: MSYS2 Pacman Glew
pacman -Sy mingw-w64-x86_64-glew
Quote from: Mac Brew Glew
brew install glew
This is important because ENIGMA should not distribute its dependencies this way. For one, they are not our code and distort the code coverage, and second they end up getting really old and crufty (like the current glew) which also leads to security vulnerabilities.
13
Announcements / RadialGM
« on: May 03, 2018, 08:36:30 pm »
Ok, so I've been hinting around and letting some of you know for a while that a few of us have been redesigning the architecture of ENIGMA to support a new IDE. Some of you may be more familiar with it as I know I've let a handful of people test out the new tools, but I'm here to break it down and try to explain it in more detail for everybody.
History
I want to start off by enumerating the current things ENIGMA was doing that are somewhat insane. When I started contributing to LateralGM, GM HTML5 was a brand new thing and there was really only the GMK format to support. This went well for a time, as many of you know, and we were able to add features as YoYoGames did without too much of a thought-out serialization framework in place. We had experimented with making a new IDE, just for the sake of making a new IDE (not as much because one was needed). Working on LateralGM, I tended to continue with the mindset that it was a "GameMaker" IDE and we should try to add compatibility for everything which is now not only a difficult task but next to impossible. Because LateralGM and ENIGMA communicated using C structs with JNA through compileEGMf.dll, they would not be binary compatible if we added new fields and other metadata. Overtime, Oracle has become an even worse company attempting to undo decades of legal precedent with regards to software engineering, Java, and specifically OpenJDK, hasn't made fast enough progress, and I just want to make games.
Architecture Changes
So I experimented with using Google Protocol Buffers as a serialization for projects. I was also adding things here and there to emake.exe as fundies asked me to. He was working with Josh to get our CI tests setup to prevent regressions in the engine and everything (which I must say are doing wonders for this project). fundies expanded the protocol format to basically load GMXs completely and then I tacked on GMK, have YYP semi-working, and him and Josh are currently working on EGM saving. These formats are all being handled in libEGM which is a new C++ library built on top of libProtocols.
The plan is to have libEGM only ever read the GM formats but save and read our official serialization format (*.egm). The CI tests will make use of libEGM to load and compile a test project from every version of GM back to GM5. You can actually examine this right now on GitHub because the Protocol Buffers PR is already running these tests:
https://github.com/enigma-dev/enigma-dev/tree/gmxProtoButt/CommandLine/testing/SimpleTests
RadialGM
Using the new protocols I was able to experiment with making RadialGM actually functional (since because of the architectural changes much of the work was already done).
https://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/RadialGM
As you can see, we've made a lot of progress. I am really satisfied with the results so far, and personally, I want to make games myself using the new IDE and that's why I've been working on it so much. What's so great about all of this though, is not just that RadialGM is actually possible, but the architectural changes really do make every other IDE as equally likely to work out (though for various reasons, I've decided to focus my efforts on the Qt version; simply because I personally like it the most). However, you should consider RadialGM to be more of an "ENIGMA" IDE as it will be almost purely for ENIGMA editing.
What You Can Expect
* It is unlikely that I will be making any more changes to LateralGM.
* The C-based backend/ in ENIGMA will remain but may be rewritten to convert to the protos (instead of the inverse) for the foreseeable future. It will likely be deleted if someone decides to rewrite the ENIGMA-LGM plugin to use the protos instead of the C backend (but that's much more work than converting the backend into protos).
* You can expect to be able to load all GM formats back to GM5 (*.gmd, *.gm6, *.gmk, *.gm81, *.gmx, *.yyp, *.egm).
* Do not expect to be able to export any RadialGM project back to a GM format, you will likely convert your projects to EGM upon open/load and then either maintain two copies or stop using GM.
* You can expect the IDE to make more optimal use of your system's resources for the above reasons (primarily because resource data is lazy-loaded and reference counted in the frontends).
14
Announcements / Official ActionMaker Release
« on: August 30, 2017, 02:13:07 am »
I wanted to update everyone on something I've been working on lately. Still investigating more ENIGMA related things, I set out to learn Vue.js and created an action library editor along the way.
ActionMaker is a pure HTML5 application that uses Vue.js and native form elements for the front-end. It can handle both LateralGM's LGL format and GameMaker's LIB format. I've actually tested conversion of LateralGM's score library to LIB and got it to load in GMS 1.4.
You can checkout the repo on GitHub and visit the live version right now!
https://github.com/RobertBColton/ActionMaker
https://robertbcolton.github.io/ActionMaker/
There are still some kinks to be worked out, but here is a list of known issues:
* Clipboard actions currently do not work in Chrome and are buggy in Firefox.
* Firefox seems to have a GTK3 issue on Linux which makes the buttons really big and breaks the layout.
* Saving LIB files does not work in any browser except Firefox because it is the only browser which supports the "image/bmp" MIME for canvas.toBlob() and bmp is the mandated image format for LIB files by GameMaker.
* I have not even tested Safari, but I'd be interested to know how that goes for anyone.
Here are some tips:
* Mark Overmar's old library editor does not let you edit official libs which are defined by having a library id less than or equal to 999. ActionMaker does not have this restriction, but if you want to also edit LIB files in the old library editor, then you should set an appropriate library id.
* LGL uses 24x24 pixel icons packed together into a single texture, and when saving to this format, ActionMaker will crop any images you provided to 24x24 while packing them.
* LIB uses 32x32 pixel icons but only the top-left 24x24 area is actually visible, the rest is the transparency color. What ActionMaker will do is crop the image to 32x32 and provide a default black transparency color if your image is only 24x24 or smaller.
ActionMaker is a pure HTML5 application that uses Vue.js and native form elements for the front-end. It can handle both LateralGM's LGL format and GameMaker's LIB format. I've actually tested conversion of LateralGM's score library to LIB and got it to load in GMS 1.4.
You can checkout the repo on GitHub and visit the live version right now!
https://github.com/RobertBColton/ActionMaker
https://robertbcolton.github.io/ActionMaker/
There are still some kinks to be worked out, but here is a list of known issues:
* Clipboard actions currently do not work in Chrome and are buggy in Firefox.
* Firefox seems to have a GTK3 issue on Linux which makes the buttons really big and breaks the layout.
* Saving LIB files does not work in any browser except Firefox because it is the only browser which supports the "image/bmp" MIME for canvas.toBlob() and bmp is the mandated image format for LIB files by GameMaker.
* I have not even tested Safari, but I'd be interested to know how that goes for anyone.
Here are some tips:
* Mark Overmar's old library editor does not let you edit official libs which are defined by having a library id less than or equal to 999. ActionMaker does not have this restriction, but if you want to also edit LIB files in the old library editor, then you should set an appropriate library id.
* LGL uses 24x24 pixel icons packed together into a single texture, and when saving to this format, ActionMaker will crop any images you provided to 24x24 while packing them.
* LIB uses 32x32 pixel icons but only the top-left 24x24 area is actually visible, the rest is the transparency color. What ActionMaker will do is crop the image to 32x32 and provide a default black transparency color if your image is only 24x24 or smaller.
15
Off-Topic / GitHub comments too long?
« on: September 18, 2016, 03:47:20 pm »
Ok so I finally got tired of reading super long GitHub comments because GitHub does not provide any collapse features for long code or quote blocks. Somebody showed me this which just came out and it works perfect! Definitely give it a try, you can customize it quite a bit too.
https://github.com/Mottie/Octopatcher
Also, please remember to put logs and stacktraces in the ``` style code blocks from now and not paste them raw into a GitHub issue. Not just on ENIGMA's tracker but everywhere you post an issue on GitHub. That way people can use this extension and navigate the site easier.
https://github.com/Mottie/Octopatcher
Also, please remember to put logs and stacktraces in the ``` style code blocks from now and not paste them raw into a GitHub issue. Not just on ENIGMA's tracker but everywhere you post an issue on GitHub. That way people can use this extension and navigate the site easier.