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trash engine

A small and trashy, quick and dirty game engine · By Niki

Suggestions, bug reports.

A topic by Dzhake created Nov 20, 2023 Views: 173 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(2 edits)

Suggestions:

1) Syntax highlight

2) Better docs (i can help if you want)

3) Img rotation

4) Update auto-upgrade.

5) Keep code undo after save (after save undo history is lost. Probably not your fault, but you can think about this)

6) Better level editor

Bugs:

1) VERY OFTEN when i draw sprite it erases everything, so only last 0.03 second of drawing are kept. Fixes by randomily moving mouse around ...or by opening GIMP and then "upload image " lol

2) Sometimes when pressing "enter" coding screen goes down, and new line becomes top line so you need to scroll up. (uh. minor bug. annoying.)

3) I think there are no more bugs? 2 bugs? perfect engine lol

Developer

Thanks for the suggestions. Syntax highlighting would be nice, even though there are more important qol features in the code editor, like tab-to-indent. It's unfortunatly not as easy as grabbing a library off google, for a variety of reasons, some to do with design decisions concerning the engine, and other plans I have (code editor might change completely).

Same goes for the level editor, I have plans for a "proper" user interface, the current one is the bare minimum really.

And thanks for the bug reports! I am aware of many bugs in the engine right now actually :p But somehow these two I haven't encountered myself.

Also I hope this doesn't come across as overly harsh, but saying things like "just grab a library of google lol" and "disable that stupid thing", makes me not exactly feel appreciated in the 100s of hours of work I've put into this. Having the remix functionality, while also not requiring a server connection for saves, while being to export as a single html file, is a really tricky problem to solve. And then you run into complicated things like origin based safety/security guidelines for browsers and the way itch hosts it's games on a separate domain. So what the save system needs is just more work being put into ironing out the cracks, adding the unique game id feature. It's not about removing a thing, it's about putting in more work to fix and improve it. And since I'm doing this in my limited free time, it might take a while for me to get around to doing these things!
Anyways.. what I'm saying is would feel a bit better to hear "hey maybe work on this" than "just fix it lol".

(1 edit)

Sorry! You are right. I know nothing about engine making, so that's unusual for me... i hope you could do something about that, because that's confusing and unintuitive. Thanks for your reply! ..but i think about syntax highlight you can just take highlight.js and add it to code? tho idk, i didn't use it.. I edited my previous message, because i understood how rude i was..

Developer

apology accepted :) and I want to repeat that I appreciate your genuine interest in the engine and feedback!

I will look into highlight.js and similar libraries, but to elaborate a little bit: One point against it is that right now trash engine itself is quite lightweight and any extra library would significantly increase the file size - and the smaller libraries I tried were somewhat buggy. I was also considering replacing the code editor with a text/visual scripting hybrid solution. So spending time on a syntax highlighting when I might scrap it anyways seemed a bit pointless.

About increasing size, as far as i know you can import most libraries with <script> in html, which doesn’t change size much. But again, i really know nothing about them.

I love that the export is a single html file and has no server connections for saving. It's a technical marvel and I can imagine a really hard task. I hope that can continue to be a pillar of the engine as it evolves.

Developer

Thank you! Yes it's something I really appreciate about bitsy specifically, so I needed to also do it that way. Even though it works slightly differently there (no remix functionality, but more readable source).

It's a feature that I'm definitely keeping, but I'm also playing with the idea of having an "offline version" that runs on your computer. It would have folders for script, image and sound files and exports as a zip archive. But maybe that's also not really in the spirit of the engine.