Snippet API (working title)

Quick links: documentation
Supported versions: GameMaker 8.1^[1]

A collection of Cool Tricks for dynamically loading scripts in GameMaker 8.1¹.

Based on my own findings and techniques of yesteryear.

Features:

• Can load and call "scripts" (snippets)
  Snippets can call each other, support arguments, and generally act like scripts.
• Can load objects from a GMEdit-like single-file format
• A little syntactic sugar for snippet code
• A few helper functions

[1] Technically any version that has argument[]/argument_count and execute_string/object_event_add, which is most likely versions between GM8.1 (incl.) and GM:HTML5 (incl.).

Technical

The extension consists of a DLL and a bunch of GML scripts.

The DLL does code preprocessing and other operations that were deemed too slow to do in GM8.1.

The scripts use object_event_add + event_perform_object to store and call the final code without parsing penalties that would occur with execute_string.

Syntactic sugar

Syntax	Result	Notes
var i = 0 globalvar g = 1	var i; i = 0 globalvar g; g = 1	Single-variable declarations only!
enum E { A, B, C = 5, D } trace(E.D);	global.__E__A = 0; global.__E__B = 1; global.__E__C = 5; global.__E__D = 6; trace(global.__E__D);	Init is done on spot - avoid function calls in enum field "values".
missing(1, 2);	snippet_call("missing", 1, 2);	Allows snippets to call each other without forward declaration.

Intended use cases

What use cases?

You could use it for dynamic content loading if you are making a game in GM8.1.

Myself I wanted something that could run snippets of GM8.1 code without opening GM8.1, which is convenient timing given that GM8.1 doesn't open at the time of writing.

snippet-tester

This is an example project that has snippets setup and does

snippet_init();
snippet_load_listfile("startup.gmk-snips");

on game start.

If you compile a GMEdit version from git, you can open .gmk-snips files in it for a slightly-better code editing experience.

Extras

• A plugin for GMEdit that lets you run the snippet-set by pressing F5 when a .gmk-snips is open.

TODOs

• Wildcard support in listfiles?
  (folder/*.gml)
• script_execute hook (that does either script_execute or snippet_call depending on whether index is number/string)

Meta

Author: YellowAfterlife
License: MIT?