SnowStateVis

Quick links: documentation
Versions: GM≥2023.4 (not LTS!)

SnowStateVis is a debugger-visualizer for SnowState, a finite state machine library for GameMaker!

This system is in beta, by which I mean: I wrote most of this code a while ago and I'm not sure if I have forgotten anything important.

How it works

• You start a little server that'll be doing coordination between the game and the "watchers".
  If you are testing on PC, the game itself can be hosting the server.
• One or more games can connect to the server and tell it what state machines they have and what's happening to them.
• One or more "watcher" (read: a webpage) can be opened to observe and manipulate (trigger state transitions) the aforementioned state machines.

Setup and use

Check out the docs!

Technical

Overall it's pretty normal code?

For graphs, I build little SVGs. The arrows occasionally don't quite reach the state-blocks, but I added a canvas renderer (see debugGraph) and apparently that's exactly what comes out of dagre, so go figure;

There's a Fader class in the JS portion, which is because CSS transitions do not offer the desired result when quickly flipping between states;

There are 4 macros for ports in obj_snowstatevis total because we need:

1. A TCP/HTTP socket that serves files to the watcher(s)
2. A WS socket that serves events to the watcher(s)
3. A TCP socket for native games
4. A WS socket for HTML5 games

3 and 4 can be merged once GM's websocket implementation for native platforms matures a bit more.

1 and 2 could be merged (by doing an "upgrade"), but I don't think that's worth the effort.

TODOs

• Dark mode
• Support for (similar but different) Goal Oriented Action Planning

Credits

• A system by YellowAfterlife
• Originally commissioned for Soulbound
• Uses and built for SnowState
• Uses HTGM for hosting a local web server
• Uses dagre to auto-build graphs for states based on their defined transitions