Code Generator #

bwplay-cli can generate bits of code to ease the development process.

Audio #

If your project has audio assets (specified by the audioFiles setting), bwplay-cli can generate code that exports an Audio object, which exposes all your audio assets as strictly-typed HTMLAudioElements.

bwplay-cli generate-audio [--stdout] [--unpacked]

Each audio element is named after its location in your project directory. Since assets are often stored in a common subdirectory, the common directory prefix is removed from the names of the members of the Audio object.

For example, assuming the following directory structure:

my-project/
├─ bwplay.json
├─ assets
│  ├─ music
│  │  ├─ song.wav
│  ├─ sounds
│  │  ├─ thud.wav

And the following config setting:

"audioFiles": ["assets/**/*.wav"],

The generated Audio code would look something like:

export type Audio = {
  music_song: HTMLAudioElement,
  sounds_thud: HTMLAudioElement,
};
export const loadAudio = (): Promise<Audio> => { ... };

To reference this generated code in your project, you could write something like:

import { Audio, loadAudio } from 'audio';
let AUDIO: Audio | null = null;
loadAudio().then(v => { AUDIO = v; }).catch(e => handleAudioError);

By default, generated audio code is written to the filesystem as specified by the audioScriptFile project setting. However, you can pass --stdout to instead print the generated code to your terminal.

When the audio code is generated, the audio itself will be packed into the code as data urls. This is meant to simplify the process of building and distributing your game. If you want to avoid this behaviour, you can pass the --unpacked flag to the command, which will cause the audio in the code to be referenced by its filesystem path (relative to the project root).

Unpacked audio code

bwplay-cli will not re-generate the audio code when you export your project. If you use --unpacked and then export your project, the exported apps may not be able to load your audio.