Well, they SAID it’s in beta.
I’ve been struggling with updating my mmap mini maps asset pack in order to fix a bug that I discovered with it. Since I’ve been unable to do so, I’ve elected to temporarily withdraw the product, rather than continue selling a broken asset. I’ll have it back up as soon as I can get it fixed, but I don’t know how long that may take, due to problems I’m having with the tools.
First, the bug. In the mmap mini maps package, there was supposed to have been a collection of Macros (what used to be known until recently as “Constants”), which I used to assist with programming the Mmap object. When I built the Asset Package, I failed to realize that these Macros did not get included. Without the Macros defined, the project doesn’t work.
One workaround would be to add the macros manually. They are documented completely in the user manual that I wrote. I can also furnish a .txt file that can be imported, to save the data entry. If I can’t get the tools to cooperate, that may end up being the solution I go with for the short term.
It was not obvious due to the way the package builder works, and I didn’t notice it in testing because I tested it by bringing the package into the same project that I had used to build it in the first place.
Lesson learned: Build the package in one project. Import the package into a fresh project to test.
Betas gonna beta
When you build an asset package in GameMaker: Studio, you start by taking some project that you’ve been working in, and then going through the Marketplace Package Manager to build a Marketplace Asset using resources from the project. However, the interface that YoYoGames have built is still very beta. It is unstable, resulting in error messages and crashes. But the greater issue is that the design of the interface, and the workflows it supports, is also rather poor and unrefined at the moment.
When you build your Marketplace Asset Package, you are presented with a Package Builder that allows you to select resources from the project and add them to the package. But the resource selection options are not complete. You can’t select Macros. They just aren’t even there.
So how do you add Macros to a Package? By adding them to an Extension, supposedly. There’s an Extension Builder built into the GM:S IDE, as well as this new Marketplace Package builder. I’m presently unclear as to the relationship between Extension builder and Package builder, but the end result of a Package is that you get a package that is ready to be uploaded to the Marketplace as an Asset, and when you download Assets that you’ve purchased from the Marketplace, it installs itself in your Library, where you can add it to a project, where it… becomes an extension.
The Marketplace asset-extension has whatever resources you had added to the Package — sprites, scripts, objects, sound effects, fonts, included files, timelines, shaders, you name it… just no macros.
But if you build an GMEZ extension using the Extension Builder interface, things are very different. I can create an Extension, add a “placeholder” to it, where I can define Macros (one at a time, which is horrible, like each Macro is its own asset in the tree), and I can add a code file, which can be .gml, javascript, a dll, a dy-lib, or java. And I can define Functions which access the code residing in the code file, providing an interface between GM:S and the functions provided by the extension.
And the documentation shows a similar resource picker for handling both importing resources from a completed Extension into the Project, and for moving project resources into an Extension that you’re authoring. But, for some reason when I am in the Extension Builder, it’s one-way only, I can import from the Extension to the project, but not from the project to the extension.
So when I build an Extension, the only things I can put in it are Macros and Functions and Code files. And when I build a Package, the only things I can put into it are project resources other than Macros and Extensions. So I can’t add Macros to an Extension, then add the Extension to the Package. And I can’t add project resources to the Extension Builder. So there’s this impasse that I can’t figure out how to work around.
It could be the documentation is just out of sync with the version of GM:S I’m running, or it could be there’s some serious design bugs in GM:S currently, or it could be I completely misunderstand both the documentation and the user interface, and am missing something that will become apparent to me eventually.
I’m a bit frustrated now, and very tired of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out how to make it work, so I need to step away from it for a short bit.