GameMaker Studio 2.1.5 – new features

YoYoGames announced GameMaker Studio 2.1.5 was released today.

This release focuses on bugfixes and stability, but also adds some very useful new functions:

New Collisions

New collision_*_list() functions that return a list storing the id’s of all instances in collision, not just a single id of the first instance detected. There have been implementations of this in GML scripts since forever, but finally having it in the engine is a great thing, since it will be much faster and available to everyone. The new functions even allow you to sort the list by position order, which is useful in many situations, such as when you need to know which collision would have occurred first in a collision_line situation.

Non-axis-aligned bounding boxes for sprites

This is a new collision type that you can configure in the Sprite properties, “rotated rectangle”. This enables tighter bounding boxes for more accurate collision detection for objects with sprites that rotate, and better performance than using precise collisions, but slower than the regular rectangular collision mask.

Mobile device virtual keyboards

Support for the virtual keyboard in iOS and Android. I’ve never built a mobile app version of any of my GameMaker projects, so I’m surprised to learn that this wasn’t always supported.

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