Category: programming

GameMaker Studio 2 impressions: Preferences

development, games, programming, reviews
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Looking at the Preferences in GameMaker Studio 2 for the IDE, we have a lot of them, and they are logically grouped, and well-organized. Most of the preferences allow customization of cosmetic look-and-feel and UI behavior options.

GMS2 Preferences

The IDE is very customizable. Most of the configurable preferences come pre-set to defaults that make sense, and I don’t see much need to change them, but it is good that you have the control to change them if it suits you. I’m sure YYG anticipated that users would have countless nitpicky complaints about anything in the IDE that they couldn’t configure, and so wisely saw fit to give us the option to make ourselves comfortable. These options are by and large very straightforward and fairly dry to drill through, so I don’t see the need to go through them in depth here. The online manual has all the detail you need.

One very notable change from 1.x does merit mention, however:

  • There is no longer a backup folder. The old “save the n most recent backups” method of source control that was the only option available in GM8.x dsays, and carried over to GMS1.x, is gone completely from GMS2. Using a real version control system, such as git, has long been available, and is what everyone should use, but this does make version backups a bit more advanced for complete newbies. Nevertheless, it is now the only way to go.
  • Source-control integration doesn’t appear to be enabled yet in the GMS2 beta, or if it is I haven’t found it, so if you do want to use version control during the beta, you will have to manage the repository management and file check-in externally to the IDE.

With regard to GMS2’s default preferences, I found very few things that I wanted to change. But there were a few that were important to me:

  • One of the changes that I made was to set “Disable IDE transition animations” to true. While the IDE transitions are nice eye candy, I prefer things to be as fast as possible, and watching the Object editor open up and seeing the Workspace scroll to its location is time wasted, to me. Others might find it helps them to remain visually oriented to leave the animations on.
  • Another was to enable “Automatically Reload Changed Files”. If I work on an sprite sheet using an outside editor, or edit a code file in notepad for some reason, I want those changes to be reflected in GMS2 automatically.
  • The other thing I did was disable showing the background image in workspaces. While pretty, I prefer a plain, uncluttered background of solid grey. You can also set a different background image if you so desire.

Skins

There are two IDE skins, Dark and Light. Dark is the default, and I find that I do prefer it. Light is a bit too light for me, as it has a pure white background, rather than a light grey.

If it were light grey, I might prefer it over the Dark skin. One thing I did like about the Light skin is the code editor’s colors for syntax highlighting, which feels a bit more muted than the bright, rainbow-y colors in the Dark theme.

Fortunately, these colors are all customizable individually, if you want to tune them.

Will we have the capability to author our own skins, or add additional skins? I don’t normally want to spend a lot of time on cosmetic customization, but it might be nice for some to have the capability.

Room for improvement

It would be nice if the code editor settings could be saved collectively, to a profile document, and then loaded, so that you could export them and share with other users, and so you could avoid having to carefully re-set every setting one at a time if you need to reinstall or something.

Indeed, it would be nice to save the entire IDE’s configuration options as a profile, so that I could then switch between different IDE profiles as desired, allowing me to rapidly reconfigure GMS2 for different types of projects, for example I might find that if I’m doing a game that uses 3D graphics, I would want different settings for the Room Editor than I would want to use in a 2D Isometric game, and so on. I can see myself wanting to set up specific settings for grid sizing and snapping in both the Room Editor and in the Image Editor for different types of projects. If I’m maintaining multiple projects, switching back and forth between them, this would be a must-have.

The preferences you set are stored in %appdata%\GameMakerStudio2\[user id]\local_settings.json — this file is human readable, easy to backup, edit, share, and swap if you so desire. This has to be done manually, for now, but it’s my hope that YYG would give us some UI in the GMS2 IDE to save/import/manage preferences as a profile.

Game Options and Configurations

Outside of the File>Preferences dialog, we also have Game Options and Configurations, which is where we find settings that are project-specific. If you’re not sure where to look for some setting, ask yourself: Am I trying to change something in the IDE, or in the game I’m building? If it’s the IDE that you need to change, look in File>Preferences. If it’s some game setting, look at the Options or Configurations branches of the project resources explorer.

A few important things to point out with the project specific Options and Configurations, especially for users coming from GMS1.x:

  1. Room_speed is no longer a thing in GMS2. Instead, there is a setting under Main Options – General, for Game Frames Per Second, which is a global replacement for the old per-room speed. The default is 30.
  2. The default draw color for the project is also configurable here. I’m used to setting this in GML using the function draw_set_color(). To be honest I don’t know why YYG decided to make this a setting, perhaps just to make it simple for Drag and Drop users to find it, but whatever the reason, it’s here.
  3. Interestingly, there are some timekeeping settings here, as well, that allow you to automatically keep track of the Project Start date, Project Use Time, and the DateTime when the Project Last Changed. Potentially, this could be used for billing users for the use of GMS2, if YYG decided to change their business model to something subscription-based, or metered. It’s also neat for if you are trying to track how many hours you have put into a project — although, the time tracked is simply how long GMS2 has been running, not necessarily how long you’ve been actively using it — if you went away for a break and left it up and running, the meter is still counting.
  4. You can find settings for project GUID and author here as well.

In addition to General options, there are also platform-specific options for your game project. In the GMS2 beta, we only get to see the ones for Windows, but I expect users who have purchased additional build targets will find options for each of them here.

For Windows, we can set our display name, project name, version number, company, copyright statement, Graphics options for interpolation, fullscreen, window and mouse cursor, and a few other options. These are much as they were in GMS1.x.

GameMaker Studio 2 impressions: IDE/UI

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The biggest change in GMS2 is the new IDE. Completely re-coded and largely re-designed, it has some things in common with the old IDE, but overall it has been re-organized and updated in many ways.

GMS2 IDE

Every form in the UI is dockable, and can be moved around into whatever layout works best for you. This is great. Even better, you can pop out any part of the IDE into its own window, which means that you can spread your IDE out over a few display screens if your computer is set up this way. GMS1.x didn’t play nearly so well on multiple displays.

The resource tree is probably the most familiar element of the new IDE. By default, YYG have positioned it at the right side of the screen, presumably to follow other development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio. It’s a simple matter to drag it and dock it to the left side of the window if you prefer the GMS1.x way.

Workspaces

Probably the biggest change to the IDE is the introduction of Workspaces. These are tabbed regions where you can dock different forms, so you can organize your project in a way that makes sense to you. For example, if you have a set of objects that are related to each other, you may want to set up a workspace where those objects can be arranged together. You can have as many workspaces as you wish, and you can name them something meaningful. This helps greatly to reduce clutter, and should improve productivity as you can leave workspaces set up and switch between them at will, without having to re-arrange windows and forms all the time.

I love the idea, but after using them for a few weeks, I’m convinced they have some serious issues that need to be addressed.

Workspaces can get very spread out, and this implies scrolling a lot. There is a new shortcut, ctrl+T, which will help you navigate the project more quickly than scrolling:

Another navigational shortcut is to middle-click on a resource name in the code editor. Doing this will take you to the resource’s editor window.

A major problem with Workspaces is that the Workspace region only fills a small section of the GMS2 window. Dockable regions at left, right, and bottom make the Workspaces area relatively small compared to the size of a maximized window.

Inside the Workspace area, you have (potentially) multiple Editors open. Certain Editors use Chain View (see below) which spreads out the sub-editors visually, in a way that takes up quite a bit of space, and will all but certainly require you to scroll, both vertically and horizontally, in order to see the whole thing. Vertical scrolling can be done by mouse wheel, but horizontal scrolling is done by CTRL+Clicking in an empty region of the workspace and dragging, which is slow and awkward.

Another problem is the Dockable areas in the GMS2 window. These do not update contextually according to which Workspace you’re in, or what Editor you’re in. If you open the Room Editor in one workspace, the Room Properties will appear in the Dockable area at the left side of the GMS2 window. Switching to another workspace and opening up a Sprite, the Room Properties are still there in the left Dock, where they are useless for the current context, and serve only to distract and confuse, and take up valuable screen real estate that could have been used to present the Sprite Editor UI and/or provide a larger portion of the screen to display the sprite canvas. Fixing this should be a simple matter of showing/hiding the appropriate panels in the Docks for the current context you’re working in. Whichever editor has focus, its Dockable panels should be the only UI visible (apart from the Menu bar and Resource tree).

Maximizing an Editor should make it fill out the entire visible area of the Workspace. And whenever an editor has focus, its entire form should fit on one screen/workspace area without the need to scroll the workspace. I’m fine with a scroll bar within an Editor, for example if I’m in a really long code file in the Code Editor, or if I’m zoomed way in on an Image in the Image Editor. But I don’t want to have to scroll about the Workspace just so I can see from one end of an Editor to the other. I really don’t want to scroll around looking for different editors that are floating about in the Workspace. I would much prefer a tabbed interface where I can easily switch between tabs. Workspaces could be better implemented as groups of related tabs.

The worst part is when you go to open a code editor. The code editor is used in three situations: 1) when working on a Script resource; 2) when coding Events in the Object Editor, and 3) when editing Room Creation code in the Room editor. In the Object and Room Editor use cases, the Code Editor is chained to its parent editor. The code editor is almost never entirely visible in the visible area of the Workspace pane, meaning that very often the right and bottom of the Code Editor will be out of frame, and necessitate scrolling to see. So you’ll often be unable to see the ends of your longer lines of code, and the helpful code tips that appear at the status bar area in the bottom of the Code Editor will also be out of view. This is awful, and needs to be addressed. Code Editing is a primary activity in GMS2, and when doing it, the Code Editor deserves a maximized view, with minimal distractions surrounding it.

I believe the issues with Workspaces are fixable, but as they are now, they’re a bit of a disaster. I find that they make it easier to get lost, and I spend a lot of time flipping between them and scrolling, hoping to find what I’m looking for. They navigational shortcuts may be helpful, but they don’t come second nature to me, and so far I find that they’re so unfamiliar that I have to shift my mental focus form the programming task I’m working on to “how do I navigate to the bloody resource I need to look at?” which takes me out of “The Zone.” They make a 2048×1152 screen seem small and cramped.

Chain view

Another major new feature is called “chain view”. This is a new view for forms that have several sub-forms. For example, the Object editor has a main form that allows you to set the Object’s properties, and then if you add Events to an Object, these are managed in a sub-form that is chained to the main form. From there, Actions are in a sub-form that chains off of the Events sub-form, with a separate tab for each Event’s actions. This keeps related forms together, making it easier to see relationships between different open windows, and reduces clutter. They do spread out more, since the sub-forms do not overlap each other, and this takes some getting used to.

Menu and Tool bar

One thing that can be a little weird, and takes some getting used to, is the Menu bar. Depending on what form you have focus on, the Menus that appear in the main window’s menu bar will change.

For example, if you’re in the Image Editor, the main window will receive some Image Editor menus, to the right of the Help menu, and not in the Image Editor form.

Open the Image Editor, and some additional menus will appear in the menu bar.

Open the Image Editor, and some additional menus will appear in the menu bar.

This felt weird to me, at first, when the Image Editor is sharing the main window with whatever other forms you have open — I expected all controls specific to the Image Editor to be contained within the Image Editor’s form. However, if you break the Image Editor out of the main window and into its own window, it feels right.

Quick import your Asset files

Importing sound and image files into GMS2 is easier than ever. Just drag a file icon, or even a folder, into the resource tree, and the file will automatically be imported into the project, and a resource created for it.

Nice!

There is a lot more to cover in the IDE, but rather than make this article too long, I will be covering them separately in future articles focusing on the various Editors: Sprite, Image, Object, Room, etc.

Keyboard shortcuts

I won’t list them all (look in the manual, under Quick Start) but these are some of the most important/useful shortcuts, which everyone should know and use.

  • F5 – build and run the project.
  • Ctrl+T – Opens the Goto window to search the workspaces.
  • F2 – In the resource tree, rename the selected resource.
  • Ctrl+K – In the code editor, comments out the selected text. (Ctrl+Shift+K to un-comment.)
  • F2 – In the code editor, opens the code snippets menu.

GameMaker Studio 2 impressions: New Project

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[Rather than posting a long article that takes days to organize, I’m opting to do short-form posts that focus on a narrow aspect of the new GameMaker. This means more frequent, smaller posts, which will hopefully be more timely and more digestable for readers. For more articles in this series, just follow the GameMaker Studio 2 tag.]

If I click on New Project, I have to choose between creating a Drag & Drop project or a GameMaker Language project.

GMS2: Create new project

Weird; I can’t use both in the same project anymore? [I haven’t actually created a new project yet; I don’t know. But that seems to be the implication here.]

Really, I expect that most GMS users use GML, but I’m glad that they’re keeping DnD, because for beginners and non-programmers it is much easier to learn. And it looks like they’ve really improved the Drag-n-Drop system by leaps and bounds over what it’s been up until now. (I’ll cover this in a separate post in more detail…)

But I think it’s odd that I have to pick between one or another coding system when I create my project.

Really, what I had hoped for was that there would be a “Convert DnD to GML” button that users could use, and this could facilitate learning how to code in GML by starting out in DnD, then converting to GML and seeing what it generates for you. I don’t know whether this is a feature that YYG have planned or not, if it is I haven’t discovered yet. Or, even better than a one-way conversion, YYG could have made DnD and GML completely equivalent, such that there was full coverage of the entire GML language with DnD actions, and allowed the developer to switch between views, viewing the code as visual drag and drop actions, or as GML code, and develop however they’re more comfortable at the moment.

I think this “one or the other but not both” approach could potentially cause problems, and will result in pushing users to using GML-only. When a new programmer begins to learn GML, at first they typically start out by going through a project they’ve created using DnD, and replacing the DnD actions an instruction at a time with equivalent GML. If you can’t do that in GMS2, it will make transitioning that much harder, because you would have to start a new project, and code exclusively in GML, before you’re totally ready. Rather than make a gradual transition to becoming a GML coder, the neophyte GMS2 developer will need to develop sufficient confidence in their understanding of GML to start a new project from scratch and use it exclusively.

This pretty much destroys GMS’s gentle learning curve that makes it great for first-time programmers. Update: GML-DnD conversion is exactly how it works! Right-click in the object-editor and there’s an option to convert from DnD to GML, and vice versa.

DnD to GML

GMS2 allows you to convert DnD directly to GML, and GML can be converted to DnD (it just shoves the GML code into an Execute Code DnD action, so it’s only semi-reversible).

Oddly, the DnD2GML conversion warns you that this is a one-way change, but that is apparently not the case (although converting GML to DnD simply puts the GML code into an Execute Code DnD action).

I suspect that many users look down at DnD disparagingly, but really there’s nothing wrong with using it. It’s quick, and if it’s all you need, it’s all you need. For what would be a simple, one-liner GML script, I often opt to use DnD when I’m in a hurry, because it’s expedient.

Vote for GameMaker Studio 2 on Linux

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I just created a Twitter poll to assess the interest in a Linux port of the GameMaker Studio 2 IDE.

One of my biggest wish list items for GameMaker Studio is to have the IDE on Linux, so I can stop being a Windows user. I’m on Windows 7 currently, and Microsoft will not support this version forever. Already they have stopped selling new computers with Windows 7. After the way Microsoft treated Windows users who were not interested in upgrading to Windows 10, using unethical, underhanded, and very likely illegal tactics to try to force Windows users to upgrade, I am not interested in ever purchasing another product from Microsoft, and my preferred platform to migrate to would be a popular Linux distro such as Ubuntu or Mint. GameMaker is the only Windows software that is holding me back.

I’ve asked on the GMC Forums if YYG intend to release a Linux port for GMS2, and currently there’s no plans to do so, but they are open to considering it if they see sufficient interest.

In 2014, then-YoYoGames CEO Sandy Duncan had teased us with the possibility that GMS2 would bring an IDE that ran on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Obviously things can change, and a lot of things have changed with YoYoGames since then. Whether or not we see a native Linux IDE for GMS2, it’s still my #1 wish list item for GameMaker.

GameMaker Marketplace Asset: PNG_2_room

design, development, games, programming
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PNG_2_room is a simple, easy to modify demo for how to populate a room with instances according to a color coded image file.

Each pixel in the source image can be color coded to correspond to an object or tile in your game. Use the script room_instance_add_from_png() to populate a room with instances using the image as a key.

For example, this PNG image:

rm_test

…was used to generate this room:room

You can modify the script to use whatever colors you wish to represent whatever objects or tiles in your project.

With this script, instead of using the built-in room editor, now you can use any image editor to create maps for your game more quickly!

You can even allow players of your games to create their own custom maps for your game, using whatever image editor they choose as a resource editor for your game!

A simple demo included in the asset shows how to use the script.

Full documentation at: https://goo.gl/z3du5f

Purchase at the GameMaker: Marketplace.

GameMaker: Exodus

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I’ve been doing game dev programming in GameMaker since 2010, and lately I’ve been feeling rather frustrated by the pace with which they’ve been improving the tool. Since being bought by PlayTech in February 2015, YoYoGames seem to have hit a brick wall.

Languishing, poor quality betas of (potentially) exciting new features

The GameMaker Marketplace debuted almost two years ago. Today, it is still in Beta. Much worse than that, there has not been any substantial development in the Marketplace website, or the integration with the GM:S IDE, in about the last year-plus.

There’s been a long-standing bug with their marketplace integration, when you have purchased a “large” number of assets from the Marketplace, the interface for managing them bogs down and becomes nearly unusable. I reported this defect, a year ago, and YoYo have acknowledged the problem, but done nothing to address it in a meaningful way, other than to warn users not to buy too many marketplace assets. That’s right: YoYoGames built a store for its users to sell assets they’ve made to each other, and then told them not to buy too many assets.

The interface for My Library is terrible — very basic, and lacking in features to allow you to organize the assets you’ve purchased. The performance problem especially is infuriating, and makes the My Library feature basically useless. I offered some ideas for improving the My Library interface on the GMC Suggestions sub-forum, which is now unavailable — apparently YYG have done more in “archiving” the old forums than simply setting them to readonly. [Internet Archive snapshot of the forum thread.]

YoYo acknowledged the problem, but rather than fixing the performance problem, they recommend a workaround of disabling assets from your purchase manifest, until the number of purchased assets is at a number that GM:S can manage without choking. That is, YoYo recommend that you disable assets that you’ve purchased through the Marketplace store, until you’ve disabled however many assets you may need to get below a number that their terrible interface can manage. We’re talking modern computers with billions of bytes of memory and multi-core gigahertz processors, choking on a list of perhaps 75-125 assets. It’s an embarrassment, and the worst part of it is that it discourages users from purchasing more assets from the marketplace, or using them.

None of this has stopped YYG from taking 30% of sellers’ revenue from Marketplace sales. In many cases, sellers are building assets which provide features and functionality that YYG should have developed themselves. For example, GameMaker 8.x used to have something called Room Transitions, which gave a neat visual transition when switching between one room and other. These were implemented in a way that took advantage of native Windows system calls, and couldn’t be supported on other build targets easily, so rather than re-implementing them in a cross-platform way so that all build platforms could make use of them, the room transition functions were deprecated and removed from GM:S.

Developers were told to write their own room transition code, and not expect the built-in transitions to return in any future updates. A few enterprising GM:S users have done so, and now sell room transitions asset packs through the Marketplace. The result of this is that a feature once included in GM:S now a separate add-on that you have to pay for. Except YYG don’t have to pay the developer anything for the work, and instead take a 30% cut of the developer’s income. This makes the Marketplace a very cheap way to outsource development that should be happening in the core product, not as aftermarket add-ons.

Of course there’s also a lot of assets for sale in the Marketplace that are free, and/or do things that are useful but should not be core engine features. The Marketplace was a great idea, and has a lot of promise, but has languished since the PlayTech acquisition.

Hamstrung by legacy cruft

YYG have been stuck with an old, crufty codebase written in Delphi C for the main IDE, and haven’t gotten off of it in 4 years. They always blame the old codebase for why they can’t deliver new features to the IDE, and promise to consider ideas for new features in “GM: Next”. They had made excellent progress in the first 2-3 years, focusing first on improving the performance of games built with GameMaker by introducing the YoYo compiler and runtime, porting those to modern C++, and incorporating exciting new features like Box2D Physics and Shaders into the old IDE. But since then, we haven’t seen much. GM:S 1.4 was released in late 2014. The PlayTech acquisition was announced a few months later in early 2015. Before the acquisition, we had a major update about once a year: Since the acquisition, YoYo have only released minor bugfix updates to 1.4. The biggest missing deliverable by far is the replacement of the old IDE with something modern and coded in a more maintainable way. The old Delphi codebase has left them hobbled, unable to deliver new features, and having to work harder than they should have to to add simple enhancements and fix bugs in the old.

In the meantime, a third-party IDE for GameMaker has been offered by at least two different groups. Parakeet and Enigma are the effort of frustrated GameMaker users who got sick of waiting for an official rewrite of the GM:S IDE, and took matters into their own hands and built their own. While it’s good to have alternatives, these are precariously positioned as GameMaker is closed source and any third party efforts such as these are prone to breaking if YYG change the way GameMaker works.

Promises undelivered and unfulfilled

“GM: Next” feels more and more like vaporware as time goes on. There’s no timetable for its release any longer; YYG have actually withdrawn their old roadmap that charted out their plans for the future so you could know what features might be coming and when.

The last straw has been this failure of the migration from the old GameMaker Community Forum software to a replacement running something with better security and features. They put the old forums in readonly mode in early April and promised the new forum in a couple weeks, which was itself a pretty headdesk move on their part, since there’s no reason why there should have been any downtime — archive the old forum only once the new forum is up and running, ready to launch.

But, almost 2 months later, they still have yet to deliver the promised replacement forum. Inexcusably, they’ve been all but silent on the matter. No apology for taking so long, no explanation of why it’s been taking way longer than expected, no revised ETA on the new forums. I’ve seen one tweet from a YYG source saying that they don’t know when it will happen, and they’re sorry but their “hands are tied” — presumably by PlayTech.

Shaun Spalding of YoYoGames commenting on the delinquent GMC forum upgrade.

Acquisition: What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing!

Say it again!

When the PlayTech acquisition happened, I expressed some concern but optimistically said I’d take a wait and see approach before judging whether it was a good thing or not. It’s pretty clear by now that it’s been a very bad thing.

It’s been my experience from watching small companies get gobbled up by large companies again and again that it’s almost always a bad thing for the small company and those who care about what it does. A small, successful company has drive, passion, and vision. A large company wants to secure its position and diversify its risk, and cares more about maintaining the status quo and staying on top than it does about disruption and shaking things up. When a large company buys out a small company, they say the same thing every time: “We’re not going to change a thing. We’re not going to risk disrupting what’s been working so well. We want to get on board and help them succeed to even greater heights.” It’s almost always a bunch of happytalk to put customers at ease and give investors a warm fuzzy feeling.

But what really happens is the small company totally gets disrupted. There’s usually a round of rebranding that happens, and the small company is paralyzed by Find/Replacing $OLDNAME to $NEWNAME, to no actual productive gain. Then there’s another round of aligning the small company’s goals to the greater strategic vision of the big company, at which point anything interesting or cool that the small company was working on gets squashed or distorted. Oftentimes the best people who made the small company great leave, pockets flush with money from the boost in the stock price from the buyout, in order to pursue other opportunities, where they can remain nimble and free to innovate without all the dead weight overhead from the large company. Products and services shift in ways that alienate former customers, the operation hemorrhages money, customers, and employees for a time, and eventually the burning dirigible crashes to the ground. Oh, the humanity.

That’s what usually — almost always — happens. I don’t know that that’s what’s happened with YoYoGames, but I’ve seen it happen time and again with countless small companies in all kinds of fields.

There’s still a lot of things I like about GameMaker: its simplicity, it’s easy learning curve, the speed with which an demo can be built. I still think it has a great deal of potential for a bright future, but I fear that PlayTech have squandered it for much of the last year. The acquisition has caused YoYo to fumble badly, and from what I’ve seen so far, I have little hope for a turnaround.

Unfortunately, for a proprietary tool a fumble like this is generally fatal. Around the time I got into GameMaker, there was another popular tool, called Torque, that was a bit more sophisticated, and went through a similar ownership transition and died shortly thereafter, to be reborn as a MIT licensed open source project. I guess it’s technically still around, but exist today largely as an afterthought. This situation is starting to feel eerily similar. Although… if GameMaker were to be open-sourced, that would be one of the best possible outcomes of the current situation. YoYoGames have stated on many occasions that this will never, ever happen, though.

Another door opens

For the last two years, I have also been watching an open-source project, called Godot. Godot is a 2D and 3D game engine with many features comparable to GameMaker, but is all modern and open source, and as of this writing is now at version 2.0. The development environment for Godot runs not only on Windows, but on Mac OS X and Linux as well. It looks really good, and I am planning to use it for my next project.

I’m very excited by this. If it works well, and I like it, I will be able to say goodbye to Microsoft, finally, and after the debacle of Windows UpdateRape, forcing users to upgrade to Windows 10 without their affirmative and informed consent, the timing couldn’t be better for me. GameMaker: Studio was the last proprietary Windows-only application that was keeping me on the Windows desktop platform, and I had been hoping that GM:Next might allow me to run GameMaker on Linux, but with Godot I may not have to wait to see if that day ever comes anymore.

I won’t be surprised in a few weeks time if I am kicking myself for not making the transition sooner.

[Update: be sure to read the follow-up post]

scrollsnap extension for GameMaker: Studio

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My latest GameMaker extension, scrollsnap, is published!

Asset listing at the YoYoGames Marketplace

Documentation

Demo video:

What’s scrollsnap?

Scrollsnap is a way of setting up a View in your room so that it “snaps” to the next screen’s worth of space when the followed instance moves outside the view. Simply put, it’s a view that stays put, but if you walk off the edge of the view, the view updates, giving the appearance that you walked off the edge of one screen and on to another.

Old-school video games such as Adventure, Pitfall!, and Berzerk used this approach to provide a larger game world to explore and play in, before programmers figured out how to make the hardware support scrolling.

mmap mini maps is back in the GameMaker Marketplace

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I’ve re-published the mmap mini maps over at the GameMaker Marketplace. The new version, 1.1.6, fixes the bug of the missing mmap constants — this time the right way, replacing the earlier workaround that I had supplied a few days ago.

Building the asset package the way I needed it was not obvious, but with the help from some GameMaker Community Forums users, I was able to learn the correct method to get the constants added to the package.

Two ways to build a Marketplace Asset

GM:S has two ways to build an Asset.

The more visible method of the two, and the one I had used at first when building my Asset, is to use the Package Manager, located in the Marketplace Menu.

Using this method, you can only build an asset which includes “project resources” — Sprites, Sounds, Backgrounds, Paths, Scripts, Shaders, Fonts, Time Lines, Objects, Rooms, or Included Files.

NOT include-able are Extensions, Macros, Game Information, or Global Game Settings. It’s a good idea to understand the rationale for not including these, and how YYG intends for GM:S users to work around these limitations:

  • It makes sense not to be able to include Extensions, because building an Asset is building an Extension, and Extensions are not designed to be nested.
  • Macros cannot be included, but I’m not clear on why. Perhaps because it’s not easy to separate built-in Macros such as GM_version and GM_build_date, and importing these would create conflicts?
  • Game Information is a deprecated legacy feature which YYG seems to be phasing out. No longer can Game Information be displayed at runtime when a game is playing. So it really only serves to exist as a readme file that you can access from within the GM:S IDE, when working on the project. The same information you might put in here is better added to an Included File.
  • Global Game Settings includes a number of fields that are developer-specific, and should not be shared, such as advertising account credentials, Facebook App ID, etc. There are some settings that would be nice if they could be included in an Asset package, such as HTML5 graphics settings, and options for Use New Audio Engine and Short-Circuit Evaluations, but if your Asset depends on such settings, the only option is to document that in your user manual so that users of the Asset can be informed of how they will need to set up their project.

The other way to create an Asset for the marketplace is to build an Extension. Right click on the Extensions folder in the Resource tree of a project, and Create Extension. Then right-click the newly created extension and Add Placeholder. The purpose of a “placeholder” is vague, but what it allows you to do is define Macros which reside at the extension level,which is done one at a time, in an interface that is different from the project-level Macros editor, and even more of a pain to use.

You can also add Functions to the Extension placeholder. You can add a code file, such as exported scripts in .gml format, or a .dll, .js, .dy-lib, etc. and then define Functions which hook up to the code file.

Once the Extension is defined, you can create an Asset out of it, by logging into Marketplace, and then right-clicking the Extension, and choosing the Create Asset Package option. Creating the Asset Package this way is much the same process as creating an Asset Package from the Marketplace menu, with the exception that the Extension that you right-clicked on will be included with the Asset Package.

Why there isn’t a simple way to include an Extension in the Package Manager build process, I don’t know. I guess the answer ultimately is that this is a new feature in GameMaker, and still in beta. The UI design is rough, inconsistent and not as obvious as it could be. Hopefully this will be addressed as the features are refined. But, for now, it is what it is, and game developers who use GM:S will just need to be aware and familiarize themselves with the differences between these two methods of building an Asset Package.

mmap mini maps asset temporarily withdrawn from GameMaker Marketplace

development, programming, reviews
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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.

Simple Performance Test 1.0 released to GameMaker Marketplace

development, games, programming
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Simple Performance Test is a stub project to enable GameMaker developers to quickly set up and run performance tests comparing two snippets of GML code to see which is the faster.

Ever wanted to know which way of coding your project will run faster?

Want to understand GML better?

Use Simple Performance Test to compare two blocks of GML code, and prove which is faster.

Don’t guess at which code is better optimized, test it and know!

It’s completely free!

Get Simple Performance Test at the GameMaker Marketplace

Project documentation