Game Maker Studio users should be advised of a potentially disasterous bug that can permanently disfigure their graphical resources.
I have (so far) been unaffected by this issue, and am unaware of what triggers it or who might be affected. From reading the story over at Gamemakerblog, it seems that it may have to do with Steam, but details are still unclear.
This is a good time to re-emphasize the importance of good backups. If you don’t have something to restore from, it’s sad, but you really only have yourself to blame for not having better backups.
GameMaker Studio even incorporates source control features that allow you to store your project resources in a Subversion repository. Anyone who uses subversion with their GameMaker projects should be pretty safe, as long as they have a version of their sprites checked in prior to the images being corrupted.
As well, it’s a good practice to maintain your graphics resources outside of your gamemaker projects. While useful, the built-in sprite editor is rudimentary, and many graphics artists prefer to work in a more robust professional quality tool, then import into GameMaker. If you work this way, you should still have your originals intact, and won’t be as badly affected by this problem.
I really hope that this incident will spur Yoyogames to look at its anti-piracy philosophy and find other controls that they can use to curb unlicensed use of the features that they reserve for paid licensees.