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Coming from his most recent blog post on the 20th:


In addition to his next "Big game" and the Princess Pitch game, I'm pretty damn excited about this news.  I've always wondered how some of the tech behind Iji worked, and this is going to awesome for some advanced GM users to learn some new tricks.

Cool. I would love to see people making additional levels for Iji and Hero Core.

agreed.

Heh. Disappointing to hear about the stolen Garden Gnome Carnage port.

Great news!  Hopefully releasing source code will be a continuing trend among game developers.

Sounds like he's only half-sticking with his 'smaller games' commitment after Iji. Looking forward to his next 'big game'!

to my knowledge iji didn't really use any advanced 'tricks' and was made in gm5. the technology used to make the graphics was done externally to gm, by using 3d models and then coloring them, iirc -- to me the best things about iji are the story and level design and music, there's nothing in the programming or engine itself that made me wonder 'how did he do that?'

also, because of the gm decompiler, all gm games are basically open source anyway (you can get the source code of any gm game easily, even if it's not legitimate) so i don't think this will change much, or give anybody access who didn't already have access, but it's a nice thing to do and yeah, if it leads to more levels or mods it'd be great

or even just a mac port, etc.

(http://platformers.net/forum/Smileys/default/thumbsup.gif) (http://platformers.net/forum/Smileys/default/thumbsup.gif) (http://platformers.net/forum/Smileys/default/thumbsup.gif) to Mr. Remar.

I don't know much about this kind of thing, but won't releasing the source code leave all the commenting intact, while decompiling does not?

As far as I know, decompiling leaves the source exactly as you would see it before compiling. Unless Daniel Remar decides to add additional commenting when he releases the source.

yep, game maker .exe's contain the complete code, including comments

It could be useful for people who are just starting out (and don't want to decompile). That was actually one of my main methods of learning GM: Downloading open source games to see how they did something.

I'd open source my games too but my code is too messy/clunky to be useful to anyone either as a learning tool or for "modding" purposes (which I'd imagine people wouldn't be interested in anyway). I don't have a problem with decompiling though in the unlikely event that someone absolutely wants to see how I make my games.

You could decompile but once you did so you would generally have no legal permission to use the source thus obtained.

If he's "releasing" the source however it's probably under some kind of proper license.

At last, after so much time my dreams of spawning the final boss several times in the same room will come true!

on topic, seeing him release more big games would be awesome.

also, the garden gnome carnage thing is even sadder once you read the fact that the guys who made the fake port failed to make it looked good. :facepalm:
 

Heh, don't think you could even do that. I imagine he won't be including the art assets with the source.

Game Maker's .gmk files contain the art assets?  How is he going to distribute the source without the art assets?  That doesn't even make any sense.

I'm still super excited about this though  :beer:

By removing them. Or by replacing each one with a black box.

While that would work, it would be incredibly pointless.

How would it be pointless? Even if all the art assets and music were removed, you'd still be able to see the framework of Iji-- the way Remar implemented the upgrade system, how he implemented the text system, the collision system, the elevators, AI, all the code for HeroCore (because I think those are done using GM's draw functions as opposed to sprites), the Null Driver, the instance deactivation system, and the menu system, among a multitude of other things.

I meant it would be pointless removing the art assets, not the removal of art assets would make the source pointless.

My point is that GM games can be easily decompiled anyway; so it would be a fair waste of time going and removing all of the art assets for a game finished in 2008, instead of just releasing them under a Creative Commons license (with the code under an open source license).

Ah. I misunderstood. :P

No worries, that was probably partly due to my laziness to initially expand on my "why-it-would-be-pointless" point.  ;)

It just got released! Downloading now.  :)
http://www.remar.se/daniel/resources.php

Edit: I tried on GM5 (GM6 also supports .gmd files but I'm on W7 and it removes some functions that the game uses ) but it needs the registered version for some features. :(
Either way the code itself it's very helpful and I thank Daniel for the time he had to organize everything.

I've just been looking through the source, and as you can probably expect, the amount of code is just insane.   :epileptic: 

Is it clean or dirty?

Well the formatting isn't that bad; he does have a standard although it's rather unusual.

However due to the way Game Maker code is organised within Game Maker itself, there's not a lot of contextual information about the code (there's a few comments here and there) which makes it hard to understand on a whole.

There also isn't some kind of base engine he wrote for doing this, so it's not exactly easy to modify the game to create a new "Iji" game; it's all very interconnected.

He had already released the art assets(with the exception of the final boss, for technical reasons), so I doubt he'll remove them from the code except maybe for space reasons.

We already know he hasn't removed the art assets, because he's released the source already  :P

When I posted that I hadn't looked at the source yet.

@hach

big games require a lot of code, this isn't a surprise. my current project saturated dreamers for instance has 2671 scripts, and 33225 lines of code, which (i just checked) is almost equal to iji's 34300 lines of code. the largest game maker game code base i've ever seen is 'perfect service' which has something like 50,000 lines of code.

(i think a lot of people forget just how long the best indie games took to make; it's rare that one of my favorite indie games was made in only a few months, or even less than a year. iji took about 4-5 years to complete, remember; a lot of that was probably spent coding.)

Oh yeah, I'm not surprised about how many lines of code exist in the game; I can understand perfectly that the game requires that amount of code.

However, it doesn't make it any less insane in terms of just how much there is (it might not seem amazing to you since you write games with equivalent lines of source code, but for someone who is used to smaller games, the amount of code written is pretty daunting :P).