TIGSource Forums

I've been out of the loop on Game Maker and had some questions about 8.1 that I couldn't find answers to elsewhere:

1. Do games made in it run faster?

2. Can gmk's saved in 8.0 be opened in 8.1 and vice versa?

Thanks!

GMKs made in 8.0 can be opened in 8.1, but not vice versa. It's not faster.

The only visible change is that the fonts are anti-aliased better in GM 8.1 (it doesn't use your system's settings anymore), but it sometimes does atrocious things to kerning.

I also had an issue with Cinders, when around 20-30% of beta player couldn't run the game on their lower-end PCs (crashed on resource loading). Took me a while to discover that simply reverting back to GM 8.0 fixes the problem. I pressed YYG into fixing the crash, but it still produced weird graphical glitches on those computers. Now GM 8.1 features an option to force software vertex processing (which I hear was the the cause of the problem), but I haven't tested it yet on any larger volume of gamers.

All in all, I use GM 8.0 in the end. Find it more stable and secure overall.

I can't remember many of the changes, but the biggest one for me was it improved my game's loading time incredibly. It went from 50 seconds to 12 seconds.

I don't believe there was any significant performance boost otherwise.

I've been working on my major project using GM 8.1 for a long time now, and I have been happy with it. No issues at all.

Yeah I think they coded a new runner for 8.1 which is why it's a lot faster loading up, other than that I can't remember reading of any performance boost. GameMaker:Studio is supposed to have a fairly big performance boost though I don't have any first-hand knowledge of that since I still use 8.0.

Yeah it's mainly faster loading. Also wasn't the room editor zoom function introduced in 8.1? (not that that thing is worth using either way lol)

Also you can open 8.0 files in 8.1 but not vice versa. It automatically converts 8.0 files to 8.1 format when you save them.

You can open 8.1 files with 8.0, there is a converter.

http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=505903

Cool, thanks! I'll stick with 8.0 for now, then.

BTW, if you're looking to get the 8.0 installer, Anna Anthropy kindly put it up here:

http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=1240

i shall remember my time with game maker fondly

can you still buy the 8.0 full version ? I thought they forced you to the 8.1 one?

I used my last activation key, which still worked. If you don't have a working key, I *think* you can still get one through Softwrap, but I'm not sure. It says you can on the YoYo Games GM FAQ, but I couldn't find the installer on the Softwrap site.

I use GM8.1 and have never had any problems with it. However, I don't make huuuge games like some of you guys do, so it's up to you.

some differences posted in a list here: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=505774

generally the consensus is that 8.1 is worse than 8.0 and yoyo doesn't seem to care

What about studio? Is it the definitive version?

maybe but nobody can even test studio because it has no demo and is 99$ for basic functionality 400$ for everything

Oh I tested it, there was a beta.But I can't tell how compares  because I didn't really bother to compare, it looks to be very similar to standard game maker.

If Studio is anywhere near the quality of Game Maker HTML5 then I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

The only thing you can be sure with all game maker version, is that they will all have this annoying scrolling flicker

Good lords. The last time I used Game Maker the question was between 6.0 and 6.1.

GameMaker Studio's alright.  There are a few bugs but YYG seems to be updating them fairly quickly.  It's a lot less buggy than GM:HTML5 was.  The default skin they use is fuck ugly though so I suggest switching to the GM8-styled one.

GameMaker 8.1 is definitely better than 8.0 - not by much, but it is. The reasons not to upgrade seem somewhat trivial and more like a desperate attempt to find something wrong for the sake of it.

@Moi, Currently it is, however there is always talk of "GameMaker 9" or a next gen GM which introduces a fully recoded IDE (moving away from Delphi to C++).

@Paul, GMS is actually $600 in total: $99 for base, $99 for HTML5, $200 for iOS, $200 for Android. I own all the modules, but have only used the iOS and Android ones briefly so far.

The HTML5 product was pretty average in beta, yes, however it was beta...it's still not even close to perfect but it is usable with some patience.

There may not be a demo for GMS yet, but it is worth the money. I've made nearly $6000 with just the HTML5 module alone. The potential with the other modules is even greater, and I'm taking a stab at an iOS/Android app this month actually.

Nope. Decreased stability and even font kerning are actually important issues. If I would use GM8.1 from the start, Cinders would be a flop, with around 30% of sales having to be refunded. I wouldn't call that trivial. GM8.0 is tried and works on almost everything. For a commercial (or just popular) game that's a huge thing. And you can always port to GM8.1 later should it prove to be as stable as 8.0 in the long run.

That's pretty subjective. If you're just making freeware hobby games then it's not worth the upgrade at all since Studio is a buggy mess right now. Locomalito tweeted about his experiences with Studio and had so many problems porting his games over that he's now back using 8.1. Studio is getting regularly updated but right now the only reason to upgrade is if you're making HTML5 and mobile games.

Are there any significant speed improvements in GMS?

Yeah. GMS is pretty much a different engine. It's not interpreted anymore and it's generally faster by quite a lot.

But are the problems evident mostly when trying to port existing project? I'm not sure and correct me if I'm wrong, but I have heard a lot of people have had problems with porting. I think it doesn't tell whole story of the tool. It might just be incompatible with old GM versions but be good if project is made from start with it.

Cool, maybe I'll get it once the bugs are fixed and their purchase page supports Paypal or Amazon. The base version  without the extra modules isn't that expensive for me considering euro/dollar conversion rates and I'm not really interested in ios, Android or html5 so...

Yeah, the issues are mainly with porting projects. Other than outright bugs, some functions simply work differently or don't work at all under Studio. It also doesn't like external resource loading (though the internal one is much improved) and some extensions/DLLs. It's not that bad when working from scratch, though still pretty buggy. Overall the tool seems to have some potential, but I'm afraid it's going to become obsolete when GM9 comes out, as it's again supposed to be a separate product.

That's my big beef with YYG's strategy. Each new release seems to actually be a separate product, instead of an upgrade to a single solid tool, like Unity. GM4Mac? Sorry, that's based on GM7, not compatible with the PC version. GM Html5? Basically it's own thing, now made obsolete by Studio. Studio? Not really an upgrade to GM8.1 or GM4Mac -- a separate product altogether, and to be replaced by GM9.

How many different GameMakers I can keep on my HDD / pay for?

as teegee said, *not working on 30% of computers* is not trivial

besides that, that thread i linked to pointed out several major disadvantages of 8.1 vs 8.0, such as compile times being twice as slow, empty game .exe files being 2mb larger, and so on. i don't know in what world you'd have to live in where those can be considered trivial

let's just consider the 2mb larger file size. let's say you are a commercial game developer, and have to pay bandwidth costs for people downloading your game's demo. if you have 100,000 demo downloads, a "small" 2mb increase in file size for the demo means 200 extra gb of bandwidth that you need to pay for, which can cost you several hundreds of dollars. and that's being somewhat conservative, some games have millions of downloads for the demo version

To clarify -- it's not that it doesn't work at all on 30% of computers. It's that a game which loaded pretty large external resources crashed on that many systems. The issue seems to be fixed now, if you turn off vertex processing, though I haven't tested it extensively.

So it may be fixed or may not affect your game, but at least for me, the fact that such things can happen at all would be enough to re-consider using the tool.

Game Maker lol that's for noobs.

says the guy who used mmf2 for most of his life :p

I started out with Klik & Play, thank you very much.

I leveled up to become a master of C++. Speaking of such, quit distracting me, I need to focus on programmer.

i didn't say you started out with mmf2, just that, to my knowledge, you spent more time using mmf2 than anything else, and for a long time (a decade a more) you were by your own admission afraid of programming, and mmf2 is even more noobish than gm, so attacking gm users is hypocritical (but you knew all this, of course, i'm just pointing it out for those people who did not know this)

You're stalking me.

what do you expect; i'm an indie game journalist (of sorts) and you're an indie game developer. it's my duty to know as much about indie game developers as possible so as to better review their games

(http://braindamage.vg/dev/blood_rain.png)

(http://braindamage.vg/junk/sig_pajamas.jpg)

Do you have an indie game journalism website somewhere? You should interview me.

i'm an editor for this particular website (tigsource)

i believe the url is http://www.tigsource.com/

You guys have been slack this past year. TIGSource is suffering from Derek Yu Website Motivational Syndrome (DYWMS). If you don't discover a cure, we will see years go by between updates.

yeah but derek's policy is only to cover the *best* (highest profile, most interesting, whatever) indie games rather than a large number of them the way indiegames.com and other indie game sites do, so in a sense it's all part of the plan to have fewer posts. other indie game sites give you a constant stream of new games, maybe 5-10 new games each day get posted. whereas tigsource maybe has 2-3 posts a week, so you know that when a game gets posted it has to be good

Well that doesn't solve the problem of me being pissed off because there is no new material to read everyday. You guys could at least do a daily round up, like Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Sunday Papers (except everyday you lazy cretin).

I actually have had an editor account at indiegames.com for several years but haven't once used it. Do you think I should spy on them?

i had an editor account there too actually (i stopped posting there around the time that michael rose started posting there). their login system changed tho so i doubt my account works anymore

and if you want more material, why not read the other blogs? indiegames.com and diygamer and playthisthing and one word videogames -- between the four of those, all your daily indie game needs can be met, even if you played games full time you couldn't possibly play all the games posted on all those blogs

besides, don't you claim to work on your game 100 hours a week? and don't you have a wife and child (even more stalking??) -- so how do you find time to want more material on tigsource, hold a job during the graveyard watch, and work on your game 100 hours a week, and have a wife and child? where do you get those extra hours per week?

What's the beef with Michael Rose? You aren't the first one dissing him, so I'm curious.

hm? that wasn't a diss. it was just a timeline thing; i didn't stop posting there *because* he started posting there, it just so happened that i got bored of posting there around the time that he started posting there. there may even have been a little of 'well now that someone else is helping timw with the site i don't have to help as much' to it. plus he was getting paid for it, and i wasn't, so i was like 'why write articles for free when he's being paid?'

that said if you want me to critique his writing or journalism skills or something i could; i don't think it's bad but don't think it's great either, his articles feel solidly average. i guess it's just in comparison to timw that he feels off? because timw really knew his stuff, he was very good at games, a true investigative journalist who went out there, dug into the forums, found the best games, posted them, often posted walkthrough videos for them and got high scores in them, playtested them, knew everything about all the developers (his memory is amazing), and pointed out the best parts of the games he wrote about in an objective way without frills (particularly impressive considering english is his second language). compared to that rose, or anyone, has a high bar to meet; i don't think anyone can ever again equal timw's abilities in indie game journalism. timw once told me he reads every post on the tigsource forums, looking for material to cover; every single post. and not just on this forum either, he had a whole list of about 50 forums that he checks every day for new games. i doubt anyone else does anything close to that

I see, sorry for the misunderstanding. I just hear some negativism (but not much) about Rose, so that's why I wondered that. I haven't seen much of Tim W. stuff, but what you said made me curious about him. I'll check his articles.

you may have to go back a bit to see some of his best stuff; timw was the founder and primary writer for the blog around 2005 through around 2009 or 2010. he started the blog on blogspot (a free blogging site), and gamasutra eventually bought the site from him in 2007 and put it on indiegames.com

http://indygamer.blogspot.com/

It's an unconventional and difficult lifestyle, but I manage to get all of those things done every week by sticking to a lopsided sleeping schedule whereby I stay awake for days in a row, then cram all of my sleeping together over the days I don't have to go to work. The Chinese call this "living like a tiger", lazing around in the sun for days, then expending a massive amount of energy to confront life's challenges. Right now I have been awake for 55 hours, done two shifts at work and completed a substantial amount of code for the BDAPI while I was the only one at home over the weekend.

I've been living like this for several years and am actually much healthier than you would imagine. I heed the advice of my GP who has helped me optimize this routine, so there is your question answered.

Also, these help:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Dextroamphetamine.jpg/250px-Dextroamphetamine.jpg)

I really got tired of crap like MMF and GM.

I've been teaching myself everything from the ground up. I am somewhat okay at C++ now (though it's a pretty nasty language in terms of syntax I don't prefer using it unless I need to). I've also learned some other languages like plain old C and Python. I even try read things like SICP and the more theoretical stuff (even though I'm sure many of you would say that's not useful for "game dev," I suppose).

It feels good to not be stifled by a program and its refusal to update. Now I'm just stifled by my lack of actual coding skill, which at least can be steadily improved.

I have used GM 8.1 for a long time with several projects, including a very large one, and have experienced absolutely no instability. I'm not certain about your issues with font kerning, but in my experience GM 8.1 actually improved my use of fonts because a bug is fixed where font characters are cut off by a few pixels(a GM issue I have despised for years).

I was very hesitant to move my major project of 2+ years to GM 8.1 and paid close attention during the transition, but found not a single problem. Granted, I'm sure our games are set up very differently. But for me, all I saw was improvements, and my user base did not have a problem with the transition.


I'm talking from a commercial perspective. GMS is a product made for developers that want to make money with their GameMaker games, hence the much higher price tag. It is not for hobbyist developers.

GameMaker Studio is for exactly that: "making HTML5 and mobile games".

Aside from performance boosts and more stable cross-platform support there's no real reason to upgrade from GM 8 to GMS if you're only a hobbyist developer. I would not have bought GMS and all the modules if I didn't plan to make my money back ten-fold (and so far I have :))


I've been following Cinders, and we can all tell it's not your "normal" GM project - it's massive, and includes large art assets. Now my major project has been in development for a long time and is quite sizable, certainly larger than 99% of GM projects, and I experienced not a single issue with my transition to GM 8.1.

I do know what problem teegee is talking about though, I experienced it myself when I used huge background texture in one of my games. It ran fine for me, but I received reports of it not loading for a few others (this '30%', perhaps?). I was notified that it is because GM 8.1 does not support such large images, and I'm sure there are reasons for that change (ironically, probably to improve stability).

Was that a big deal for me? Not really. I altered my game to use a smaller texture and everything was fine. For Cinders, teegee probably has the option of separating his high res asset into smaller sprites. Is it easier to stick with GM 8.0 though, instead of doing that? Yes, most certainly.

So holding onto this "your game now won't work on 30% of computers" is not representative of everyone's experiences, and is something that developers CAN address if they experience problems (correct me if I'm wrong, teegee). In his case, sure, I can see that as a reason to stay with GM 8.0.


This response in that same thread counteracts many of the points raised: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=505774&view=findpost&p=3736908

Compile times twice as slow? Not for me. Mine where much faster, and my loading times improved many times over.

Extra 2mb on empty files? Apparently not according to the above linked response. I didn't bother trying this myself, because when your project is already 50Mb in size an extra 2Mb is not going to kill anyone and yes, I consider that absolutely trivial in a world where patches alone are frequently 400Mb+.


I am a commercial game developer, and I have unlimited bandwidth on my web host and excessing bandwidth on my VPS. By the time a commercial game is so popular that its demo is receiving 100,000 downloads, I'm quite certain you'd be able to afford a little extra bandwidth.

Now I want to finish by saying that again, this is all just in my experience. My transition from 8.0 to 8.1 was excellent; much smoother than I anticipated. Will my transition from GM 8.1 to GMS or GM 9.0 be so smooth? Absolutely not, it's going to be incredibly painful.

If some developers have issues with the software, that's enough to raise a warning flag. Someone else not having problems doesn't change it. Basically, when I check a new tool, my main question is: "will I run into problems if I continue to use it". For GM8.1 it's still possible, while in GM8.0 it's highly unlikely.

Who told you that they introduced that crash to increase stability or prevent using excessively large resources? That sounds ridiculous. If they wanted that, they should introduce a hard limit, not make it fail on some systems. It was a bug related to moving from one vertex processing mode to another. It's also claimed to be fixed now, with the option to use the old method.

Also, I'm talking about 1280x800 (so 2048x1024 in reality) assets here. That's hardly excessively large in the era of Full HD screens. Even the casual games I worked on back at my day job used 2048x2048 textures.

In all seriousness, if Cinders would be too much for GM to take, it would mean it's a very limited tool.


As for the font kerning, this is what I meant:

(http://moacube.com/img/temp/gmkerning.jpg)

I haven't put a space there in the artist's name. It's just how GM8.1 draws it. The top one is produced by GM8.0. Also notice how "fat" the GM8.1 output looks. It can be an important issue, depending on how text heavy your game is. Cinders dialogues were hard to read in GM8.1, I imagine Paul would have similar problems with his Saturated Dreamers. The font cut off is indeed fixed, but it comes with this as a trade off.

I just don't consider those issues enough to call GM 8.1 unstable, or really even less stable. It's a problem that few developers would encounter, and if they do it's not difficult to fix (talking small scale, not Cinder's scale).

I see what you mean about font kerning now. For text-heavy games like Cinders and Saturated Dreamers I can understand why you'd stick with GM 8.0.

Really, arguing whether 8.0 or 8.1 is better is somewhat pointless. For you 8.1 is obviously less appealing, and for me it's obviously more appealing. That's due both in part to our varied projects and how we weigh different flaws from both versions.

I can't tell the difference between both versions, but until now I don't have any issues in GM 8.1. Either the "infamous" sprite loading issue and the font problem. Maybe because my laptop (yeah, laptop) is not slow enough to crash while loading or I use sprite fonts in my games.

So I'm happy for now. Until I find a problem. I hope not...

What's the appeal in programs like GM anyway? If you were to code this (using C++, Python, Java, whatever), I doubt you'd ever run into an issue of the font not showing up the way you wanted unless it was your fault.

Ease of use and speed of development.

And here we go again... ::)

Both are dependent on your skill in coding though, something that using "game making" tools severely hold you back on, especially with the handholding it does and with how you're limited by bugs and bizarre behavior you have to try working around (which in turn enforce even more bad habits).

You can become a better (and faster, more efficient) coder but you can't make something like GM become a better program. You're at the mercy of the developers on that one.

How many games have you finished on your own?

I made some crappy MMF game years ago called Project 053. I like to pretend it doesn't exist.

Since then I never really finished anything, either due to lack of motivation or really awful bugs (on the developer's end, not mine, especially when I used Construct) that would stop me from making any more progress.

I can tell you this though. I noticed since learning how to code, I'm able to do simple tasks like keeping track of an inventory far more easier than the convulated way you'd have to do it in something like MMF, which was a mess. All the trouble it goes through to keep you from having to code isn't worth it. It's better just to learn it instead of being shielded from it.

Then again, my experiences aren't with GM, but this topic and the issues people are having remind me a lot of MMF and the pants on head retarded things that would happen with it.

No matter what you use to make a game, whether it is assembly code or a high-level package like Game Maker, there are always trade-offs. It's just a matter of choosing which ones you would prefer to deal with. Like True Valhalla said, with Game Maker we choose to speed and convenience over absolute control. Finding work-arounds for bugs and weird GM idiosyncrasies can be annoying and time-consuming, but there are tons of other, different things that are annoying and time-consuming when working in C++ and "from scratch" programming languages.

If you are a multi-disciplinarian like myself or TeeGee or many others on this forum, it helps to have a tool that covers all the stuff like font rendering and memory management and external resource loading so that we can worry about designing a complete videogame, finishing it, and then releasing it, even if on occasion the tool doesn't work perfectly.

Hopefully that clears things up for you and we can get back to the topic at hand.

I suppose. But it gets frustrating when there's a huge flaw that isn't your fault but the developers of whatever tool you're using.

That's what kinda made me give up these "easy" game making tools and go in the hard way. If there is a mistake, I'd rather have it be my own fault, not the fault of the "game making tool" I'm using.

I like making mistakes I can actually learn from and fix. Often with game making tools, there's a lot of stuff you just have to "just deal with" and never hope to fix.

Also it seems like companies like Clickteam and YoYoGames are all about selling exporters now instead of fixing obvious bugs in their program. What's with that?

Good coding skills are very important, even in GM (it's not like MMF, you actually code/script stuff in it), no doubt about that.

But coding a feature like inventory is one thing, while having to code an entire engine from scratch is another. And then you have to test it (and it doesn't work), and then you have to port it to other platforms (and it doesn't work), and then you realize you need to add physics and particles systems with some editor (and they don't work). After several months, you realize that what you have is still not a game, but some basic engine that doesn't even have a fraction of features of Unity or GM.

I've been making games professionally for 7 or 8 years now and during that time had the chance to work on completely custom tools, GM-likes, and even those AAA engines. Custom engines are cool and very efficient, but even at a company where we had a fully developed proprietary framework (that took years to code and perfect mind you) and a programmer team to maintain it, we still had moments where we wished we simply went with Unity instead. When I went full-time indie, I consciously decided to go back to GM. For small indie teams, unless it somehow limits the scope of your game, I think such tools are the way to go.

I may complain about GM's faults and development schedule, but I can't deny the fact that I've had a completely playable demo of Cinders (which looked just like it looks now and had all the underlaying code work as intended) within a month.

No doubt about it. But as Gabriel said -- it's a trade off.

I guess I'm not experienced enough to talk about coding in an "actual language" yet. But I really do get frustrated when there's an issue and it isn't my fault.

I'm hoping to become proficient enough where I don't have to rely on such tools like this. I'm sure it's possible. I know a guy who has made games in assembly and made lots of homebrew games for old consoles and some demoscene stuff. He works so fast I doubt he'd ever need something like GM.

I think that's the way to go. I want to be like that. Then GM, MMF, or whatever can go ahead and bite me.

Gabriel and teegee have already hit all the main points. I know C++ and would still choose GameMaker over it any day. Unfortunately my major project requires me to use a combination of the two, but for everything else I am a GM purist ;)

You'd be impressed with what experienced GM users can create in short periods of time.

i use gm for jams and stuff like that, but for anything bigger than a jam game, it's way more effort dealing with the bugs than it is just rolling my own stuff. it's not that hard to get gm-esque capabilities in your own thing, gm's main advantages are the UI / built in level editor (which, let's be honest, suck anyway) etc. mainly interface things. (hence being better for jam stuff.)

Not to brag (haha, right), but done under 48h :laughter:: http://moacube.com/games/co-op/

Though I can relate to falsion's sentiment and I find his attitude commendable. Isn't: "I'm pissed at all the X out there, so I'm going to do it better" a foundation for this scene's very existence, after all? ;)

I gave up GM after I learned AS3 and Flashpunk. Partially because Flashgames seem to get more players but mostly because of the workflow. After I got into working in IDE like Flashdevelop with only code I can't imagine going back to GM dor now. All code and traditional OoP just feels better to me than GM's UI. However if GM introduced a way to work like that with its GML I'd probably use it again.

i used to use c++. i thought i wasn't a "real" game developer unless i used a "real" programming language and wrote my own engines and stuff like that. after a couple years of not getting anything done i dropped my ego and switched to gm. i don't really enjoy programming so anything that helps me reduce the effort is good (gml is programming for idiots) and i'm not looking to get a job in the game industry or build a portfolio or anything like that. i just mak gams as a side hobby and gm is perfect for that.

Yup. Though I have ignored my GM 8.1 license for far too long, and getting Construct 2 for HTML5 anyways, I figured that the best approach is to get my hands on something quickly instead of reinventing the wheel every time.

if you are an amateur (not making gams professionally),90% of the time your experience will be :
-if you use a "real programming language", you'll get games done, but very simple games, simple half-finished platformer prototype, maybe an arena shooter or you'll spend months creating a very complex minecraft-like simulation that will sort of work and then you'll give up on everything
you'll create the structure of sthg you had in mind
-if you use a high level package, you'll be able to reach a higher level, all the complexity and brain oil that you would put in solving a simple platform collision bug, you'll be able to use it for a puzzle, story element, asset creation or a complex level design. You'll make a gam and it will be more than you imagined.

The other thing to keep in mind is that with Game Maker, you can write your own .dll's and extensions in C++ or pretty much any other language, and then use them in your GM project.

Using an 'actual language' won't stop you running into issues that aren't your fault. I mean are you going to code everything and use zero external libraries? Even if you code everything from the ground up an external system will pop up and bite you in the ass. 90% of issues players have with my game stem from either a sound or graphics driver. So much so that I start nearly all support emails with update you drivers. And I've had several issues with external libraries that I can't solve directly so have to devise workarounds. It's the nature of modern computing I'm afraid. I say use whatever you are comfortable with and whatever will make the process least painful for yourself.