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[True Valhalla]

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.

[TeeGee]

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.

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.

[Ant]

There may not be a demo for GMS yet, but it is worth the money.

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.

[C.A. Silbereisen]

Are there any significant speed improvements in GMS?

[TeeGee]

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

[Tumetsu]

There may not be a demo for GMS yet, but it is worth the money.

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.

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.

[C.A. Silbereisen]

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

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...

[TeeGee]

There may not be a demo for GMS yet, but it is worth the money.

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.

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.

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?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

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.

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

[TeeGee]

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.

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

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.

[sigfarter]

Game Maker lol that's for noobs.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

Game Maker lol that's for noobs.

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

[sigfarter]

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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

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)

[sigfarter]

You're stalking me.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

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

[sigfarter]

[sigfarter]

[sigfarter]

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

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

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

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