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[Paul Eres]

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/

[sigfarter]

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?

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.

[sigfarter]

Also, these help:

[falsion]

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

Studio is getting regularly updated but right now the only reason to upgrade is if you're making HTML5 and mobile games.

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 )

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

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.

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

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+.

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

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.

[TeeGee]

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:



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.

[True Valhalla]

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.

[Shackhal]

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...

[falsion]

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.

[True Valhalla]

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.

[TeeGee]

And here we go again...

[falsion]

Ease of use and speed of development.

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.

[TeeGee]

How many games have you finished on your own?

[falsion]

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.

[Gabriel Verdon]

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.