OFFICIAL Winter Q&A 2021

[Miradur]

Thanks first for the(long awaited) easy use of shading. Now to my question.

Is there a layer planned that allows easy and automatic collision detection?

So something like this, anything i make black on this layer will be detected as collision
and i can add objects using this layer as collision event.
With the option if as a tile or precise.
It would make creating a game environment so much easier(especially for beginners).


Miradur

 

[Posh Indie]

Thanks first for the(long awaited) easy use of shading. Now to my question.

Is there a layer planned that allows easy and automatic collision detection?

So something like this, anything i make black on this layer will be detected as collision
and i can add objects using this layer as collision event.
With the option if as a tile or precise.
It would make creating a game environment so much easier(especially for beginners).


Miradur

Not too sure this would be a great idea as implementation would leave collision VERY limited for this feature (Would it be worth the bloat?) unless there is a crazy level of over-architecture (And more bloat) to make it worth using. Collision detection and resolution don't really have "One size fits all" implementations. It would be a big addition (And time sink) for such an inevitably limited feature that most probably would not use (It also would be making the engine dictate a key component of your game). "Automatic" collision detection sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

At some point I think we need to draw the line on "beginner features". As mentioned previously (In this thread, even), part of GameMaker is being a learning tool. If everything is done for you, are you actually learning anything at all? If every feature is predetermined in behavior, or restricted for the sake of ease of use, are you actually making anything of value?

That said, tile collision methods would be nice to have. I remember they were supposed to be a thing years ago until they silently became "not a thing".

 

[gnysek]

Is there a layer planned that allows easy and automatic collision detection?

From previous answers it seems that those might be "triggers":

The old triggers in GMS were just a function that was evaluated and if true it then executed an event, this was very inefficient. The new Trigger system is quite different and is more like Unreal triggers where different types of triggers (areas or lines) can be placed in the room editor and then when a game object enters / leaves / hangs around then events can be triggered. These triggers can also have related objects that can be consulted in the event (so doors etc can be opened/closed easily). The goal is to make it easier for designers to be able to use them easily.

 

[Chaser]

@GameDevDan Gamemakers stance with regards to blockchain and crypto currency’s I suspect will be left to the dev to code in themselves, or through extensions. Opera appears to be adding a heavy load on their carbon footprint as it stands today.

Opera collaborates with famous CS:GO streamer, Anomaly, to mint a set of 4,000 NFTs

The collaboration will be kicked off by an auction of five super rare Anomaly NFTs on October 23, followed by a general sale of mystery boxes with NFTs on the new Traden.pro platform starting on Oct 26, 2021. Oslo, Norway – Opera, the personal browser of choice for hundreds of millions of people...

press.opera.com

NFT’s will eventually work there way into GMs infrastructure I’m sure. Sadly it’s the future every cooperate business are positioning them self’s for. Including governments.

 

[Zhanghua]

Is trigger something like signal&slots?

 

[RefresherTowel]

Sadly it’s the future every cooperate business are positioning them self’s for. Including governments.

I don't really think that's true. NFTs are just the latest tulip bubble, any government getting itself wrapped up in them shouldn't be a government.

 

[Chaser]

@RefresherTowel we not just talking about NFT’s matey. It’s a whole lot bigger than that. It’s blockchain, web3 and crytocurrencys. Uk government is, ive seen the publications, and I know they are already using it. OK I can’t speak for other govs around the world, but all you have to do is look at what the big corps are doing in the scenes. Facebook now Meta is the tip of the iceberg. Lol.Anyways, it’s off topic.

 

[Posh Indie]

@RefresherTowel we not just talking about NFT’s matey. It’s a whole lot bigger than that. It’s blockchain, web3 and crytocurrencys. Uk government is, ive seen the publications, and I know they are already using it. OK I can’t speak for other govs around the world, but all you have to do is look at what the big corps are doing in the scenes. Facebook now Meta is the tip of the iceberg. Lol.Anyways, it’s off topic.

You still haven't given anything convincing enough as to why YoYo Games should care, though. The government is the last sector I would reference as a leader in the software world. Big corporations have bigger problems to solve than Indie Developers using GameMaker Studio...

 

[Chaser]

@Posh Indie i haven’t and I won’t either, it makes no difference to YoYo as they will do as Opera instruct. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything I don’t think. Was just responding to gamedevdan and enlighten refrshertowel that nfts were a small part in a bigger pool. Kind of ‘direction’ that the company is moving, and that is ‘blockchain’. In some ways it is may effect developers, or maybe not. To some it’s important, to some it won’t be.

 

[RefresherTowel]

enlighten refrshertowel that nfts were a small part in a bigger pool.

Lol, you didn't enlighten me of anything. I mentioned NFTs because that's what you mentioned.

 

[Chaser]

@RefresherTowel Er....well.... ahem.......well I mentioned it because @GameDevDan mentioned it lol.

 

[Lance]

I think you're talking about completely different things. Sure better out of the box support for middleware like fmod and wwise would be nice but don't dismiss native audio.
A lot of people just want to have an ability to plug on an EQ on a track without going mad. Not everyone wants to attach fmod to do that.
UEs native audio capabilities is on par and outperform middleware. Why did they bother if it's so useless...

Sorry, dude. Unreal's audio tools or any built-in audio tools out there are not in the same ballpark as FMOD or Wwise. You're only furthering my point that non-audio people don't understand audio tools and the needs of audio professionals in game development. Every AAA house and many indie houses use middleware of some sort. Power and complexity without coding intricate systems because those systems are already there at your fingertips and can be as complex as you'd like without having to rethink code or node trees. Even just the fast iteration with middleware is enough to justify it. Iteration ad infinitum without fidgeting at all in the IDE. Sound designers like to tweak levels and knobs and curves and parameters thousands of times a day. No sense in adding 14 clicks when you can do two in middleware. It adds up. Often audio designers are at the mercy of the programmers who create the audio behaviors based on what the audio people envisioned. Sometimes that involves even waiting for a build to observe your work, to discover you need to make a thousand corrections. With middleware you can test the synergy of everything together in a simulated environment before even integrating into the game. Elaborate adaptive music and dynamic mixing are basically done before you even start. Scratching the tip of the iceberg here.

Nothing wrong with improving the tools that GM already has, for those who don't need anything other than simple audio: play, stop, fade, etc. I'm definitely not arguing that FMOD should be side loaded just to add an EQ. Anything other than all or nothing doesn't make sense. But having middleware available would open up new worlds of understanding for GM users. Devs who might have used only "simple audio" might discover what the world of better, more involved audio means for games in general. They also might discover how easy it is to collaborate with a remote sound designer/composer who can create all the behaviors perfectly on their end without having to touch the dev's GM project, and those audio pros can iterate and make changes at home, push an updated FMOD build to the dev, who then doesn't need to do a single thing for those changes to take effect.

 

[Posh Indie]

@Posh Indie i haven’t and I won’t either, it makes no difference to YoYo as they will do as Opera instruct. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything I don’t think. Was just responding to gamedevdan and enlighten refrshertowel that nfts were a small part in a bigger pool. Kind of ‘direction’ that the company is moving, and that is ‘blockchain’. In some ways it is may effect developers, or maybe not. To some it’s important, to some it won’t be.

Oh good. Then we're on the same page that NFTs and Blockchain shouldn't be a priority, haha.

 

[Chaser]

@Posh Indie 100% abso friggin loutly.

 

[redantgames]

This is why we added extensions….

Cross platform video support is something that we are considering but it has not been high priority as it can be done via extensions

I greatly appreciate the ability to do this, and understand that this could be a logistical nightmare for GMS devs to try to upkeep with every piece of hardware from every platform. (...on top of still developing GMS to be even more awesome!) So obviously we, the community would need to help pickup the reigns here and start making our own extensions from 3rd party dynamic libraries.

However I feel that those interested in learning how to do this in GMS2 could use more updated examples, new written tutorials, video tutorials and such of how to do this. There is surprisingly very little sources of information on how to use GMS2 to make an extension out of a 3rd party library unless you are already knowledgeable about doing as such in other development platforms.

Could you guys help to expand on this a little and show us how it's done on a simple example using a 3rd party shared library and in turn creating more "experts" in using the Extensions system? I certainly would like to learn more on how to do this and I would be happy to do it to help Game Maker expand.

File bugs with projects to show the problem, we are improving the functionality.

I am currently creating a small project to try audio recording to a buffer and playing it back to see if anything has changed since I looked into this last. It's possible that I just didn't understand how to do it when last I checked. Maybe this means, it would be a good topic for a tutorial?

XML is a complicated standard and not something we are looking to support. Again it could be supported via extensions.

lol, wow people really didn't like this idea. All good, I have no personal biases on data formats. Maybe one day I'll earn learn JSON too! I was just was hoping for a quicker/easier way to convert my old data files from a project I did a long time ago that was is a horrible XML data format. No more tomatoes please.

 

[Sam (Deleted User)]

2. Pointers in gml?

That's technically already there...

 

[Miradur]

Honestly? I think there is too much discussion here about the questions of others. Everyone is allowed to ask questions here and ultimately it is not us who decides what will be implemented in the future and what will not.
It also makes this post unnecessarily confusing.
So here is my extended question, because I think collisions are very important and one of the biggest hurdles, for beginners.

Are collisions generally revised and expanded, keyword, slopes and tiles?
Will there be a layer to set simple lights(since a light engine is not planned until 3.xx)?

Miradur

 

[kingyo]

There are still several problems when typing Japanese by IME. Do you have any plans to provide more support for double-byte characters, including Japanese, in the future?

I've been reporting IME issues for years, and every time I've reported a problem, the support team has said "it's not a bug we need to deal with because it's an OS issue" or "it's not a priority and we don't plan to deal with it". I don't want to be miserable like that.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

[rwkay]

There are still several problems when typing Japanese by IME. Do you have any plans to provide more support for double-byte characters, including Japanese, in the future?

I've been reporting IME issues for years, and every time I've reported a problem, the support team has said "it's not a bug we need to deal with because it's an OS issue" or "it's not a priority and we don't plan to deal with it". I don't want to be miserable like that.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

We are committed to continually improving our IME support, now that we are on SDL2 and have the bandwidth to address that you should see continual improved IME support - we have just fixed more issues reported in the latest Beta (if those fixes are not in the build from Tuesday they will be in Thursday) we have also been supplying our fixes to the upstream SDL2 implementors.

Russell

 

[KyleRansford]

Thank you!

Can I we also say something like, "Full game available on Steam"?

Just bumping my question.

Can we cross promote on our Opera GX game page by saying things like, "Also Available on Steam, EPIC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, etc."?

 

[kburkhart84]

I submitted a suggestion at some point but didn't get much of a response. Could we possibly get run-time functions that return lists of assets that are in the project.

This came up for me because I've made an audio system that works with sounds, doing stuff like playing one out of multiple randomly and similar. To configure all this, I currently am making the user do it in code. I want to make a GUI of sorts which could be ran simply by going to the correct room in a build. However, the only way to accurately get a list of all the sounds in the project is to literally go from index 0 to XXXX and check each one if they are sounds.....that sucks, and I don't like using undocumented behavior.

I'm sure the suggestion could be useful for the other asset types as well, especially the sprites.

 

[poliver]

Sorry, dude. Unreal's audio tools or any built-in audio tools out there are not in the same ballpark as FMOD or Wwise. You're only furthering my point that non-audio people don't understand audio tools and the needs of audio professionals in game development. Every AAA house and many indie houses use middleware of some sort. Power and complexity without coding intricate systems because those systems are already there at your fingertips and can be as complex as you'd like without having to rethink code or node trees. Even just the fast iteration with middleware is enough to justify it. Iteration ad infinitum without fidgeting at all in the IDE. Sound designers like to tweak levels and knobs and curves and parameters thousands of times a day. No sense in adding 14 clicks when you can do two in middleware. It adds up. Often audio designers are at the mercy of the programmers who create the audio behaviors based on what the audio people envisioned. Sometimes that involves even waiting for a build to observe your work, to discover you need to make a thousand corrections. With middleware you can test the synergy of everything together in a simulated environment before even integrating into the game. Elaborate adaptive music and dynamic mixing are basically done before you even start. Scratching the tip of the iceberg here.

Nothing wrong with improving the tools that GM already has, for those who don't need anything other than simple audio: play, stop, fade, etc. I'm definitely not arguing that FMOD should be side loaded just to add an EQ. Anything other than all or nothing doesn't make sense. But having middleware available would open up new worlds of understanding for GM users. Devs who might have used only "simple audio" might discover what the world of better, more involved audio means for games in general. They also might discover how easy it is to collaborate with a remote sound designer/composer who can create all the behaviors perfectly on their end without having to touch the dev's GM project, and those audio pros can iterate and make changes at home, push an updated FMOD build to the dev, who then doesn't need to do a single thing for those changes to take effect.

On what area does UE fall short? You can easily create generative, procedural and adaptive audio with ease. There's granular synthesizer built in if you want to make a racing game for example etc. Only downside is it doesn't offer you a DAW-like timeline that a middleware can offer.

 

[Ninja Dodo]

There used to be a feature on the roadmap for Sprite Attach Points (I think based on a suggestion of mine), where you can create animatable named or numbered anchor points on sprites (placed with mouse per frame) which you can then call the position of and use for example to attach particle emitters to animated characters... However, it seems to have disappeared from the list. I was wondering if this or something like it is still coming to GMS at some point as I was looking forward to having such an option. It's possible to code around the problem, but it would be really handy to have.

 

[Karlstens]

There used to be a feature on the roadmap for Sprite Attach Points (I think based on a suggestion of mine), where you can create animatable anchor points on sprites (placed with mouse per frame) which you can then call the position of and use for example to attach particle emitters to animated characters... However, it seems to have disappeared from the list. I was wondering if this or something like it is still coming to GMS at some point as I was looking forward to having such an option. It's possible to code around the problem, but it would be really handy to have.

Yah, I too would love multiple anchor points within a sprite - importantly that can be relocated frame by frame too.

 

[iampremo]

I was wondering which game engines does YYG consider to be its main competition? I know its a bit of an obvious question and people are of course always talking about it but I would like to know from YYGs point of view who they think their main competitor/s is/are?

Main ones are generally thought to be Unity, Unreal, Godot, and Scratch (for education). You could throw Construct in there too but they are less of a competitor than the others, we are probably more of a competitor of theirs than they are for us, especially seeing the page full of “facts” about their performance vs ours...

Does YYG have any plans to bring back the publishing division that used to exists or if not that then maybe something else that might help people market their games?

We decided to go down a different path and now that we are with Opera, GXC and providing this as a place where anyone can publish content is going to be a focus.

 

[iampremo]

I'm sure you aren't ready to speak of any of this yet. But, how close is/was GMS2 to being the codebase you wish to keep developing long term?

GMS2 was mainly an IDE rewrite and a readjustment of a few things within the runtime (dropping the d3d_ functions and adding in the gpu_ ones) but on the compiler and runtime side it was mostly cosmetic. Looking forward there is going to be a new runtime and toolchain/compiler, this will be what we develop longer term and allows us to advance the engine in many ways that have just not been possible so far.

Are there any aspects of GMS2 the team feels needs an new rewrite, be it the runtime, the IDE, asset pipeline, GML etc?
(Whether that means a new product or a new major GMS2 release).

As above the compiler and runtime will be getting a complete overhaul, as will the IDE workflow (as with many) we are not overly keen on workspaces in their current form and have some exciting new changes coming next year.

 

[iampremo]

Not multiprocessing strictly speaking, but what about jobs using Fibers or co-routines?

Being able to run a GML job over multiple frames could be very useful.

Perhaps a system whereby we would fire off a function, and either poll for its completion or get an async event.
The runtime could use any left over frame time to run these jobs, or run them in parallel to some other systems like backend rendering.


Definitely out of scope, but would be an interesting way to bring some form of async programming without having to deal with multithreading issues.

The New Runtime is built around allowing for multi-threading and multiprocessing and while this will not be enabled day one (our initial focus will be on compatibility to ensure that current projects will work on the new runtime) we will be rolling this out once we have released the New Runtime.

 

[gkri]

I remember confirming (at the first QA under Opera), that you will revamp marketplace. I have not seen any significant improvement yet, at least improvements that could justify the word "revamp", while I saw major changes and/or improvements on other web places run by Yoyo Games (eg Tutorials and Acounts pages). Considering that a polished and user friendly marketplace could be a real money maker, I was expecting to have seen such a change by now...

Are you consider revamping the marketplace as a high priority? Is it going to happen soon?

 

[iampremo]

Any plans for updating auto tiles live at runtime?

You can already change the tileset that is used to switch to a completely different one and you can also change the individual tiles in a tile layer at runtime but the autotiling is a purely IDE side feature. That being said, we could add a function that would pick the tile that should be used from an autotile, I think there is already a feature request for this..

Also are there any plans for improving tilemaps in general?

If you have any suggestions please let us know by submitting a feature request.

 

[iampremo]

Speaking of async, any chance of seeing some or all of the Async events replaced with function callbacks now that those are things that we have?

Not in 2.x lifetime but in the new runtime we plan on using function callbacks as the main async paradigm going forward.

 

[iampremo]

1. Will any features in the future make a distinction between permanent users and subscribers and what are they?

We do not have any further plans to add any 2.x features which will not be available to permanent licence holders.

2. Is it possible to get more clarity on what features will not be available to free users going forward?

The only features planned that won’t be able for free users to access are those associated with non-GXC exports.

3. It is certainly understandable that with the very noticeable increase in development + release pace you want to encourage more people to move to subscriptions to support this. If your position on this holds and you are now reluctant to make a distinction between permanent licenses and subscribers for feature releases, what will you be doing to make subscriptions more appealing to users who already hold licenses and will there ever be a point where "permanent" licenses will realistically have to stop being quite so literally permanent?

We have a very interesting addition coming soon to subscriptions that should appeal to a wide portion of the user base. This is not a GameMaker feature and may not be of interest to everyone but it will add a lot of value to those who have subscribed. The New Runtime and Toolchain is not part of GMS 2.x and will only be available to subscribers.

 

[iampremo]

There's lot of "not in GMS 2.x" lifetime, is it possible to give us minimal (like: for sure not before year X), or even better maximal dates of 2.x line life (like: no mater what, after year Y there will be next version)?

Simple answer is no, we are not ready to talk about a timeline for GMS2.x yet. However as with GMS1 > GMS2 there will be a transitional period with plenty of notice given before we stop supporting GMS2.

 

[iampremo]

The catch being that answers are "Not in 2.x lifetime", so as long as it holds the title of "2.x"... Basically, the longer GMS2 has legs, the longer it takes to get to the "Big Fish".

Puts me in the awkward position of being more excited for GMS2 EOL than GMS2 features, haha.

So are we!

 

[iampremo]

Same here. For me the roadmap has a few interesting points, but most of them feel like cosmetic props that doesn't address core limitations of the product. Most of the things my studio is interested in are sadly "Not in 2.x lifetime".

Yeah sadly the majority of the limitations that we have faced with GMS2 were just not solvable in the current runtime.

 

[iampremo]

Oh was thinking about this

Any info you can give us about the ability to have custom plugins (yoyo/community) made, for the Ide?
Like lets say I make a plugin for Power mode as seen in VS code but for GMS, can it be on the marketplace for people to download and load into their IDE if they choose?

This is something that we have discussed internally but it wont be in the lifetime of 2.x

 

[iampremo]

What's the percentage of users who use DND compared to GML?

Roughly 60% of all new projects created are GML but ~80% of projects opened are GML… Make of that what you will...

 

[iampremo]

I just tested out the functions you linked to and I think it's being misunderstood what I'm requesting. The linked functions seem to apply effects to a single layer still. What I'm requesting is the ability to apply the effects to specific areas of draw code.

For example, you have an object drawing multiple buttons on a GUI and one of them is disabled. One way of user feedback could be to apply a desaturation effect to the button that is disabled. Not applying the effect to the entire layer but instead setting it directly before and after the sprite and text draws for that specific button. In this way it would work like a shader.

Unless I'm missing something here about the documentation you linked to.

Furthermore, I'm not even sure the layer functions you linked to can effect the GUI at all, as they only apply to the depth range of the layer they are setting and the GUI is outside those depth ranges.

Most of what you are talking about are planned to be supported through adding the ability to apply the filter/effect to just a single layer and sequence support - you can also do this through code by just rendering using the shader that is present in the filter.

 

[iampremo]

I’ll be honest, this is not going to sound good to any game audio professionals. What GM needs is not for you to put together some new audio tools. What GM needs is professional audio tools. Those already exist. You didn’t attempt to make a Spine clone for your animators. Why? First, because Spine is incredibly complex and you could never achieve what they did without dedicating a sizable team of specialists and animators for years, and second, why would you spend the time trying to when it already exists? Audio middleware is 100% exactly the same here. For some reason it’s easier for non-animator/artist types to understand and be critical about the visual arts and their needs, than it is for non-audio types to understand audio and its tools and needs and be critical about what makes it “good”. Any attempt YoYo could ever make to supply creators with audio tools will always pale in comparison to the deeply-complex, state-of-the-art, developed-over-decades, AAA tools that are already out there and free for most of us in the GM community. Imagine back before Spine integration if you just announced to your artists and animators, “we’re looking into making some new animation tools” — the backlash would have been “my gosh please no, don’t try to make something—it won’t be what we need, we’ve already had a cross-platform/cross-IDE industry standard tool for years that we use, and we don’t need ‘new features’ or a (*cringe*) ‘overhaul’ developed by one ‘dedicated programmer’!”

As a professional in the game audio industry, I can tell you that the we’re not looking for solutions made by programmers for programmers on teams not led by audio professionals. We’re always looking for and developing ways to take audio implementation and designing audio behaviors out of the hands of programmers and IDEs and put it back in the hands of audio professionals to empower them to do more with interactive audio. This is the miracle of audio middleware.

I’m glad YoYo has stated that audio will no longer be neglected, but please please don’t think an “overhaul” done by one or even a small team of programmers will be at all what audio people need. Why spend a lot of money reinventing a wheel that will arrive later? How about spending no money on a perfect AAA solution that we have now? GM needs FMOD support exactly as much as it needed Spine. The tools are there already, they’re free, they’re powerful, widely used, and incredibly easy to use. It’s literally the last gaping hole to fill in GM among the basic disciplines of game development.

Full support for FMOD and WWISE require improvements to the extension mechanism and toolchain these are coming in the New Runtime and we are looking to support external libraries such as these in that timeframe. You are welcome to create your own extension on the current runtime to support them, we are not planning to.

 

[iampremo]

Can YoYo please engage the community when it comes to improving/replacing all aspects of the particle system? The current particle system falls short in many ways, and there are a lot of people with great ideas that need to be discussed for the systems revamp.

The initial implementation of the new Particle Editor will only be giving users a visual editor for the current particle system. We’re unlikely to be modifying any of its core functionality with this change. If you have any suggestions for specific improvements please submit a feature request. We are looking to introduce an improved particle system in the New Runtime, again our focus is compatibility so it will not be day one item we release but it is high on our list of elements to change.

 

[iampremo]

Is there a layer planned that allows easy and automatic collision detection?

No but you can do something similar already with tile layers. The new triggers feature may well contain a lot of what you are looking for.

 

[iampremo]

Is trigger something like signal&slots?

I have no idea what signal&slots is so I am unable to compare the two.

 

[iampremo]

However I feel that those interested in learning how to do this in GMS2 could use more updated examples, new written tutorials, video tutorials and such of how to do this. There is surprisingly very little sources of information on how to use GMS2 to make an extension out of a 3rd party library unless you are already knowledgeable about doing as such in other development platforms.

Could you guys help to expand on this a little and show us how it's done on a simple example using a 3rd party shared library and in turn creating more "experts" in using the Extensions system? I certainly would like to learn more on how to do this and I would be happy to do it to help Game Maker expand.

I am currently creating a small project to try audio recording to a buffer and playing it back to see if anything has changed since I looked into this last. It's possible that I just didn't understand how to do it when last I checked. Maybe this means, it would be a good topic for a tutorial?

Yeah they sounds like a good ideas, submit some feature requests

 

[iampremo]

Are collisions generally revised and expanded, keyword, slopes and tiles?

They are updated as required but we are unlikely to add much to this in 2.x lifetime, Triggers will likely expand the functionality greatly.

Will there be a layer to set simple lights(since a light engine is not planned until 3.xx)?

Not planned in 2.x lifetime, New Runtime will have expanded capabilities.

 

[iampremo]

Just bumping my question.

Can we cross promote on our Opera GX game page by saying things like, "Also Available on Steam, EPIC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, etc."?

We are ok with you having links to your game hosted in other places. Our stance might change in the future but right now feel free to set up however you like, if we have any issues with anything in the content we will reach out to the creator.

 

[iampremo]

I submitted a suggestion at some point but didn't get much of a response. Could we possibly get run-time functions that return lists of assets that are in the project.

This came up for me because I've made an audio system that works with sounds, doing stuff like playing one out of multiple randomly and similar. To configure all this, I currently am making the user do it in code. I want to make a GUI of sorts which could be ran simply by going to the correct room in a build. However, the only way to accurately get a list of all the sounds in the project is to literally go from index 0 to XXXX and check each one if they are sounds.....that sucks, and I don't like using undocumented behavior.

I'm sure the suggestion could be useful for the other asset types as well, especially the sprites.

You can already iterate over individual types of assets and get assets that have tags, I would suggest that you use the tagging mechanism as this is what it was intended to allow (get lists of assets that you are interested in at runtime, and allow ad hoc communication from authors to runtime).

 

[Stra]

Plans for the "New Runtime" to seamlessly import 2.x projects?

 

[drandula]

About triggers, can you define them in polygonal shape? I think they could be also be used for platform collisions too, and polygon shapes would make slopes etc. Easy to define.

Now as you have said, "not in 2.x runtime", so you are planning new runtime version as current has limitations. While you are doing new features and updates for GMS2, do they have double-purpose to visit areas you need to know about - or more experience - for new runtime? Like trying to find what works and what not, or just get experience about necessary things, so you can build new runtime more smoothly?

 

[BananaFaction]

when you say certain things are planned for a new/different runtime I guess you mean for 3.x.x or something like that. Will this be the next version of the software (gms3) and if so gms2 perpetual users would need to subscribe to be able to export to desktop etc… also any ballpark figure date or timeframe for when this new runtime is planned for release?

 

[Mehdi]

Construct in there too but they are less of a competitor

Enjoyed it a lot.

 

[Mehdi]

@iampremo
What will be the limitation of the free version of GMS 3?
And so there will never be a permanent license any more? I mean we would have only free users & subscribers?