F
Flab
Guest
First of all, fairly experienced coder and general gamedev hobbyist. So I tried GM(free version), not very much so far, but I'll mention a couple of things.
Documentation, naming and convention is somewhat lacking, but some of that is preference.
The available (official) tutorials aren't exactly great and some can't be used with GM free.
At some point I noticed something called YYC, which is supposedly a compiler. This is not in the free version. I cannot say anything about it, I do not know if it's functional. Related to this, it appears to me that the interpreter/vm whatever is quite slow (I'm coming from mostly c/c++ land here). Related to performance would be things like explicit/specific typing and so on. So that's a problem with a few factors that as free/trial user I simply have no real confidence about.
I also (think) I noticed a couple of strange (to me) oversights. I'll give an example, I made an object_a that has a collision event with other object_a, so what I did was add ' If (self.id < other.id) return; ' and ' If (self.id > other.id) return; ', this confirmed that the collision event was triggered twice. It also made me realize collision events (and the associated collision detection I guess) are incredibly slow, which bothers me as I used to code this sort of thing.
So while I like gamemaker so far, some of it seems pointless and there's a bunch of basic stuff which I simply find bizarre and a bunch of what I'd call basic functionality missing, performance is pretty poor.
I can't actually publish anything with the free version either, so this makes understanding developing for multiple platforms and even testing kind of pointless. Ultimately, it means I have to pay $99 (I think?) just to be able to test properly on windows. Some of that seems counterproductive to me, considering.
So yeah, it's perhaps a bit harsh, but those are criticisms I have initially.
Documentation, naming and convention is somewhat lacking, but some of that is preference.
The available (official) tutorials aren't exactly great and some can't be used with GM free.
At some point I noticed something called YYC, which is supposedly a compiler. This is not in the free version. I cannot say anything about it, I do not know if it's functional. Related to this, it appears to me that the interpreter/vm whatever is quite slow (I'm coming from mostly c/c++ land here). Related to performance would be things like explicit/specific typing and so on. So that's a problem with a few factors that as free/trial user I simply have no real confidence about.
I also (think) I noticed a couple of strange (to me) oversights. I'll give an example, I made an object_a that has a collision event with other object_a, so what I did was add ' If (self.id < other.id) return; ' and ' If (self.id > other.id) return; ', this confirmed that the collision event was triggered twice. It also made me realize collision events (and the associated collision detection I guess) are incredibly slow, which bothers me as I used to code this sort of thing.
So while I like gamemaker so far, some of it seems pointless and there's a bunch of basic stuff which I simply find bizarre and a bunch of what I'd call basic functionality missing, performance is pretty poor.
I can't actually publish anything with the free version either, so this makes understanding developing for multiple platforms and even testing kind of pointless. Ultimately, it means I have to pay $99 (I think?) just to be able to test properly on windows. Some of that seems counterproductive to me, considering.
So yeah, it's perhaps a bit harsh, but those are criticisms I have initially.