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HD Graphics in Gamemaker

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AgelessFall

Guest
In my current project we are shooting for a high-quality graphical style, something like Rayman Origins as you can see below.



Regarding this kind of graphical style, in our work I've kind of learned that raster images aren't very good at accomplishing this so we looked to move to vector images. Sadly, Gamemaker has somewhat limited support for vectors so, I was wondering, is there a better way to achieve this kind of style in Gamemaker? If so, how would I go about doing this without destroying performance with high-resolution graphics? If not, what kind of alternative engine could I look at for this? I would much prefer to stick with Gamemaker but this has been making art assets, a tad difficult.

Thank you for any help you can provide!
 

Alvare

Member
No. Huge waste of time and energy to use Gamemaker for a hd quality project. Gamemaker's swf importer doesn't recognize instances (of transparent bitmaps in your case) exported from Adobe's swf.
I was complaining about this and blend modes two years ago and still nothing improved since then.

Let me explain why. I know there are extensions like Spine, but it's workflow is way too dated and slow to work with. An artist should be able to create something in Adobe Flash and have seperate layers animated instead of having to export all separate parts and program them together. It's absolutely ingenius if you ask me. Also, Flash can re-use the same asset (sprite part) within multiple animations, which is super beneficial for saving the amount of memory by having less resources. So if you use Gamemaker for this, this will be another problem. What I recommend is going to Unity's C#, throw in your art and build it up step by step. You'll be surprised how much better it runs and looks.
 
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lolslayer

Member
No. Huge waste of time and energy to use Gamemaker for a hd quality project. Gamemaker's swf importer doesn't recognize instances (of transparent bitmaps in your case) exported from Adobe's swf.
I was complaining about this and blend modes two years ago and still nothing improved since then.

Let me explain why. I know there are extensions like Spine, but it's workflow is way too dated and slow to work with. An artist should be able to create something in Adobe Flash and have seperate layers animated instead of having to export all separate parts and program them together. It's absolutely ingenius if you ask me. Also, Flash can re-use the same asset (sprite part) within multiple animations, which is super beneficial for saving the amount of memory by having less resources. So if you use Gamemaker for this, this will be another problem. What I recommend is going to Unity's C#, throw in your art and build it up step by step. You'll be surprised how much better it runs and looks.
Hey, you should make them stay at game maker, not scare them off :p
 
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AgelessFall

Guest
No. Huge waste of time and energy to use Gamemaker for a hd quality project. Gamemaker's swf importer doesn't recognize instances (of transparent bitmaps in your case) exported from Adobe's swf.
I was complaining about this and blend modes two years ago and still nothing improved since then.

Let me explain why. I know there are extensions like Spine, but it's workflow is way too dated and slow to work with. An artist should be able to create something in Adobe Flash and have seperate layers animated instead of having to export all separate parts and program them together. It's absolutely ingenius if you ask me. Also, Flash can re-use the same asset (sprite part) within multiple animations, which is super beneficial for saving the amount of memory by having less resources. So if you use Gamemaker for this, this will be another problem. What I recommend is going to Unity's C#, throw in your art and build it up step by step. You'll be surprised how much better it runs and looks.
I was thinking Unity would be the best for this. What's wrong with Spine? I had always heard it's one of the best things to use for 2D animation, at least for games and I was planning on getting it. On the other hand, what would you suggest for drawing the art for the sprites then? We were planning on using Illustrator and animating with spine, we have Corel Painter but I'm not sure if that would work. Is there any better software out there I could use?
 
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Paolo Mazzon

Guest
The game you screenshoted is made with the UbiArt Framework, a framework specifically designed to be used for high resolution displays and vector images. Gamemaker is more or less only good with bitmap images for reasons @Alvare went over, and thus isn't fit for high-res graphics. I don't know many engines that work with vector images outside of flash engines, but I am fairly sure HaxeFlixel (Which is kind of Flash, but not really) can work with vector images.
 
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seanm

Guest
spine or non-actionscript SWF's should work fine. Just give it a shot and see how things turn out.

That being said. I would agree that unity is more apt at handling higher resolution art. And since unity forces you to use its physics engine, you also get collision and movement for free. (but you're locked inside the prison of its physics engine, so its not really free)
 

Alvare

Member
Hey, you should make them stay at game maker, not scare them off :p
Lol. I used to. But It's been years. And I've pretty much seen no big capability progress. What I do see is lots of people losing motivation over these kind of missing features.
 
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kurtwaldo

Guest
Shaders are great though
They are great! But pretty useless in GameMaker Studio due to a simple issue in the graphics pipeline that YoYo neglects to fix. See here: https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.p...os-ones-to-lag-with-surfaces.3603/#post-27485

Yeah, if you are going for hi-res graphics with nice graphical effects, stay away for now. Even a game menu can not currently run at 60fps when using surfaces on most Android devices and any iOS device comparable to an iPad2. And it apparently effects Macs and PCs as well, although I have less experience doing GM dev for those platforms.
 
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heyimdandan

Guest
Not sure what all the fuss is about... I'm creating a game that runs in HD, with a graphic style that will resemble Rayman Origins using rasterised graphics. You just have to look at some of the games that came out for the Genesis towards the end of it's life to know that with persistence you can push boundaries with smart, efficient and creative coding! You just have to put in the effort.
 
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LordBingShipley

Guest
Not sure what all the fuss is about... I'm creating a game that runs in HD, with a graphic style that will resemble Rayman Origins using rasterised graphics. You just have to look at some of the games that came out for the Genesis towards the end of it's life to know that with persistence you can push boundaries with smart, efficient and creative coding! You just have to put in the effort.
Completely off topic, but I have to say it. I love your profile pic xD
 
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Williams Saez

Guest
Hep, i'm also making my game HD, but in another way...
Probably one of the easiest ones
 

klys

Member
PNG is the high quality way to develop and design games in Game Maker Studio.

And there should be a swf extension out there that make Game Maker Studio able to handle swf files.

You know about marketplace?
 
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