How much progress will I lose?

F

Freedom2Fight

Guest
Not sure if this is the right place. However, it is about game development. Mine, specifically.

I'm relatively new to game dev. I spent a long time learning GML. GM Studio's GML. Knowing almost nothing about programming, I sought the help from a few kind GM users.

With guidance from my betters, perseverance and time - I got a handle on the process. Still, it took me a long time to be able to code on my own with some semblance of competence.

Since then I've managed to build my project slowly, mostly on my lonesome. Regrettably I'm nowhere near finished but I feel I've made significant progress.

Though I fear that my efforts would get stalled. This is because I only have GM Studio. I have yet to upgrade to GM2 but it is my hope that one day I can.

If I upgrade to GM2, how much will I have to re-learn? How much of my progress will be incompatible with GM2? Will my project fully run on GMS2? How much code will I have to change?

These are fears and my questions. I hope that someone can answer my questions. Thank you in advance.

TLDR :

Dude. I made a lot of things with my project using GMS. Will upgrading to GM2 make it all for nothing? You know obsolete functions and stuff.
 
Considering your level, I'd imagine the only two major things you'd have to learn would be layers and cameras, replacing traditional instance creation and views. Everything else is mostly the same or new to GMS2.
 
M

MishMash

Guest
Depends on your intentions really. If you are doing it with the incentive of migrating an already far-along project, i'd just stick with GMS 1.4, I personally don't think the benefits are worth it unless you can start a project from scratch, or your project has big hurdles that GMS2.0 would resolve.

If you are simply talking about learning, then i'd say its the wrong attitude to take on board. Granted, I know you mentioned you are relatively new, however one really really really important thing to consider with programming (that so many people just don't practically think about) is that the MOST important skill you have as a programmer is your ability to learn new things.

As programmers, we never stop learning. Once you have "learned" an engine, it doesn't necessarily make you any better as a programmer or a game developer, just marginally faster. Once you gain experience, you will realise that most of the difficulty from programming has very little to do with the engine, and is far more about the systems that you design, the algorithms you write and the techniques you utilise to implement desired features. Game Engines and program language libraries in general are designed to be simple to use, they provide an API to abstract away the complexity of common tasks, mainly so we don't need to keep on re-inventing the wheel. Therefore, when you start to gain more experience, it will become second nature just to read through the api/engine documentation to learn how to achieve what you want to need.

The takeaway point here is that you really shouldn't worry about specific functions, but rather be interested in building a great ability to learn new things. When you start projects that are more challenging, you'll need to learn new things anyway, and normally things that go beyond the function set that the engine provides. Whether it be implementing fluid dynamics, physics, AI, networking; All of these things require new learning, but the good news is you can get pretty fast at picking up new things if you do it enough :) If all that mattered was knowing functions, every programmer would be out of a job whenever a new game console came out, or a new type of technology emerged :p

So.. embrace the learning and focus on that being your key skill that you attribute to your programming/game-dev ability! You clearly have the capacity for learning anything that has changed in GMS 2.0 because you have done it before with GMS 1.0. I can promise you that given you have experience learning things once, it will be faster the next time around.
 

trg601

Member
I've moved from 8.1 to studio and now to studio 2. It took me a while to move from 8.1 to studio but I was able to move to 2 really easily.

I would definitely recommend reading about some of the changes or watching a summary video.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Will my project fully run on GMS2? How much code will I have to change?
Depends a lot on if you used any of the features that are deprecated now (such as the old audio system), but a lot of code features have official compatibility scripts that replicate the old functionality using the new that are automatically added when you import the old project.

Note that some things that worked fine in GMS1 are more inefficient now, so you should monitor your game's performance carefully if you were pushing limits in the GMS1 version.
 
F

Freedom2Fight

Guest
So... Is it okay to stick with GM:S? I mean... will not upgrading bite me in the behind?
 
Top