HTML5 HTML5 Export, yay or nay? Is it worth the trouble?

[Retrofire]

so i love gamemaker. genuinely, it's a very comfortable environment that i feel capable developing in.

i have recently decided to develop most of my future games predominately on my website, which requires HTML5. gamemaker was the obvious choice since i have experience using it

but then i also hear it has innumerable bugs. and also, the fact that you are not programming in the native language, the compiler translates it into javascript (apparently) which you would expect causes countless problems, and will continue to

i saw some examples of people facing unsolvable issues, at least according to them, which concerns me. i will be developing large (relatively speaking) games. which means more fault points

would it be better to find another game engine or framework to develop in HTML5? or does it make sense to continue my game development journey in gamemaker since i love it, and work around the bugs?

also, is YoYo (or whomever bought YoYo recently) going to be improving the HTML5 export moving forward?

 

[Appsurd]

In my experience, I heard people complaining a lot about HTML5.
But this has gradually improved over the years, and right now, I would say that it's pretty good.

 

[duran can]

I'm waiting for community to develop Game maker studio. Not the company. This is sad.

 

[FlameRooster]

Not enough people use it so it always has bugs that may not get reported until you report it yourself, and then you have to wait 3 months for a release to get the bug fixes. Especially for HTML5+Spine. When bugs do get fixed and a stable version comes out, often times with HTML5 you have to deal with a new set of bugs that weren't there before. This is much more the case for HTML5 than Desktop. Desktop is usually rock solid most of the time, HTML5 is not. Updating GM is always a trade-off.

If you can, try to stick with Desktop/Mobile/Consoles. These are better supported.

If you do decide to use HTML5, v2.2.5 seemed to work best for me, but v2.3.2 right now is pretty decent but still has some bugs.

 

[TsukaYuriko]

but then i also hear it has innumerable bugs. and also, the fact that you are not programming in the native language, the compiler translates it into javascript (apparently) which you would expect causes countless problems, and will continue to

GML being translated to whatever is the target platform's native language (or to an intermediary one in the case of VM exports) is the whole point of GameMaker. If this was expected to cause countless problems, then absolutely every aspect of GameMaker would be flawed to the core. While I'm sure we can all agree that there are some flaws that yet have to be worked out (and should be reported if you encounter them), I don't think the general consensus is "everything is broken", so the quoted statement may not be the most accurate...

i saw some examples of people facing unsolvable issues, at least according to them, which concerns me. i will be developing large (relatively speaking) games. which means more fault points

would it be better to find another game engine or framework to develop in HTML5? or does it make sense to continue my game development journey in gamemaker since i love it, and work around the bugs?

Rather than taking a stance that will invariably be called biased, rather than making any recommendation, I'll just mention that, instead of merely working around any bugs you encounter, you should file bug reports. Then work around them, if it's absolutely necessary.

In general, it's easy for people to voice their dissatisfaction over having encountered a bug, and you'll likely find those by the hundreds no matter which game engine you decide to go with. I don't believe for a second that everyone who complains actually filed a bug report, though, despite that being more aligned with their goals (getting the thing to work) than publicly complaining will ever be (as that will at most demotivate others from using the product and thus generate an even more shallow curve of bug reports coming from a shrinking or more slowly growing user base).

also, is YoYo (or whomever bought YoYo recently) going to be improving the HTML5 export moving forward?

YoYo Games has been continually updating HTML5. (YoYo Games' words, not mine.)
This is the only recent official announcement that has been made regarding this. Any further details regarding what this means is something only the company's customer support can answer (but may choose not to even if contacted) and the community is neither capable of knowing more than it nor allowed to speculate about it.

 

[RichHopefulComposer]

I used the html export YEARS ago, and it worked fine for me, for what that's worth.

 

[gkri]

I bought the html5 module a few months ago (during last sale) and I have not yet fully and constantly experience it/test it yet. But my most important conclusion about html5 module so far, is that if you base your development on this export from the beginning, you should be fine in most cases. If you try it on a game that most of its development was based on another export, it will probably have a lot of issues. Make sure to read this article, and the rest of them, too.

 

[Roldy]

I have used the HTML export regularly. There are many documented differences when targeting HTML and it is best to be familiar with them. Unfortunately there are also many undocumented differences and bugs with the export. However, every problem I have run into with the HTML export I could always find a work around for and it never halted development.

I would strongly recommend continuous integration / testing when developing cross platform and especially with the HTML export. I have submitted bugs for HTML export and YoYo quicky acknowledges them and adds them to their tracker. The more devs that do so, the more the export will improve.

 

[Retrofire]

GML being translated to whatever is the target platform's native language (or to an intermediary one in the case of VM exports) is the whole point of GameMaker. If this was expected to cause countless problems, then absolutely every aspect of GameMaker would be flawed to the core. While I'm sure we can all agree that there are some flaws that yet have to be worked out (and should be reported if you encounter them), I don't think the general consensus is "everything is broken", so the quoted statement may not be the most accurate...


Rather than taking a stance that will invariably be called biased, rather than making any recommendation, I'll just mention that, instead of merely working around any bugs you encounter, you should file bug reports. Then work around them, if it's absolutely necessary.

In general, it's easy for people to voice their dissatisfaction over having encountered a bug, and you'll likely find those by the hundreds no matter which game engine you decide to go with. I don't believe for a second that everyone who complains actually filed a bug report, though, despite that being more aligned with their goals (getting the thing to work) than publicly complaining will ever be (as that will at most demotivate others from using the product and thus generate an even more shallow curve of bug reports coming from a shrinking or more slowly growing user base).


YoYo Games has been continually updating HTML5. (YoYo Games' words, not mine.)
This is the only recent official announcement that has been made regarding this. Any further details regarding what this means is something only the company's customer support can answer (but may choose not to even if contacted) and the community is neither capable of knowing more than it nor allowed to speculate about it.

That might be the most passive aggressive PR answer I have ever seen. bravo

i'm actually less inclined to use Gamemaker purely because of this response. we, the customers, are forbidden from speculating about a vague statement your company has made, nor are we allowed to make an assessment of the value involving the product because of it?

go ahead, delete my reply. i don't care. lame response to say the least

 

[Retrofire]

Not enough people use it so it always has bugs that may not get reported until you report it yourself, and then you have to wait 3 months for a release to get the bug fixes. Especially for HTML5+Spine. When bugs do get fixed and a stable version comes out, often times with HTML5 you have to deal with a new set of bugs that weren't there before. This is much more the case for HTML5 than Desktop. Desktop is usually rock solid most of the time, HTML5 is not. Updating GM is always a trade-off.

If you can, try to stick with Desktop/Mobile/Consoles. These are better supported.

If you do decide to use HTML5, v2.2.5 seemed to work best for me, but v2.3.2 right now is pretty decent but still has some bugs.

Thanks for writing this response out. ya, my general impression (despite the YoYo moderator's hostile response) is that HTML5 appears to be an afterthought for the team.

I think HTML5 is really important for my future platform. So maybe I should look around a bit. I don't want to have to worry about my project breaking periodically :/

 

[Nocturne]

Can I just point out that NONE of the moderating staff here are YYG employees and we all work for different companies and have our own lives. We are here moderating this forum because we love GameMaker, and all opinions are personal, and are not reflections of the company that owns GameMaker.

For what it's worth, I would not in the least consider the reply hostile either. You brought up some points based on hearsay (you specifically said "I heard that..." and "at least according to them") to which you got a reasoned and polite reply from someone who is incredibly knowledgeable on the subject. If you choose to interpret that reply as hostile or passive aggressive then that's your prerogative. However, I can assure you that that was not (and never would be) the intention behind any reply from the staff we have on this forum, and I'm sorry that you feel that way.

Thanks for writing this response out. ya, my general impression (despite the YoYo moderator's hostile response) is that HTML5 appears to be an afterthought for the team.

I'd also like to address this, as someone who knows exactly how this platform was developed... So, believe it or not, the HTML5 export was the very first cross platform export that YYG developed when they decided to update the old GM8.1! There was actually an intermediary version of GameMaker called GM:HTML5 between 8.1 and GM:S1.4! Since then the HTML5 target has been getting continual support from YYG, although that support did wane a little a couple of years ago as their specialist left the company, but in the last year they have been giving the platform a lot of love. So, the issue here isn't lack of support, it's the fact that every other target shares a lot of things in the code-base. It's not too hard to translate code from Windows into code for Android, as at a low level the languages and pipelines are very similar. However the change from Windows to HTML5 (JavaScript) is actually pretty massive, especially when you consider that the whole rendering pipeline is very different, as is the use of storage, memory, etc... So, it's technically quite a challenge, and requires that the user understands that there ARE some limitations and issues involved with using this target. Is it bug free? Nope! Is any product bug free? Nope! But YYG do respond as quick as possible to any bug reports, especially for HTML5, and especially if they can't be worked around until they can be fixed. I'd also say that - from my own personal experience - it's no more buggy or problematic than any of the other exports, as long as you read the support articles and understand the differences when programming with web in mind compared to desktop.

tl;dr: HTML5 is far from being an afterthought, it's just a very different beast that requires a different approach from the user and a lot of work to maintain from YYG as GM changes and grows.

 

[Appsurd]

@Nocturne Thanks for your explanation. If I understand you correctly, the translation from internal GMS code to HTML5 code is way more difficult than for Android or iOS. Then it's logical that many bugs/issues arise for HTML5, compared to Android and iOS.
Anyway, it still seems that HTML5 still is the least stable export from GMS2 but things are definitely improving and I hope that the collaboration with Opera will enhance the HTML5 export even further!