OFFICIAL Learn About GameMaker’s Future and How We Fit in At Opera (Q&A)

GMWolf

aka fel666
GML is simple
*laughs* ok sure its easy to get started with, but a simple language it is not! its very high level, with many concepts. A simple language would be C, or lua, with far fewer concepts.

IMO the best course of action for the Yoyo / GM / 3D combination space would be something like, Yoyo contacts these devs and asks about what they struggled the most with, then adds any fixes/features that would also benefit 2D games into the big pile of secret new features when Sandy Krystian isn't looking.
I think that should just be a thing in general, not just for 3D. (It most likely already is a thing).
I think them having some internal dev team to work on more experimental, or longer form projects to identify issues of pain points first hand would be helpful. I suspect this is also already a thing in some shape or form. I also suspect this is what the YoYo labs were supposed to be.

They might focus on 2D, but no way will they avoid adding 3D. 3D will eventually happen with time, even if it is 10 years from now lol. It might not be great 3D, but as long as I can make Pikmin for Gamecube, or Ocarina of Time for 64, then I and many others will be happy lmao. Releasing Gamecube or Nintendo 64 quality 3D games onto Steam would be awesome.
You can already create GC and n64 level graphics in GM, with just vertex buffers and matrix/camera functions.
In fact shaders actually give you a lot more power than what was available on GC.


@Yal I guess since I'm one of the people in this topic mentioning this(despite the fact that I'm not really one of the guys doing the 3d stuff, rather just vouching for the needs), Russell directly asked me what we are looking for as far as exposure. I've included the following things in my responses. Feel free to add more and I'll shoot them his way.
its interesting how these features do not align with what I would have requested at all.
Geometry shaders have been abandoned by the industry as a whole. We tend to favour compute shaders to generate geometry instead. Its far more flexible and high performance. (Geometry shaders were a mistake).
also no mention of buffers which I believe to be the gateway to many high performance and flexible graphics pipelines.
allowing us to split shaders into multiple files and use includes would be tremendously useful too.
(mind you i'm not saying your list is wrong, but rather that what features developers will want to use is highly variable and depends on the person)

I think people underplay the potential that these features have in 2D rendering as well.
I think where many game engines fall short in 2D is with the ability to develop advanced graphical features. Which is why the more visually stunning 2D games tend to use in house engines (eg dead cells).


should we have a topic dedicated to this discussion? this really feels out of place here.
 
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kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
I don't know enough about 3D to know what to ask for, really
I feel you. This is why I connected with some of the other guys that know more than me to add a few things I didn't already have on the list. I'm familiar with the 3d pipeline somewhat, though much of my knowledge is old(I messed with vanilla OpenGL back before shaders were a thing even).

I think people underplay the potential that these features have in 2D rendering as well.
I think where many game engines fall short in 2D is with the ability to develop advanced graphical features. Which is why the more visually stunning 2D games tend to use in house engines (eg dead cells).
I think GM and the game maker community has the potential to develop visually stunning games and the technology required to support them.
I 100% agree with this.

should we have a topic dedicated to this discussion? this really feels out of place here.
I wasn't originally going to, but since I inadvertently got more people involved, I'll go ahead and make one and we can continue over there.
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
Btw. as predicted, we didn't got any mockups of inspector, new workchain or sequences addons.
thats hardly surprising.
The point of the call was to introduce Opera and be more transparent with the community.

I think all the feature talk happened because of the amount of noise that made on the forums.,
 

gnysek

Member
What's fun, Krystian mentioned, that he was trying several engines with his son last year. I remember that there was #StayAtHomeMakeGame game jam for Polish students in all ages in March, with Ministry of Education patronage, and YYG was giving 10-days full version of GMS 2 to any who want to participate. I was asked by organizers to promote GameMaker as one of tools to use in this game jam, so it was officially mentioned in all press statements (and directors of schools which participated) - that might be coincidence that it was same year, but would be fun if that would cause them to become interested into YYG :) It's even possible that some of tutorials made by persons from this community led to the conclusion that GMS is indeed an easy tool to make games :) So, everyone here might have their two cents in what actually happens longer than we think.
 

Slyddar

Member
It's even possible that some of tutorials made by persons from this community led to the conclusion that GMS is indeed an easy tool to make games
haha, when Krystian mentioned he had played with various engines, and ultimately Gamemaker, with his son I thought that exact same thing. Nice to dream that the community helped ease them into using the program :)
 

XanthorXIII

Member
Here's my takeaway from the meeting today. I thought it was overall ok, but kind a little bit overly cautious. I know GM2 doesn't want to over-promise and under-deliver like we've seen before. It doesn't hurt to tease us a little bit now and then, just be clear if the feature is not going to be coming anytime soon. I'm hoping with the resources that Opera will be able to provide it will help to prioritize on getting features done. Also Congrats to Matharoo. I really appreciate the content that he puts together for Youtube and it's very straight forward, easy to learn. I believe he will be an awesome addition to YoYo's team.
 

gnysek

Member
I'm not sure that there was problem with over-promises before. Of course there was list of considered things, but there was clearly stated, that they have no date yet. The only issue was 2.3 update with sequences and GML updates - but to be truth, that was very, very big update with thousand of changes and bugs, so it's rather normal that things like that came after deadline. Usually, there was "no due date" added to every statement - so, of course, many times I felt that things takes too long, while nice feature were promised, and would be great to use it already in projects, but I've got bigger problem with features that were added as priority, while nearly nobody got interest in it. Most of them were probably sponsored by some other company, so that's also obvious that they can't reject them, the issue was that other things weren't made parallel.

So, what I would like to see in future is more parallel work, maybe more often betas with not finished things, while stable gets only those that are finished, and rest goes for next betas (it might be not possible for all features, as they may depend on each other too much). Witch current roadmap I've got feeling that for next 9 months YYG is only going to refactor IDE, which doesn't sound good - as I mentioned previously, I would really like to see 1 new feature to use in games every quarter (even if it just extends existing one), cause IDE refactor will mainly have impact on development time, but no impact on how games will look. There was info about updating sequences, so if that also will be done this year, I'm OK with it.

Also, there was totally no info about feature similar to GMLive, so testing games will become much much faster when we will be able to modify code when game runs - while I remember that it was planned to make something similar.

I'm waiting for blog entry, there's small chance that there will be more details about something they forgot to mention.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
allowing us to split shaders into multiple files and use includes would be tremendously useful too.
Oh yeah, a feature like this would make it a lot easier to make "library" stuff (handy helper functions) you can reuse across all different shaders.

I think people underplay the potential that these features have in 2D rendering as well.
I think where many game engines fall short in 2D is with the ability to develop advanced graphical features. Which is why the more visually stunning 2D games tend to use in house engines (eg dead cells).
I think it's mostly a creativity problem... you can do some pretty powerful stuff once you start messing around with using image input data as stuff other than texture data... say, using it to describe how something changes over time:


The more power we get over shaders, the cooler things can be done, of course, so there's always room for improvement.
 

Zhanghua

Member
I'd uploaded the video on the bilibili to let more guys to know yoyo's bright future.
And we are very happy to see the chinese translation and localization on update 2.3.2 and can't wait for that.
 

Zhanghua

Member
If we don't focus on the 3d, could we do some stuff on the 2.5d such as isometric view without complex tricks....

So that we can say GMS2 is a pure and pro 2d engine...
 
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