I agree with pretty much everyone that has posted so far, but I just wanted to add my own thoughts on a couple of things.
I'm not sure how many of you are aware of this but there are regular "GameMaker Meetups" which have started recently in/around London where prominent GMS users and staff give talks and presentations etc whilst chatting to other like minded GMS users, which is great.
(Shaun Spalding hosts some of the talk videos on his YouTube channel, for anyone interested)
After the latest meetup Russell answered a few questions (offstage I think) and the answers were posted on the Discord channel, a couple of which caught my eye.
If you want to see the full list -
join the
/r/gamemaker Discord, good bunch of guys over there!
"When are you planning on implementing inline functions and/or lightweight objects?"
All the work on extending GML gets done by me in my spare time. I have three kids so you can appreciate that I don't have much time spare! We do have this feature close to release but we need to make sure it gets the appropriate amount of QA time.
OK so first, whilst I do appreciate the obvious work Russel is doing in his own time - is it just me or is it crazy to anyone else that a company that was bought for millions of dollars is having it's language changes done by a single person in his spare time?
This isn't a dig at Russell
at all - in fact it's quite the opposite in that I feel for him having to do it on his own in his spare time - he is obviously going above and beyond what is required of him, and I do appreciate his effort and dedication.
It's more just....disbelief at that situation as a whole.
Why would something like this not be done in work time as part of scheduled updates to the engine?
Is there anything that you'd want to see the community do with GameMaker that hasn't been done yet?
Use high-resolution digital art and vector graphics. I'd like to see GameMaker be known for "good 2D games" rather than "good pixel art games".
How can anyone that seriously wants to create a game using high res digital art consider GMS as a suitable tool to do it when support for anything other than pixel art is so poor and outdated, and (as has been said above) all YYG talk about is how used, important and in need of updates the IDE sprite editor is.
"It's the most used feature" we keep getting told - and that may be true by metrics such as "time spent in sprite editor" due to people using it to create placeholders, collision tiles, importing images / frames made in other programs etc, but certainly not by people trying to create high quality digital art within it.
I just posted some Spine related stuff in another thread but I'll repeat it a little here:
The current recommended version of Spine for use with GMS is v3.4.02 which is 15mths old, and basic features such as skeleton scaling and slot colouring are still nowhere on the radar to be implemented.
I filed a suggestion for slot colouring 9mths ago and didn't hear anything back, and there is another related suggestion dated back to 2015 which is still "open" and "assigned".
You can also only still only have 1 texture page for your skeleton, so how that's supposed to work out with "high res digital art" for a character with a lot of animation requiring a lot of custom transition frames I'm not quite sure.
Yeah you could probably write your own custom texture page management system, but when the official runtimes already support multiple texture pages, we shouldn't need to.
Not to mention that being forced to use a 15mth old version of the Spine IDE means we don't get any bugfixes, UI improvements, tweaks etc that have been made to the IDE since then, and there are a lot.
This isn't crazy functionality being asked for here, these are simple functions already in the official runtimes and are as basic as it gets - they just need to be hooked into by YYG in GMS.
In terms of vector art - which most people would associate with high res, scalable digital art as Russel mentioned above, has anyone tried to use vector art in GMS?
I'm talking actual .swf here, not vector art rendered to sprites (which is then pixel art)
I tried for the first time last week by creating a 64x64 tile, and placing ~20 of them as sprites into an empty room on an asset layer (GMS2), and my texture swaps were near 50. Twenty 64x64 sprites, fifty swaps - extrapolate that out to trying to make a full game using vector art...
Add to this that I was getting constant error messages that my version of Flash was too new and only upto version 11.x was supported, that I was using unsupported features "but it may work" (it didn't) because I dared to try and have a gradient in the vector image, that any animation you want HAS to be on the main timeline or else you will just get frame 1 for any animation not on the main timeline shown throughout...I won't go on, but there are more.
Who in their right mind is going to consider GMS as a tool for creating a high res digital art game when it's just problem after problem and constantly having hurdles put in your path when you try to do anything
other than create a pixel art game.
If "good 2D games" is what is wanted to be associated with GMS and not just "pixel art games" then give users the support and tools to allow them to even consider that as being an option in the first place.
Broken outdated extensions, runtime implementations that are years out of date and vector support that makes seriously trying to create a large game using them so prohibitive. with workarounds and performance issues at every turn, that you realise after minimal testing it's out of the question.
That's not not the way to head towards "Good 2D games" as an end goal.
If they worked out a way to prioritize in the right areas and keep on top of extensions, runtimes and changes/updates in other 3rd party tools so it didn't become a massive job for them to do multiple versions worth of updates in one go it would be so much better.
Washing your plate after every meal takes 1min, but if you keep putting the dirty plate on the side and using clean ones then you eventually run out of plates and have to spend an hour washing dirty pots.
It also wouldn't be such a headache for end users having to find an old outdated particular version of a tool which is the only one that works without issues, or trying to workaround things that are supported on the box but don't quite work in real world use .
I guess money talks though, and of course I don't have any metrics as to where the main userbase is, what demographic they need to be hitting and all the rest of it which will ultimately make them the most sales - which is what it's all about.
I just think things like those mentioned above would go a big way to helping sales due to the increased features and viability of the engine to so many more devs who choose other engines that themselves are not perfect, but offer less hurdles than GMS currently does for anything other than pixel art and is (IMO) why GMS primarily gets the pixel art crowd and not the "high res digital art" crowd.
Mike has stated before that users here are tiny percentage of the GMS userbase so whether what is said on here ever holds any weight I have no idea, but hey it's a forum for discussing opinions so may as well write them anyway.
This has got a little "ranty" I guess, and that wasn't my intention but I it's because I really like GMS2 and it's just so frustrating that it could be and offer so much more, as well as be a viable tool to so many more game devs that choose other engines because of issues like those I mention above.
Apologies for the length of this post, guess I got carried away.