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Discussion Please remember why GM became popular.

hdarren

Member
The IDE update is a massive improvement however I am having concern about the direction we are heading in regard to GML. GameMaker is popular because GML is both powerful yet on the surface very simple. With GM2 I am seeing a disturbing trend where the latter is being sacrificed for questionable reason. The biggest examples are there are now additional systems for dealing with views and depth. It looks like views have been partially nerfed and instead we are now forced to deal with a needlessly cumbersome camera system. I've never had any problem with views, why do cameras even exist? Why couldn't the tile system simply be incorporated into depth instead of there now being a weird layer/depth hybrid? Importing 3D games cleanly seems to be an impossibility due to all the changes. I have no idea what is going on with all these gpu functions, why even rename well used functions like draw_set_blend_mode? I think if we are not careful GML is in danger of fast becoming a huge cluttersome mess.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
The cameras are more powerful once you get used to it (you can use multiple cameras to show the same scene in a new way, making it easier to e.g. zoom in on the player) and now you can use the same system in 2D and 3D making the transition easier for users that want to use 3D graphics.

The new layer system lets you control stuff much easier, too... you have full control over relative depth ordering without having to keep track of tons of random integer numbers, and since you can put INSTANCES in layers as well, you can easily do things like top-down maps where each floor of a building uses the same objects and you easily can edit just one layer.

All functions that have an equivalent with a new name can be imported, scripts with the old names that call the new functions instead are automatically generated.

The renaming also makes a lot of related functions with inaccurate names consistent with each other.
 

hdarren

Member
So simple and clean systems have now been bloated with additional hybrid systems just because of a couple of edge cases which hardly anybody uses and could be done anyway in the previous system. And how is draw_set_blend_mode() an inaccurate name? I use it all the time in draw functions but now apparently I'll have extra scripts cluttering everything up. What a mess.
 

Mike

nobody important
GMC Elder
You only have extra scripts if you don't want to port over to the new system/names. once you do, you don't need them. GMs name spacing was horrible, and we've cleaned up a lot of it, most are just 1:1 renames, some have changed to reflect what most graphics apis or hardware actually does - or calls it.
 
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