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Discussion Using Gamemaker on Laptop

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iMilchshake

Guest
Hey guys!
I am using desktop PC's since i am a child. I never owned a laptop myself. Now i would love to get a cheap laptop for school and stuff, not for gaming!
But i would love to be able to use gamemaker on it and also test what I am programming.
Most cheap laptops of course only have a onboard graphic chip, Intel HD graphics 4000 is the most common one i guess.
Will basic 2D games run with such a cheap graphic chip? Does anyone have experience with using gamemaker on cheap laptops?
 

Changgi

Member
It should run as fine. Mine isn't a powerful laptop and GM games have run fine on it until I plugged in a controller, but GM:S games work on it fine still.
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
Normal 2d tilemap/sprite type games should be just fine unless you are doing something out of the ordinary, huge sprites, too large of texture pages, complex expensive shaders....of course there are other things but you should generally be OK.
 
G

Guest User

Guest
ye, i use Gamemaker Studio 1.4 with a netbook and have never had any troubles. it doesn't drain my battery any more than usual (as far as i can tell) either even though i'm constantly playtesting my games.

the only thing is you probably won't be able to have a bunch of other heavy programs open at the same time, so just don't expect to be able to work on a bunch of different aspects of your game at once.
 
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Wraithious

Guest
I use a 2 year old non upgradeable ( All components soldered in) dell laptop and gamemaker runs fine on it, been using it for the full 2 years I've owned it for gamemaker. Build times on large android games is under 30 seconds, first open and build time is upwards of 2 minutes.
 
M

MishMash

Guest
I occasionally use GMS 1 on my laptop, its a cheap one with an i5, intel HD 3000 graphics. Its not fun using it after having used my desktop, as loading/compiling takes quite a noticeable amount of time longer. The main issue I run into with the laptop is just lack of screen space. With my desktop setup, I work on 2 1080p monitors, whereas the laptop is only a single 1366*768 monitor. Having multiple code windows/object windows open can be frustrating, though its entirely relative to what you are used to.

As far as performance, GameMaker itself runs fine, but the game itself doesn't run all that well for me. This is just because the game im working on is quite graphically intensive, though I do use the laptop as my "minimum" benchmark specification. Basic games however do run, but you will notice a performance drop off quite quickly if you are going anywhere near shaders or surfaces.
 

KurtBlissZ

Member
About half of my time spent using game maker was on my netbook I got from school. Well GM8.1, GMS I could run on it but 8.1 was snapper at the time. This was like 2-4 years ago.

But any new low end laptop running windows would run GMS2 no problem.
 

onjai_x3

Member
I used gamemaker on a cheap acer netbook years ago, and currently using gm:s 1.4 on a low end Lenovo and I've never had any issues.
 
G

Guest User

Guest
gamemaker studio 2 looks pretty cluttered on a small screen
can attest to this, now that i have it. scaling down the dpi thing (to about 50%-75%) down works really well but then you have to put up with all the text being microscopic and workspaces being extremely cumbersome.
on my netbook, GMS2 itself also stutters a TON compared to GM:S 1.4 which ran just fine, but my project itself runs much smoother. so might end up having to suffer for your art if you want to use a small computer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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hrtstudios

Guest
I've used it on my old macbook without any problems (it only has a 256MB graphics card)
 
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