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Windows x64 support 2019?

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Ashley Waffles

Guest
I've been using Game Maker since 8.0, and I find the lack of x64 support completely unreasonable, especially after the community has been asking for it for years upon years now, and the fact that x64 has been standard since 2009...

When I look back at old posts from 2016 all I see are staff complaining about DLLs not working anymore and that they're "planning to add it in the future", it's the future now, so where is it?

I recently got back into GMS2 however if this isn't in the development plan and their not working on it I don't see this as a viable game engine to use for most modern games.

People with better tech should be able to use their benefits. At-least make an option to switch from x86 to x64.

Coming from a long time fan and supporter, and yes this is a new account, I usually don't post on the forums but this got on my nerves a bit too much.
 
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Ashley Waffles

Guest
I find it extremely stupid and redundant on how Mac and Linux supports x64 yet Windows does not
 
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Ashley Waffles

Guest
It's not "picky" at all, UWP is a 400 dollar license, and you can't exactly put a windows 10 app on Steam.

People have been asking for this since 2014-2016 and in those threads the staff said they were working on it, but apparently it didn't happen
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
Can't rush these things :D

Seriously though. If you need to address huge amounts of RAM, chances are 'you are doing it wrong'. That is the only benefit of going 64 bit.

You are actually reducing your consumer base by going 64 bit alone.
 
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Ashley Waffles

Guest
It's not that I'm asking it to be rushed, it's that they're not working on it at all.

"OK the GMS Runner has been able to do 64bit for years (PS4, XBox One and iOS are all 64bit) we have held off doing it on PC because of the technical issues (ALL native extensions would be incompatible and need to be changed), also XP has held us back as that was always 32bit (I know there were 64bit versions of it, but I was one of the three people that installed it)."

from rwkay's post from 2016, can't post links yet due to new accounts, there's much more like this,

"Downsides are that every DLL based extension would need to be redone as they would only be packaged for 32bit - so there would be changes required there as they would need to be repackaged and recompiled as 64bit, this would be down to each author individually."

This just seems like laziness to me.

x64 has been standard since 2009, and x64 has much more benefits than just RAM.

I don't know a single person in my life who even uses a 32 bit machine, the elementary schools even updated to x64 long ago
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
"Downsides are that every DLL based extension would need to be redone as they would only be packaged for 32bit - so there would be changes required there as they would need to be repackaged and recompiled as 64bit, this would be down to each author individually."

This just seems like laziness to me.
Agreed on that front. As a DLL writer myself, I thought this was a pretty poor argument from @rwkay, as It is a matter of just changing the build target in VS. Voila, job done.
 
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Ashley Waffles

Guest
I assume he meant community made extensions, in which case it's not an argument at all. 3rd party libraries the community makes wouldn't change the difficulty of making GMS2 capable of exporting x64 executables.

They could even make it an option of choosing between x86 or x64 if they really cared about user created DLLs that much (even though as you said it's usually as simple as changing the build target).

The only extension I personally use is Apollo, and if that wasn't updated then I'd still use x64 regardless and make my own similar extension if needed
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
I assume he meant community made extensions, in which case it's not an argument at all. 3rd party libraries the community makes wouldn't change the difficulty of making GMS2 capable of exporting x64 executables.

They could even make it an option of choosing between x86 or x64 if they really cared about user created DLLs that much (even though as you said it's usually as simple as changing the build target).
That's exactly what I was talking about. Community made DLL's. Which is what I do myself.
 
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Ashley Waffles

Guest
I looked into creating extensions... it seems methods can only return doubles and strings, I don't see how the developer of Apollo could make Lua interact with GMS2 objects?

"The extension allows GML code to call Lua functions and for Lua code to call exposed GML scripts / work with exposed GML instances. This means that you can use the extension to implement high-end modding APIs for your game(s)."

Edit : Only arguments can be strings and doubles too, am quite confused unless they just serialized information via strings/doubles
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
'strings' in the extension system are actually pointers (not strings at all). So you can actually do quite a lot of stuff via DLL's.
 
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Ashley Waffles

Guest
So you can directly interact with GMS2 objects? Neat, I'll try it out lol thanks.

I still love GMS2 as an engine, however was just a bit annoyed, in my mind an engine should support x64 for Windows first before any other platform, especially other operating systems (Linux, Mac), as it's the most popular and widely used....
it seems like they're doing the opposite and completely disregarding the fact that a Windows desktop export even exists, lol.
 
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