GMplanet
All your Game Maker news under one roof!
GMplanet aggregates the Game Maker related blog posts of:
When on Sunday we revealed that a beta of Game Maker 8 was “not far away” little did we know just how soon it would emerge.
Earlier today Mark Overmars posted details of how to obtain a copy of Game Maker 8 beta on the YoYo Games blog. To receive a copy of the beta you will need to register here which also gives you access to the bug reporting facility.
Features that will only be included in the Pro version are present but documentation states that the beta “will stop working at the end of August 2009. The same applies to all games created with this beta version.” Hopefully YoYo Games have put steps in action to ensure that this can not be abused.
Details on the new features included in Game Maker 8 can be found here.
The first beta of Game Maker 8.0 is now available for testing.
For this we will use our official Mantis bug reporting system. However, to make it possible for everybody to test the new version we created a special open version. You can access this at http://gm8.yoyogames.com.
To obtain the beta go to http://gm8.yoyogames.com, sign up for a new account, fill in the information, use the confirmation email you receive to activate the account, and log in. Now use the link Get Beta at the top left to obtain the beta. Install it and test.
Report all bugs through the Mantis system. We will not consider bugs reported in other ways. In particular don’t send us email. Also don’t post questions, only report bugs. Carefully follow the instructions provided on themain page. If you don’t you will give us a lot of extra work resulting in less bugs being solved.
For a list of the most important new features see the “What is New” page in the included help file. Note that the beta is not yet feature complete. We will still include some further (smaller) features.
Mark
Earlier today Mozilla released version 3.5 of Firefox. As I write YoYo Games instant play is not compatible with this version due to the ‘maxVersion‘ value YYG have placed within the plugin.
The Mozilla Developer Center states in its documentation:
“minVersion and maxVersion should specify the range of versions of the application you have tested with. In particular you should never specify a maxVersion that is larger than the currently available version of the application since you do not know what API and UI changes are just around the corner. With compatibility updating it is not necessary to release a whole new version of the extension just to increase its maxVersion.”
Therefore YoYo Games followed the advice provided when choosing their maxVersion value.
When version 3 of FireFox was released it took almost a month for YoYo Games to release an official solution. A similar problem occurred when Firefox 3.0.1 was released and Chronic quickly provided a solution. If you follow that solution and set maxValue to “3.*” the plugin functions in Firefox version 3.5.
You can download a pre-modified version of the extension here.
Evidence of the increasing use of Game Maker in education can be seen by the upcoming release of the third(?) English language book that focuses on the game development platform.
Published by Course Technology Jerry Lee Ford’s Getting Started With Game Maker will be coming out next month. Ahead of its launch we caught up with Jerry who has previously authored books on programming in languages such as Visual Basic and Scratch.
You have previously written books about programming in several different languages, why did you choose to write about Game Maker?
Learning new programming languages and writing books are hobbies that I am passionate about. Last year one of my son’s friends started talking to me about this great game development tool he had found called Game Maker and he wanted to know if I had written a book about it. Based on this young man’s excitement and enthusiasm I decided to learn more about Game Maker and the rest is history.
Who is the book aimed at?
Its target audience is beginner to intermediate game developers and programmers. It teaches basic game development and programming principles. First timers will find all of the information they require to use Game Maker’s drag-and-drop development approach. More advanced game developers, comfortable with drag-and-drop game development, will benefit from the books almost 100 page review of GML scripting.
What can we learn from reading the book?
Readers will learn how to develop computer games using Game Maker. They will learn how to navigate and configure Game Makers Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and to master its drag-and-drop approach to game development. The last third of the book focuses on GML scripting. By the time the reader finishes the book, he/she will have a good understanding of both drag-and-drop and scripted game development.
Summary of the games made in the book
Do you think that Game Maker is a good starting place for those wanting to go on to more advanced programming?
Absolutely, by starting with its drag-and-drop development approach new programmers can quickly master basic programming concepts and when they are ready they can make their leap to GML. The GML language is robust and powerful and the GML function library is huge. Anyone who puts in the time and effort required to master Game Maker and become a good game developer will find themselves well positioned to make the transition to programming languages like Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Java.
Last year you released Scratch Programming for Teens. How does Scratch compare to Game Maker?
Scratch is a good programming language for children just getting started programming. It lets you create computer programs using drag-and-drop Lego style bricks, where different types of logic blocks snap together and can be configured. However, Scratch does not have any where near the depth of features that Game Maker has. Nor does Scratch support scripting. So you are limited as to what you can do with it. Scratch is a good place for beginners to get started but after a while, most people will outgrow it. Game Maker and its large library of functions, on the other hand, are well suited to meet the needs of both beginner and advanced game developers.
You must have seen the other books written about Game Maker. How is yours different?
I have seen The Game Maker’s Apprentice book. It is a good book though sometimes I felt that the book made too many assumptions about the things the reader should know. In my book I provide additional coverage or Game Maker’s IDE, which is quite extensive. I also delve deeper into GML, dedicating the last third of the book to teaching GML and demonstrating its use. I also place additional emphasis on a lot of other development skills like the creation of customer splash screen, progress bars, and debugging.
Have you got any plans to write about the more advanced aspects of Game Maker?
I would love to write a more advanced book but a lot depends on the success of this book. If it does well, I am sure my publisher would be willing to publish a more advanced Game Maker book.
What improvements would you make to Game Maker if you were its developer?
I would start by providing it with better documentation. The “Designing Game with Game Maker” PDF file written my Mark Overmars is packed full of information but is not well organized and would benefit from having a lot more code examples. It would be great if more graphic, audio, and midi files were bundled with Game Maker. I would also like to see the MAC version of Game Maker make its debut. An easily accessed library of code snippets would be another helpful add-on.
Getting Started with Game Maker is released in July.
RRPs: $34.99 (US), £25 (UK), €30 (EU), $41.95 (CA).
Amazon: US $23.09
If you look at the artwork in old 2D 8-bit games, you see a lot of noise and dithering in the hand-drawn bitmap art. For an example, take a look at the grass or concrete in this Transport Tycoon screenshot:
When the gaming world moved to 3D 32-bit vector art, we lost some of that level of detail. We got lots of smooth areas. Eventually we mostly got the detail back by applying textures to the polgons. However, it often looks worse to me than the old hand-drawn art.
With my Flash experiments, I've been playing with 2D procedural vector art, and I've been trying to figure out how to make it look nicer without drawing textures by hand. The simplest thing I found has been to apply noise to the art. On the left is some terrain without noise and on the right is some with noise:
I like the noisy version much better.
The noise layer is fairly easy to apply; I use BitmapData.noise() to generate it, and then use BlendMode.ADD to add it to the original layer.
var noiseTexture:BitmapData = new BitmapData(128, 128); noiseTexture.noise(Math.round(Math.random()*65536), 0, 8, 7, true); var noise:Shape = new Shape(); noise.graphics.beginBitmapFill(noiseTexture); noise.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, size, size); noise.graphics.endFill(); layer.draw(noise, null, null, BlendMode.ADD); noiseTexture.dispose();It's nice in that it inherits the color already there; the noise doesn't impose its own colors. However, this only works nicely on my background terrain, and it feels somewhat slow on my low-end machine.
For foreground sprites, the noise layer doesn't move when those sprites move or rotate. An alternative would be to draw the noise on top of my sprites, using Graphics.beginBitmapFill(), but that would require that I have a way to compute the outline of my procedural art, so that I can draw the noise on top as a polygon. Another alternative would be to use bitmap fills for every polygon, but that requires that I have a noise bitmap for each color. And yet another alternative is to draw every polygon twice, once for the color and once for the noise.
With Flash 10 I had hoped that the pixel shaders would allow me to apply noise to anything. I played around with them a bit. The shader receives the output coordinates in a function outCoord(), and can compute a color for that location. It can optionally include parameters (like a noise bitmap). The big problem is that the output coordinates are in screen space. This means that when the sprite moves or rotates, or if you zoom in, the noise would stay fixed relative to the screen. I tried both using shaders for fills and shaders for filters, and neither gave me what I wanted.
That's a serious problem for my use. To address this problem, I can pass in additional parameters like rotation and offset. However, I have to re-fill the shape every time I change the shader parameters. Even worse, the pixel shader is recompiled every time you fill.
So it looks like pixel shaders in Flash 10 just don't do what I want. I want a way to get the pixel's location in the sprite's coordinate system, after transforms are applied, but instead I only get the screen's coordinate system.
I think my best bet for performance is to not apply noise to vector backgrounds (applying noise to a bitmap won't impact performance). This will make me sad but smoothness matters a great deal. I should also try using tiles to see if that is any faster. For foreground objects, it's probably not too bad to draw everything twice, but I'll have to test this. It may not matter if I switch to bitmap sprites eventually; they'd let me draw a lot more details.
Sandy Duncan has revealed that a “GM 8 Beta is not far away….”. The statement was made in a response to a question by Polish student Piotr Gnys on Twitter.
A preliminary list of features for Game Maker 8 was only revealed a couple of days ago so the news may come as a surprise to some.
Then again it all depends on your interpretation of ‘far’. The latest official word on a planned release date is “during or after the summer” given by Mark Overmars in March. Unlike the beta versions of the C++ runner and Game Maker 7 for Mac which were released to a small private group of testers Sandy has said that the Game Maker 8 beta will be public.
If you don’t understand how Twitter works the screenshot above may confuse you. Either way you can still follow Game Maker Blog on Twitter!
It’s going to be a BUSY summer. For those of you who received the first (slightly buggy) beta of GM7 for Mac, you should by now have received the invitation to download and test Beta II. This is much more stable, though not completely bug free. We REALLY need you to test and provide feedback to the bug testing website. How much you do will determine whether or not we EVER release this version of Game Maker, so PLEASE HELP !
A few other important points.
Firstly we will not be doing anything to synchronise the Apple and PC Versions of Game Maker at this stage.
Secondly we have no plans to extend the beta test list, so THIS IS IT…if we think the product is stable we will fix the major bugs and release the Mac version, hopefully by the end of the summer.
Finally (for now)… IF we do release the Mac version we will make a few changes to the YoYo Games website to allow you to upload .APP files for other Mac users to play. (including me…I’m writing this on my favourite Mac which is an iMac 24 …I also have a MacBook Air so I REALLY want to see this version of Game Maker shipping !!)
