GMplanet
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The list of entrants to Competion 6 is now up and available you can access them here… http://competition.yoyogames.com. We have a very simple application that we are using to help with the judging and you can use to visualise the information.
We have also added an RSS feed to the page so you can use your favourite reader, rather than our application to follow what is going on.
This is the definitive list of entrants (in no particular order) that we will be judging and you can follow progress on Twitter using the tag #YoYoComp06.
We will be judging round 1 this week, where we will be looking at the entries that will move forward to the next round and we will be updating the information and the application as we proceed.
Please note that due to the vast number of entries we can’t give feedback to individual games.
We have been notified by our hosting provider that our servers will be down for essential repairs for 8 hours from 00:00 BST on the 2nd September to 08:00 BST on the 2nd September, this should not impact Competition 06 but all our services will be affected the main website, GMC, Forums, Wiki and any purchases of Game Maker for Mac.
We apologise for any disruption but it is out of our hands.
Normal service should be resumed by 8am BST on the 2nd September.
We have now added the #YoYoComp06 tag to all current Competition06 games. You should now check your game to see if it’s been tagged, if not you should add the tag yourself.
The reason we’ve added the new tag is simply because there’s been so many miss-spellings of the Competition06 tag! We will still search for the Competition06 tag, but you must make sure you’ve spelt it correctly. If in doubt, use the shiny new #YoYoComp06 tag and all will be well.
Competition 06 is almost finished, entries need to be submitted before Midnight GMT next Tuesday 31st August 2010, anything not submitted by then will NOT be considered, so please submit before then.
We are modifying things a little in that we are changing the tag to apply to entries, this will be #YoYoComp06, this will be the twitter hash tag that we will be using for any announcements with the competition. Any games currently submitted with the old tag of Competition06 we will automatically add the new tag today, so do not worry about anything currently submitted.
Starting with this competition we will have a more transparent process for judging that we will announce next Wednesday, when we will also reveal all the titles that have been accepted for judging.
We are all looking forward to playing the entries, so get those games in on time!
This is a planned series of glog posts focusing on aspects of a game that may cause needless slowdown, and how it can be remedied with alternative methods producing the same effects, as part of YoYo Games’ plan to introduce technical posts about working within Game Maker to the glog.
If there’s anything that ruins a fun game, it’s it running so slowly it verges on being unplayable. Although it will sometimes be down to an underpowered computer or graphics card, much of the time it’s simply down to some some slow code and we can fix this by trying to optimise the offending code.
Remember that even if your game runs smoothly on your own computer, it may not for people with older/cheaper/worse systems. You’ll presumably be wanting to have as many people as you possibly can experiencing the game as you do, so optimisation is still very much worth doing. If you can, test your game on as lousy a system as you can get hold of. Run it in debug mode (or just draw the FPS somewhere), find the areas where it’s slowest, and see if you can figure out why.
The first area of focus will be the first thing you can edit in Game Maker: sprites. The majority of objects in a game will each contain a default sprite, which can then, through code or drag & drop, be altered in a number of ways. And while the Draw event seems like the most logical way to go for sprite manipulation, it is a lot slower than other methods, requiring every step to redraw things while the object already has its own default drawing. One thing to remember is that the majority of transformations can be handled through variables such as image_xscale, image_yscale and image_alpha. Setting these just once or whenever needed is a far quicker way of manipulating the appearance of an instance than using something like draw_sprite_ext() and having it set itself 30 or more times per second.
Sprites, images with optional animation, are each drawn as two textured triangles by the hardware, and in many cases the triangle count can be reduced through simple merging. If you have a man made up of separate head, torso, arm and leg sprites, see if you can find a way to put all or some of these into one single sprite. As long as the resulting sprite isn’t huge (either in the subimage count or actual dimension department), the speed of its drawing will be greatly increased and the slight size increase will be minimal.
There are many other applications in which sprites could be merged. Take a side-on platformer/shooter hybrid, in which your main character has the choice of four different guns. Your direction in creating this would probably be to create the player holding nothing, then the guns separately, using code to bring the player and the selected weapon together as one. However, this doubles the amount drawn. A better method would be to create four different player animations –one for each gun. Though this is a slightly longer drawing process on your part, not only does it bring the number of triangles drawn from four to two, it also reduces the amount of code processed. Another example: an overhead space shooter. Say there’s a powerup which gives your spaceship a temporary forcefield. The quickest way for Game Maker to interpret this is to make a second sprite which displays both the forcefield AND the ship, instead of a forcefield sprite drawn over it.
Though techniques like these increase the size of the game, it’s a very minimal increase (a few kilobytes), and while they increase the amount of memory required to play it, it will reduce the power required to run it allowing low-end computers (or even better ones depending on the complexity of the game) to run to more smoothly. The general idea of game development is to strike a balance between everything being done – a few extra sprites has little impact on the memory a game requires, but shortening the code can increase performance significantly, and allows for other areas to be fleshed out for a better, more polished game as a whole.
As many of you know Game Maker has supported the ability for others to provide Extensions that will expand and extend the functionality of Game Maker, with the release of Game Maker for Mac many of those extensions will not work as they require native extensions, and these are not available yet. This situation will change over time as authors start to provide extensions that will work on both PC and Mac.
To help this situation I have uploaded an example project for developers to look at, this extension will work on both a PC and a Mac, and uses native code, see the information at http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/Game_Maker_for_Mac#Extensions.
We have been the target of a consistent hack on our adservers which no matter what we did to lock it down, meant that our adverts have been compromised on the main web site… We use OpenX as our adserver and this appears to have a vulnerability that the hackers could just enter the adserver site at will and modify the database behind the scenes… Several avenues have been followed to purge the adserver of any contamination and no matter what we did were still compromised, so this morning we have removed the adserver completely (all adverts are now served directly from Google), these are not compromised in any way and we are going to ditch OpenX completely.
Apologies to everyone who has been affected by this, and we have been working behind the scenes to fix this but the hackers have stayed one step ahead of us.
Game Maker for Mac... is go!
We are proud to announce the official launch of Game Maker for Mac!
This is our first release on the Mac, it is the Pro version of Game Maker 7 adapted for the Macintosh environment and contains almost all the feature of Game Maker 7 and more.
It has taken a long time to reach this stage, and many thanks to everyone involved in helping us with alpha and beta testing.
You can download Game Maker for Mac from here – http://appstore.yoyogames.com/downloads/gm4mac/Game_Maker.dmg – this will give you 10 hours of accumulated use (i.e. you can use it for an hour, then a week later still have 9 hours use left), before you need to purchase a license.
An introductory price of $20 until the end of August, then $25 from 1st September. You can buy a license for Game Maker for Mac now from the YoYo Games Appstore… http://appstore.yoyogames.com/gm4mac!
There is no upgrade path from Windows to Mac.
As part of our testing of Game Maker for Mac I have revoked the previous licence key – but do not despair here is a new one so you can continue testing.
Just select the “Enter Licence Key” button at the initial screen and cut and paste the following information.
Licence Key: 987bef80-5f7b-012d-e0ad-001e4f347ee6
Email Address: beta@yoyogames.com
Do not worry if the licence does not revoke immediately it will take a couple of days before everyone is notified.
If you have any problems with Game Maker for Mac (with the license process or the actual code) then please file bugs at http://gm4mac.yoyogames.com
Bugs will be fixed faster if you include a GMK that illustrates any problems you find, preferably not a game but the minimal GMK needed to illustrate the problem.
Some time ago when we reformatted the glog, we said we would be posting some more technical stuff for your enjoyment. So I thought I’d describe some of the work I’ve been doing to speed up the PSP version of Game Maker.
As some of you may know, Game Maker uses doubles internally for all it’s numbers. This allows a very simple end-user experience as when you’re learning you don’t want to bother with knowing about integers or floating point numbers; you just want a number. And while the PC can handle these very quickly, the PSP doesn’t have hardware support for them, meaning they are processed by the CPU in software and are incredibly slow. In the early days of the PSP port, we spent a long time converting internal code to use INTs and FLOATs rather than doubles, but we still have to use doubles when dealing with GML as that’s what the end user uses. This means using library functions to convert from a DOUBLE format into a FLOAT or an INT. These are slow… really slow. In our latest profile they came out about 3rd top of the function time list, with only the kernel and audio mixing beating it. So before we change these, we have to understand the double number format.
IEEE 754 Double format
So this is how doubles are stored in memory and we have to try and extract the integer part of it quicker than the library function. First, what does each part do? The sign bit simply tells us if it’s a positive or negative number, and the fraction is the actual numerical data. The interesting part is the exponent. This tells us where the decimal point goes. Now, we don’t have a decimal, we have a binary one so we have a binary point. So in normal binary %11 would give us 3. But what if there was a binary point inthe middle? (%1.1) Well this would give us 1.5 while %11.1 would give us 3.5 etc. Now this takes a little thinking to get your head around, and I’m not going to go into it too much, but suffice to say that the exponent tells us where this point goes, and if we’re casting to an INT, how much data we can ditch. Since we’re only interested in whole numbers, we can remove anything after the point. The exponent is also offset by 1023, which allows for large numbers, and small fractions meaning 1.0 is actually 1, with an exponent of 1023 (i.e. the decimal point hasn’t moved at all). Or rather… it WOULD be 1, except floating point numbers use a little trick to get more accuracy; they don’t store the leading bit!
Now, it all gets (even more) technical here, but suffice to say that when you store a number in the fraction part, you have to shift the number all the way to the left. so %000000001001001101 would actually be shifted up to %1001001101000…with enough zeros to make 52bits. This is called normalising the number. Now, I also said the FPU removes the leading bit, as can assume it’s there, so our number actually becomes %001101000..(to 52bits). Yes, this is odd… but it’s what the FPU wants, so that’s what we do.
Now,thats the basic idea… if you look at a HEX dump of a double storing 1.0, it’ll actually be 0x3ff0000000000000. This is an exponent of 1023 (0x3ff), and a fraction of 0 (as the 1 is removed). yes… very odd.
Still, with all this knowledge, we can now try and speed up the casting of DOUBLE to an INT. The first thing to do would be to write it in C so that it’s easy to follow and debug. So here we go… a simple C function to convert a DOUBLE, to an INT.
int Double2Int( double _d ) { uint32* pD = (uint32*)&_d; uint32 s = pD[1]&0x80000000; int exp = ((pD[1]>>20)&0x7ff)-1023; // get exponent if( exp<0 ) return 0; // ONLY a fraction int64 t0 = *((int64*)pD)&0x000fffffffffffffL; t0|=0x0010000000000000L; int shift = 52-exp; t0 = t0>>shift; if( s!=0 ) t0=-t0; return (int)t0; }We access the double as 2 integers for ease of use by taking the base address of the double, and then extract the sign. Next we grab the exponent and work out if it’s a positive exponent and therefore has an integer part, or negate exponent and is all fraction. If its negative, then we have a fraction only (like 0.001234) and casting it to an INT would return 0, so that’s what we do.
Next we get the 52bits of the fraction and OR in the leading bit (remember the FPU drops the leading bit for better accuracy). Since the exponent is the shift of the decimal point, we do a 52-exponent to get a real shift value, and after this, it’s just a matter of shifting down the bits to remove the fractional component and getting the whole number part. As we now have a whole number all that’s left to do is check the sign and negate it if need be; and that’s it!
Now while this is okay, it still uses 64bit numbers to make it simple to debug, but as we want to make it as fast as possible on the PSP, we’ll write it directly in MIPS assembler. Don’t worry if you can’t follow this, but it’s here to show the lengths we’ll go to in order to make the PSP version as fast as possible.
asm inline int32 Double2Int( double _d ) { // Get exponent sra t0,a1,20 andi t0,t0,0x7ff addi t0,t0,-1023 // rebase exponent bltz t0, Exit // if ONLY a fraction, then return 0 (in v0) or v0,zero,zero // get upper 20 bits (20_32 format, 2 registers) lui t1,0xf ori t1,t1,0xffff and v0,a1,t1 // Get rid of sign and exponent lui t1,0x0010 // add in 'explicit' 1 or v0,v0,t1 // Get 32bits of data - that theres ANY chance of keeping. sll v0,v0,11 srl t1,a0,21 or v0,v0,t1 ori t2,zero,52 // 52 - exp to get shift 'right' value sub t0,t2,t0 addi t0,t0,-21 // take off 20 bits from the lower 32bits we've killed already. srl v0,v0,t0 // + 1 for 'implicit' 1 at the top. srl a1,a1,31 // Get 'sign' into bit 0 (while nuking the rest of the bits) beq a1, zero, Exit // if NO sign, then return number, otherwise, we have to negate it. lui t0,0x8000 // Little fudge to allow -2147483648 (cant do 0- -2147483648) beq v0,t0,Exit nop jr ra sub v0,zero,v0 // negate... Exit: jr ra nop }Now this MIPS assembler version does the same as the C version, but only uses 32bit registers and has no memory accesses. We also have a little fudge in this version to allow for -2147483648. This is because you can’t have +2147483648 inside an INT (not enough bits), but you CAN have -2147483648. So we simply check for this number and force that as the return value.
This speeds up the whole process massively, to the point that the DOUBLE to INT cast no longer even appears inside the profile. Now there are several other functions to convert. DOUBLE to UNSIGNED INT, INT to DOUBLE, UNSIGNED INT to DOUBLE, FLOAT to DOUBLE and DOUBLE to FLOAT. Once we’ve converted these over we get a pretty sizable boost in performance, so it’s well worth doing.
Hope you followed all this… and enjoyed it. If you did, we’ll try to post more of this stuff down the line.
Good news everybody! Thanks to Chris Krier, instant play on Fire Fox has now been fixed!! So many Many MANY thanks to Chris for this help, we simply haven’t had the time to delve into the problem so were overjoyed to see a solution magically appear.
This solves the dreaded “install script not found – 204″ error, which Fire Fox has been throwing up. It turns out that the plug-in was fine! But the ZIP program we use to automatically create the archive was adding a new YoYo “root” folder, which meant that the file install.rdf and the folders META-INF and plugins were not in the root directory. And because of this, Fire Fox couldn’t find the install script, and so refused to install it.
So anyone who has manually copied the instant play DLL into their C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins or C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\plugins (for x64) directory, should now be able to delete it, and then install the plug-in as normal. Lastly though, be sure to clear your internet CACHE before trying this again, as it’ll keep picking up the old one. I had the same problem, and this fix has worked great for me.
Again, many thanks to Chris for his help.
Yes, we’ve taken on our first dedicated Game Maker programmer! While Russell and Mike are very experienced in many languages, we’ve hardly touched Game Maker itself, so we’re very proud to announce NAL (aka Andrew McCluskey) has been brought in to give us some much needed expertise. So not only will Andrew be helping us understand Game Maker better, but he’ll also help developers with game optimisations and focus future Game Maker features to where they are really needed.So, welcome aboard Andrew!!
NAL is overjoyed to join YoYo Games.
We’ve just moved into our brand, spanking, new office this Monday. It’s got walls and windows and everything! We’re right bang in the centre of Dundee based in the prestigious University of Abertay, within the heart of the gaming community.
So, it seems like a good opportunity to introduce myself; I’m Kirsty and I’m now the Community Manager (double whoop) adding to the expanding YoYo team 
I’ve been working in and around the games industry as far back as 2001 and have worked with both Mike and Russell before in different games companies. I’m absolutely jazzed to be joining such a colossal community! I’m going to be holding the helm on the YoYo Games helpdesk here so be gentle with me ;) If you have any problems then go through the helpdesk in the usual way. Other than that, watch this space and hello everybody!
YoYo Games gang
From L-R we have Russell, Sandy, myself and Mike, all looking rather smug in the new YoYo Games Penthouse. Here’s a few other pictures from moving day…
So now that the dust has settled a little on our last podcast, it’s become obvious that it’d be nice to get a little closer to you guys – not that we want to move in or anything, but that a better dialogue with what you as users and developers would help us to get a feel for what you’d like to see. And this got us wondering, are any local Game Maker users out there? Some guys in Dundee, or even Scotland who would be interested in having some face to face time so we can get feedback.
We’re still thinking about how this would work, but think every couple of months it would be nice to get a load of you together and just talk about the issues and wishes of real users. It obviously depends on how many are local to us, and who can make the (unpaid!) trip to where ever we decide to hold the meeting, but we are open to holding it in a more central location so more can attend.
It would also give us an opportunity to talk over (and perhaps show) what we’re doing and where we’re aiming to go, and see if real users agree with us. To this end we’ve added a new POLL feature (which you can see in the sidebar). So, if you could let us know where you are based, it’ll give us an idea of where we should arrange various meetings. We may well do England sometime, at which point we’ll do a similar poll and see where’s best then. But for now Scotland is by far the easiest and quickest so we’ll start with that. This of course doesn’t stop you from attending if you live somewhere else, but as you’ll have to pay your own way there and back, that’s really up to you.
We are delighted to announce that we have the latest Release Candidate for the Apple Macintosh available for download here.
This will be the final release candidate, we believe that the Game Maker code itself is final but we want to do one last testing round of the distribution mechanism and how the license system will work in the field. To this end we are releasing this version to as wide an audience as possible, to get as much feedback as possible (all bugs and feedback at http://gm4mac.yoyogames.com)
In this version we now have a “Trial” version that allows the user 10 hours of accumulated use (so you can use Game Maker for Mac as many time as you like, over as long a period you like for a total accumulated time of 10 hours) before you have to buy the Full version.
Throughout this final trial phase (which will be for 2 weeks) we will be testing the update mechanism and the YoYo Games license key system so please helps us and participate at http://gm4mac.yoyogames.com. These keys will be available from the Announcements section at http://gm4mac.yoyogames.com
The license keys will be live for the period of the trial, then deactivated once the trial is complete.
We have added
We will follow up with pricing information when we are ready to launch in a week or so (assuming there are no new, critical bugs and the distribution system works as elegantly as we expect). Initially we will not have an Academic version (i.e. Site License) and, since this is a new product there will be no upgrade eligibility.
GMIndie has put Podcast IV online so if you want to hear Mike and I discussing some future ideas and direction for Game Maker then head on over to GMIndie.
Apologies for the delay but the GMC forums are now back up and running.
When we put together the test site so we could look at any issues generated by the upgrade we did not have to process and rebuild the posts themselves, just the private messages – this time the upgrade wanted us to rebuild and process all the message posts – hence the delay (we have a lot of messages in there).
Anyway the upgrade is complete and the doors are open, however we have not finished the whole process yet as we still have a few setting and changes that will be made while the forums are live
Again, apologies for the delay, thank you all for bearing with us.
The GMC Forums have been under attack this week, and as our hand has been forced we have decided to upgrade the GMC forums today. Apologies to all affected but we really had no choice due to the large amount of hacker attention it was receiving.
The upgrade will take 2-3days as the Database format is completely different so it takes time to update it.
If you want to see what the new forums will look like, you can see them on our test server (although they are read only).
Apologies to all affected… blame the hackers.
I’ve just posted this on the bug testing website…thought I would “double post” here to make sure the message gets out.
GM4Mac RC2 Has Expired….what’s next ….
We’re working on getting the last bugs cleared and getting a proper package assembled as a DMG. Goal is to get a VERY FINAL candidate out in the next 2 weeks. We’ll give this package one more week of testing and then hopefully we can get on with shipping GM4Mac by July.
Many thx for your help and patience….
We have just performed a major upgrade to the website, we have added 2 Terrabytes of disk space to the server, we have been building up to this change over for the last 3 weeks, running tests and copying the data over incrementally. So we flicked the switch this morning and everything appears to be running well.
If you see any problems then let us know (with clear instructions on how to reproduce the issue, step by step; we would also need to know which OS and browser you are using).
We have had some complaints about Instant Play but we cannot see a problem (it is working on our test machines) please check the troubleshooting tips on the Wiki and make sure that everything is setup correctly.
Russell
