News on GameMaker v4.0

[alias]

i want methods and arrays!

[GMG Mike]

i want methods and arrays!

Big Mike's SilverCreator has what you want.

[alias]

Big Mike's SilverCreator has what you want.

does it have a healthy dose of awesomeness?

[Al Staffieri]

Just wanted to update everyone that I am still working on GameMaker. I spent the last few days mostly working on click areas.

Also I'm trying to figure out the best way to save all the game info to files for the easiest and fastest way for me to read it all back in. I'm hoping to be able to read all of the current card info in from disk and parse all the scripts for that card and save it in memory. that way when you run a script on the card it will run faster because some of the work has already been done.

This will make opening cards slower, but the game will run faster overall. Maybe I'll make it a preference option, so you can decide which works best for your game.

I'll probably do that for all global scripts when the game first starts, so at least running a global script will be fast.

[Silverwind]

Cool. Can't wait for methods, ToF had reached exactly 750 lines in the ON KEYDOWN routine and nearly 400 in ON TIMER.

[Al Staffieri]

Here's a little preview movie of the card buttons. I made this with QuickTime's screen recording feature. I'll make a few more of these in the next few days.

http://alstaffieri.com/movies/gamemaker4previewmovie1.mov

[Silverwind]

Wahay! Being able to manually edit the size and x+y location properties for interface elements rocks! Great use of the new Quicktime Al!

[WarHampster]

Hot. This may have been asked before, but how difficult will it be to port games made in the current GM to GM 4?

[Silverwind]

I think Al said 4.0 will be able to open 3.9 files, though how that'll work with the code structure changes I din't know.

[Mystor]

I think Al said 4.0 will be able to open 3.9 files, though how that'll work with the code structure changes I din't know.

If I had to guess it will open them, with a checkbox checked that says "3.9 Engine" that will basically make them run in a 3.9 environment.

Byt that may h=just be me, mabby he is epic and has written a translator!

Mist

[Gnome]

WOAH  

[GuthanSoftware]

Still can't wait for this

[Gnome]

Maybe this will finally raise my attention span high enough to not to go in the internet for 4 hours everytime I open GM....

[Al Staffieri]

I still haven't been able to get a Universal Binary version to compile. There are 2 hurdles I need to overcome. File handling and text handing.

File handling: I'm doing something wrong getting the correct folder location for the project files . I'll figure it out, but I hate even looking at it now after getting frustrated with it. I'll get some other stuff done and then go back to it.

Text handling: This one is really bugging me. Something that was so easy to do in before is now so hard to handle because Apple is no longer supporting edit fields. It's all HIText and HIView now.


So in the mean time I switched my help window and code to the now standard Apple Help Book. This is really nice and makes it look much like a modern Mac OS X app. It was pretty easy to do too. It's basically just a bunch of html files. This is great because it allows me to make easy linking to other topics and related items in the reference.

[Silverwind]

Wow, so do you reckon the majority of the workload is out of the way?