Game Maker 8.1: Video of Changes [Part One]

Since this video was made I quizzed Mike Dailly on the absence of the “Publish your game” option and he has stated that this functionality will be added back in.

A list of bug fixes can be found in the Game Maker 8.x changelog.

Transcript follows
“Opening up Game Maker 8.1 one of the first things you may come across is the automatic updater. This has has just popped up alongside a warning to beta testers. The updater lists all the changes that have been made to Game Maker since the last version Upgrading is very easy – providing your antivirus software doesn’t detect the new version as a virus and remove it!

When you first open Game Maker 8.1 you are met with the new larger Game Maker news screen. It displays the same information as before.

On the background you’ll notice that the Game Maker text has gone.

There is also a new Game Maker Tech News blog.

I have open the final example GMK file from the 1945 tutorial. I’m using the lite version and as you can hopefully see the new room editor buttons that control the zoom are disabled. You are also not able to pan around the room as you can do in Game Maker Standard. More significantly. The “Create Executable” and “Publish Your Game” options are disabled.

However if you hit [F5] the game runs. It does this by opening a temporary executable file generated by Game Maker which can easily be located and copied. If you think that this will let you distribute an EXE of your game you are mistaken. A message reading “LITE .exe has expired” pops up when you try to open the file.

So now I’ll upgrade to Game Maker Standard and show you the differences. Upgrades are handled via the YoYo Games store but I already have a key so I’ll just go ahead and enter it.

Instantly the disabled options become available.

Now we’ve got that all sorted lets take a look at the improvements that have been made to Game Maker. We’ll start in the room editor with the zoom function controllable by these toolbar buttons and also the mouse scroll wheel. There’s also the ability to pan around the room which you can activate by pressing and holding the middle mouse button.

The right click priorities have changed. In Game Maker 8 right clicking on an object deletes it. Now it brings up a context menu. There’s a new “Edit Object” option on this list which opens up the Object Properties window. To delete an object the shortcut is [Ctrl]+Right Click

The script editor now supports block indenting so selecting a portion of code and then pressing [tab] will not delete it but will indent it, and reverse indent is [Shift]+[Tab]

Renaming resources now uses the standard [F2] shortcut instead of [Ctrl]+[R]

Adding a piece of GML code as an action for an object event normally results in ‘Execute a Piece of Code’ appearing in the action window. However you can change this to something more descriptive by placing a comment prefixed by three forward-slash characters on the first line of the script.”