Development of Game Maker 7.0
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The Development of Game Maker 7.0, the next major version of Game Maker after version 6.1a had began shortly after Mark Overmars released his new Game Maker book along with Jacob Habgood.
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[edit] Delays
Mark Overmars's preliminary plans were to release a beta of Game Maker in November, but has later announced a delay to december.
[edit] Beta Stage
In an announcement ([1]) made on December 9th in the GMC. In the first beta, few things are noticable, considerably that Game Maker works on Windows Vista with only a minor problems (unknown publisher).
[edit] Beta 1
Beta 1 was released on December 9th 2006. The beta couldn't be run unless the user is legally registered. One of the main complaints were that there was no extension maker, and that extensions weren't compiled and packed.
[edit] Beta 2
Beta 2 was released on January 1st 2007, it included many changes, such as a new way of creating extension packages along with some other bug fixes. Here is the complete list of changes:
- Completely rewrote the extension mechanism and created an extension maker.
- Added functions draw_line_width(x1,y1,x2,y2,w) and draw_line_width_color(x1,y1,x2,y2,w,col1,col2) to draw lines with a width.
- The display of the website on the main window can be switched off in the preferences.
- d3d_start() and d3d_end() now return whether successful.
- Corrected some typos in the error message.
- The game window is now made visible before the create and game start events are executed such that it will be there to e.g. show the game help.
- In image editor, moving to next or previous image now asks whether changes must be saved.
- Under Scripts>Show Extension Functions, the list of extension function is now correctly shown and also the constants are included.
- Scripts in extension packages can now use constants defined in such packages.
- In simple mode the extensions help is no longer shown.
- .gmk files can now be merged into games.
- Corrected the drawing of rectangles such that outline and filled have the same size.
- Corrected the bug with limited real precision. Should also solve problems with functions dealing with the date and time.
- Variable cursor_sprite can now be used to set a sprite for the cursor. (Was already there but not in the documentation.
- Solved a bug in the function median().
- Missing extension names are now reported.
- Solved a crash when resizing a grid.
- Comparing and finding values in grids now works correctly for string values.
- In the function help at the bottom of the script editor, built-in and extension functions are now sorted.
- Empty include files are no longer added, and when loading an include file the name of the file is updated.
- Corrected a typo in the helptip of the Append button in the Constants tab.
- Corrected a bug in the automatic freeing of DLL files, that could lead to an error at the end of the game.
- Editing a non-transparent sprite will no longer sometimes turn it transparent in the preview.
- Increased the maximum number of arguments to DLL functions to 16.
- Slightly improved the handling of bugs in extension package scripts.
- Solved a bug in collision checking with scaled instances.
- Solved a bug in collision checking with e.g. lines and rectangles that were not on integer coordinates.
- Function file_bin_open now create the file if it does not yet exist.
- Added checks in the object_set_parent function to avoid cycles.
- In the error form Abort is now the default button and the close mark behaves as abort.
- Solved an error in the bounce action with diagonal bounces.
The release of Beta 2 of Game Maker 7 also started a debate about the .gmk encryption introduced in the first beta, which would disallow people from creating programs that deal with the source code of a game directly, such as converters (g-java) for example.
[edit] Post Second Beta
No more public releases were made to Game Maker after the second beta. It was internally tested at YoYo Games. Major changes includes a complete new registration system.
