What version of Game Maker do you use?

[BPzeBanshee]

Simple enough question for all you devs out there. Do vote.

It'll be interesting to see who sticks to the cutting edge latest or uses an older version. I've seen some threads where people have backported to GM 5 for some reason or other though I doubt they're still around to actually enlighten us as to why (or they said it in the old threads and I forgot/had trouble finding again).

And no, I don't care whether the copy's legit or not.

[Sumez]

Maybe it would be interesting to know what development resources people are using in general, not just GM users. It seems there are a lot of people here doing it "proper" and making their games in C++.
Personally I use XNA/C#, but primarily use my own classes from scratch instead of inheriting the base components made specifically for XNA. The cool thing is that it allows me to see my game on my X360 - otherwise I'd use C++ as well

[BPzeBanshee]

Good point. I targeted Game Maker because I know there's been a bit of a trend within the time I've been here of people who use Game Maker, but the code type of choice in general would make for an interesting stat grab. Can't say I recall much people besides Udderdude using C++ but then I've seen a programmer here use Java of all things as well.

Hell, if I broadened the scope a bit further out I could even find a few games in Python or LOLCODE. The choice of code format is huge.

[Rozyrg]

8, as it had significant improvements in things like scripting speed and the very handy color-coded coding window... no obvious reasons to stick with the older one by my assessment. I honestly haven't even looked into what the latest upgrade does, I've only heard about some minor stability/compatibility issues... which is enough to keep me away for the time being.

[BPzeBanshee]

8, as it had significant improvements in things like scripting speed and the very handy color-coded coding window... no obvious reasons to stick with the older one by my assessment. I honestly haven't even looked into what the latest upgrade does, I've only heard about some minor stability/compatibility issues... which is enough to keep me away for the time being.

The only big thing I see about 8.1 myself is fixing that damn one undrawable line and change of file format to try to battle against decompilers, which I didn't think had really caught on here much anyway.

Hopefully GM9 or Game Maker Studio with the C++ runner I keep hearing about will be a further improvement again eh?

[null1024]

5.3, because it works on damn near everything [like say, VirtualBox w/o hardware acceleration]. GM8 is really nice, but I'm almost never in Windows natively, so I can't really use it.
Shame, because I love the proper alpha support in GM8, and rotation is a godsend [hell, it has been since GM6, but it sitll deserves mention].

Also, I was one of the people who backported to GM5, using not-Windows meant GM6-and-up stuff broke [eg, VirtualBox without hardware acceleration, which I didn't have at the time], or ran really slowly [Wine].
I haven't actually seen if GM8 works well in VirtualBox, if it does, I might switch back.


But... I haven't actually worked on a game in ages though.


Also, I'll be amazed if I see anyone making GM4 stuff, unless you're targeting Windows 95.

[BPzeBanshee]

I wasn't aware of older versions of Game Maker actually worked with VirtualBox, thanks for the interesting viewpoint. I thought it might've been you who was doing the GM5 backporting stuff but I had trouble finding the threads in question and figured you were long gone from Development outright.

I tried Xeno Fighters R (which is in GM8) via VirtualBox for Mac OS X and the game's a bit distorted when initially windowed, bring it to fullscreen and you can see the game by its room-size on topleft corner of the screen but the rest of it's all garbage. As for performance that's been improving steadily - XF-R runs at something like 90-95% speed and it's a bit performance heavy (which GMOSSE isnt but I haven't tried it under VirtualBox yet) so chances are you can get it running perfectly with some hacks. This is with the experimental hardware acceleration support within VirtualBox, mind you.