Warbird A13-02 - Beginner's Shmup Template

[BPzeBanshee]

For anyone who finds GMOSSE a bit too intimidating to start off with, or have cost restrictions (Lite only), here's a little project of mine that may help you get used to this method of programming in GM.

(Screenshots currently unavailable for now until I get time to put them on Imgur)

Warbird is now on Bitbucket! All binaries, source blobs and an updated GM:Studio GMX project is available at https://bitbucket.org/BPzeBanshee/warbird

Okay, so what makes this any different from GMOSSE?

It's barebones: it started in Flash coded by an aspiring Flash developer (me) and then ported to various current forms of Game Maker including the 'Lite' versions for those who can't afford the full thing. It has nothing more than movement, enemies, bullets, and some core functions like a debug display, score display, lives display, etc. No bullet prediction or TATE or joystick rebinding or anything too fancy: just the absolute basics. As it is based on the GMOSSE engine, such features can be easily added later via inclusion of controller objects.

Note also that there is a Flash version included. This is the original base game project which the GM versions are ports of. Naturally it's going to be different code-wise but I've done a few tricks to make things slightly easier, especially if you know GM already. You might want to research stuff like unsigned integers though.

[BPzeBanshee]

Heads up: this mostly works in the ENIGMA project now. http://enigma-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=1396.0

The future is looking bright for GM-based projects.

[Rozyrg]

Very cool! I'm not all that familiar with ENIGMA; but it sounds intriguing just going off of their wiki page. Always good having bridges to as many platforms as possible, too.

[BPzeBanshee]

I suppose you could say that ENGIMA is an enigma.

Their website's a lot better than it used to be: the most important thing they're having issues with at the moment is making the project easy to access, which was nigh-impossible a few months ago. They've really made huge leaps forward lately. If you or anyone else would be interested I can write a How-To guide for it here, could be handy.

[BPzeBanshee]

Updated the archive after reading this in another thread, and also finding out that GM:Studio's "free" license removed the resource restrictions.

I fixed one thing in the Studio version that I didn't update on the rest of them, which was the bullets appearing aimed right for the first frame of existence. I also updated the sound commands to use GM:Studio's new audio engine, but I forgot about fixing a couple of stupid things I did that made porting this to ENIGMA less than flawless. If anyone actually cares about having an ENIGMA version let me know.

[DJ Incompetent]

Thank you.

'Curious, what is your opinion of YoYo Compiler?

My main interest was the YoYo Compiler but it looks like they're milking all the cash they can get, making it another $200 module rather than just making it part of the game like they should've done at the beginning.

Outside of this, anyway.

[BPzeBanshee]

I'm a bit on the fence about YYC: If it's really as good as what YoYo seem to think it is it's a neat solution to the "lol interpreter engine" crap some give GM (and about damn time), but I'm not convinced it's entirely worth the now $300 price tag. In fact I originally thought the whole point of the engine rewrite that occurred with Studio/GM4HTML5 was for that to be just an out of the box function. I can see people being a bit pissed off that they've made a cash cow out of it instead, and ENIGMA's been doing the same thing from the beginning and in most areas has been getting *better* performance results than what Yoyo are doing.

However, a game that's compiled with the YoYo Compiler will be a lot different internally from the same game run in the default interpretive environment its normally outputted in - had they made it part of the parcel bugfixing would surely have been pure hell. Better to have a solid turtle than a rabbit that will crash and burn on the slightest road bump, so to speak.

[BPzeBanshee]

Warbird is now on BitBucket!

https://bitbucket.org/BPzeBanshee/warbird

I also updated all GM source blobs and reimported the GM8.0 Pro port into GM:Studio to get a current GMX project file that works correctly. Folks attempting to get used to GM:Studio let me know how this goes for you.

I almost had this on GitHub instead but the idea of not having private repositories bothered me a little, but BitBucket's Windows client is tricky to get the hang of whereas GitHub is piss easy. I might switch back over there if I change my mind next week but I'd like the opinions of anyone who cares.

Also, regarding the above post, note that people with paid Standard/Professional licenses actually get the YoYo Compiler specific to their platform module of choice included in their purchase now. As I was one that got GMS Standard when they were doing giveaways my license is slightly different and sadly doesn't include it so I can't really put it to the test. With this being said however, Warbird runs out of the box in ENIGMA now which does the exact same thing the YoYo Compiler is trying to do. GMS's debug management is a lot better than it used to be as well but I have other concerns with switching to Studio concerning the use of separate exe runners with data.win files which your project is compiled into (which already has programs to extract script names, sprites/backgrounds/tiles and music).