These are the three most annoying misuses of the Game Maker engine to me. If you use Game Maker, please avoid these!
- Stretching the game to full screen. Why do people do this? Can't they see how bad it looks? Either make your game run in a window, or run in real full screen mode with a resolution change, don't stretch it to fit the full screen, because that causes all kinds of distortion and blurriness problems. It also makes games run much slower.
- Using GM's built-in sound capabilities instead of using a .dll. This often produces scratchy sounds, delays when loading sounds, and other problems. It also only supports MP3, MIDI, and WAV -- the first two of which you probably shouldn't be using in a game anyway: MIDI because it sounds pretty awful, and MP3 because it's illegal to use them in a game that gets more than 5000 downloads without a license and because OGGs are superior in terms of video quality to file size. Good sound dll's to use with GM games are bass.dll, fmod.dll, or supersound.dll.
- Not using external resources. Optimally all or nearly all of a game's resources should be external and loaded on startup or on use. Keeping all of a game's resources inside the .exe leads to huge load times and massive overuse of RAM, for no real benefit at all. Some people do it to avoid other people having access to their game resources, but if someone really wanted access they could just use the decompiler anyway.
I posted this already on
I posted this already on your LJ feed, but I don't know if you get told if I do that, I don't mean to harass you. Can you write a doc about using external resources for Game Maker games? I've not thought of doing it that way - I want to give it a shot, but the prospect is kind of frightening.
- tocky
Yeah, I don't get
Yeah, I don't get notifications for comments there unfortunately.
Sure, I can write one for that, although you can also check the GMC forums, they have a lot of help topics on that and probably could explain it better than I could.
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