143 replies to this topic

[fenyxofshadows]

Speaking of the nag screen... It would still be awesome to have it be at the beginning, like the splash screens in the iOS games. That way, you get the message across, it looks more professional (sites and companies do this all the time), and you don't have to wait... As an example of what might happen if you use a nag screen at the end, download the Trial version for Halo: Combat Evolved. Next, try exiting it. Annoying, ain't it? Now, compare that to the beginning. That BUNGIE logo looks much better then that nag screen at the end, and, lo and behold, it's even in the paid version.

Just saying what I think is a good, non-obtrusive idea.

[Smarty]

@Mike: I actually meant occassional nag screens in the IDE, just to remind the Game Maker user that the developers have kids to feed. They're a little obtrusive, but there would be no development impediments other than those already covered.

The watermark is fine by me. It's actually a bit more classy than the cornered message at startup that is there now. I do agree with what was previously mentioned, that it should state the game was made with Game Maker Lite - at least this hints that you can actually get rid of the watermark.

Edited by Smarty, 01 April 2011 - 08:42 AM.

[Dangerous_Dave]

Ignoring technical problems, I've always wanted a pro only forum, enabled by entering your registration key. It seperates the pirates from the legits, and encourages people using the pirated version, who have no reason to pay, to actually pay for the software they have used for free for so long.

[oddbob0]

That's how the old Blitz forums used to work and it was fine. Tangential, I know, but Paradox also run their forums in a similar manner (which is why you still get a key even when you buy through Steam, for example).

[GearGOD]

Paid Blitz forums was a brilliant idea. It also made piracy a lot less appealing as key was checked serverside so no key meant no access to a vig chunk of the knowledge base.

Edited by GearGOD, 01 April 2011 - 09:52 AM.

[YellowAfterlife]

To previous Mike's reply to my post, I meant that two (one by now) features do not seem to be a worthy refund for new restrictions.
About draw_self()... what makes it so problematic to implement in lite edition? Shouldn't that simply call standart object drawing 'routine'?
Perhaps the main point of that function in lite edition is that there is no function to draw sprite with scaling and alpha, but without rotation and blending.
If draw_self() cannot be implemented, maybe an additional function «draw_sprite_light(sprite, subimage, x, y, xscale, yscale, alpha)» could be added, or draw_sprite_ext could be made to ignore angle and blend if GameMaker is not registered*?
* That would also somewhat improve examples compatibility.

Edit: paid forums sure sound like a nice idea, but would probably just make «pirate» users to search for other gm forums, or create these. I cannot guess if that is good or not.

Edited by YellowAfterlife, 01 April 2011 - 09:54 AM.

[Smarty]

Ignoring technical problems, I've always wanted a pro only forum, enabled by entering your registration key. It seperates the pirates from the legits, and encourages people using the pirated version, who have no reason to pay, to actually pay for the software they have used for free for so long.

The moderator team has considered this in a distant past and even suggested to Mark. But it isn't that easy.

Once you provide special access to (parts of) the forum for paying users, they will feel entitled to be using those forums as they'll see this as a service they have paid for. That's all fine and dandy unless they do something that isn't permitted by the moderating team, and get a (temporary) preview of ban applied to their account.

On a free-for-all forum, the disciplinary action is left at the discretion of the moderator and that's usually the end of it. But on a (perceived) paid forum, there is more at stake: the moderator appears to be directly capable of discontinuing a paid service. This is problematic, because the GMC is run by volunteers with no association to YoYo Games. There would be no end to the flood of complaints YYG will receive on 'unfair' moderator actions. Either YYG would have to give a stamp of approval on moderator actions, or they'd have to moderate the forums themselves, or in any other way be more involved in forum moderation.

I don't think everyone appreciates how much YYG have left moderation of this place in the hands of the community. I can speak from experience when I say they have never, ever interfered with how this forum was moderated, what rules should apply (other than the explicit wish that piracy of the software is not permitted), or who was to be appointed for moderation. And I don't think they do that now, given that moderators like Ragnarak would bail out if they would.

I'm sure we'd all like to keep it that way.

Edited by Smarty, 01 April 2011 - 10:08 AM.

[GearGOD]

On a free-for-all forum, the disciplinary action is left at the discretion of the moderator and that's usually the end of it. But on a (perceived) paid forum, there is more at stake: the moderator appears to be directly capable of discontinuing a paid service. This is problematic

Its not problematic once you understand and make clear to the users that what they paid for is the application. The fact that the registration key unlocks access to a subforum is no different from any other kind of private subforum, complete with rules and bans.

[sabriath]

Its not problematic once you understand and make clear to the users that what they paid for is the application. The fact that the registration key unlocks access to a subforum is no different from any other kind of private subforum, complete with rules and bans.

That's why he stated "apparent" in his debate. We are talking about children, children (and a lot of adults) do not read the rules, even if it were in size=72 font bold and bright saying "do not contact YYG with problems", they would still do it.

That's getting offtopic, sooo...

As to the rest... The GM7 Pro.. we did think of that, but to be honest, there simply isn't enough difference between GM7 and GM8. This may happen in the next release... but as we don't have the source to GM7, it might be hard. It might have to wait for a much bigger leap so we can then use GM8 pro. But that would be nice, I agree.

+1 ... I'm glad you guys had that in mind, and hopefully one day you'll have the ability to make it so.

As for the nag screen, I would honestly rather see it at the beginning than at the end. 5-10 seconds while loading the game isn't so bad, but putting it at the end makes it feel like the infamous Mr. Hardy is back, and that puts a bad taste in my mouth at least.


by the way: I really don't want to be a bother, but could I pick your brain for a bit on compilation theory in PM, I'm having a bit of trouble with the typeless 'var' datatyping while using structure storage ability. No code, just a question really

[Dangerous_Dave]

The moderator team has considered this in a distant past and even suggested to Mark. But it isn't that easy.

Yeah I'm aware there are problems with it, but there must be something similar you can do (and by you, I don't mean you specifically, just to be clear ).

Currently, pirates get everything paying users get, besides an install limit. By setting up something that you *can't* pirate, it makes the pay-for version more attractive. Not everyone has morals, in fact, I think YoYo have found out just how few people do. I think there should be some service offered to people who have paid, and can prove it, but as you've said a private forum has too many problems. Maybe the new publishing service, that YoYo have talked about, should only be offered to those people who have purchased GM.

Another option is that instead of offering a private forum, simply offer a badge appearing next to / under your username in posts that shows you have purchased GM legitimately. You would certainly only allow one key to be tied to one GM account. This still requires behind the scenes technology that may not be practical (linking these forums to a database of keys) but it removes a lot of the more obvious problems.

[Rusty]

Ignoring technical problems, I've always wanted a pro only forum, enabled by entering your registration key. It seperates the pirates from the legits, and encourages people using the pirated version, who have no reason to pay, to actually pay for the software they have used for free for so long.

But it's the Lite users who will suffer from this because they don't have access to the knowledge they need to be able to actually learn how to use Game Maker. Although Game Maker is not freeware it is a learning program and the GMC forums is meant to be a site where more experienced members can help the less experienced members, people can find partners for the parts of games they don't know how to do and (of course) the creation of games.

Another big issue here is that many spriters, musicians and the like don't actually have Game Maker, if you cut them out the website, you cut the usefulness of the website and effectively, the attraction to it leading to a decline in the amount of people using it.

Edit:
Wait... read through the posts again. I'm getting the feeling you're drifting more towards a "VIP" section for paid members. While I enjoy the idea of paying members getting an advantage over cheapskates I do have to question what use this new sub-forum would actually be and why anyone would want it?

Edited by Rusty, 01 April 2011 - 10:44 AM.

[Dangerous_Dave]

But it's the Lite users who will suffer from this because they don't have access to the knowledge they need to be able to actually learn how to use Game Maker.

The suggestion was to add one pro-people-only forum, not make the whole GMC pro only .

[Rusty]

But it's the Lite users who will suffer from this because they don't have access to the knowledge they need to be able to actually learn how to use Game Maker.

The suggestion was to add one pro-people-only forum, not make the whole GMC pro only .

I know, I just caught on too late. Anyway, that still leaves spriters and musicians who can't get into the sub-forum and a rather pointless forum...

So it basically becomes a random GML Programmer Chatroom.

[Dangerous_Dave]

So it basically becomes a random GML Programmer Chatroom.

What it would have been is irrelevant now that it's been shown it wouldn't work. Now you can comment on my newest suggestion

[Yal]

So it basically becomes a random GML Programmer Chatroom.

The main idea of that suggestion would be to add a new Sub-Forum for registered users, and that would mean that we'd get, say, four more boards to post in. That wouldn't really exclude anyone from the boards that already exists (I mean, I really like to hang around at GI&D to volcano design ideas over people).

Of course, I fail to see what addition to the forum something like that would be - right now it's pretty well divided in all the main topics one would like to discuss: Game Maker, Resources, Design&Distribution. A "paying people only" board would sort of be "Important people come here to discuss important stuff. We're so proud of ourselves."

Or is there some stuff Standard users only are able to discuss?

[Rusty]

Another option is that instead of offering a private forum, simply offer a badge appearing next to / under your username in posts that shows you have purchased GM legitimately. You would certainly only allow one key to be tied to one GM account. This still requires behind the scenes technology that may not be practical (linking these forums to a database of keys) but it removes a lot of the more obvious problems.

This isn't practical and it creates more problems than it solves. Pirates aren't as dumb as they used to be, I've seen YouTube video tutorials on how to use a fake registration key to activate various programs. There are far too many ways for people to turn to piracy and nowhere near enough ways to cull them. Besides that, how are you going to tell the difference between a pirate and a Lite user?

As much as I agree with you that paying users should be getting a better service than pirates, there just isn't a practical way to stop piracy yet.

[Dangerous_Dave]

This isn't practical and it creates more problems than it solves. Pirates aren't as dumb as they used to be, I've seen YouTube video tutorials on how to use a fake registration key to activate various programs. There are far too many ways for people to turn to piracy and nowhere near enough ways to cull them. Besides that, how are you going to tell the difference between a pirate and a Lite user?

As much as I agree with you that paying users should be getting a better service than pirates, there just isn't a practical way to stop piracy yet.

Don't check the registration key against a pattern, check it against real keys that have been given out, stored in a database. Once a key has been claimed, you can't reclaim it. The people who never claim their key at the GMC will have the small risk of having theirs stolen by someone else, but the chances of correctly guessing these keys are pretty low.

And we wont bother telling the difference between the lites and pirates. Just paying people get the badges. People who talk about using pro features but don't have the badge will be easily identifiable as pirates (although there will be excuses galore).

[chance]

I fail to see what addition to the forum something like that would be - right now it's pretty well divided in all the main topics one would like to discuss: Game Maker, Resources, Design&Distribution.

I think this is the issue. Even if it were easy to make a registered-users forum, what would we discuss?

[GearGOD]

This isn't practical and it creates more problems than it solves. Pirates aren't as dumb as they used to be, I've seen YouTube video tutorials on how to use a fake registration key to activate various programs.

If you haven't noticed, keygens don't work for online games. Nor will they work for a forum. Here's why:
The master key function can output N keys.
A secondary function selects N/100,000
The keys sold are passed through both functions.
The installer/game verifies the input against the master function only. Its extracted by the attacker and used to generate potentially all N valid keys.
Meanwhile the server/forum runs the input through the secondary function also.
You thus have a 1:100,000 chance of getting a working online key.

Edit:

I fail to see what addition to the forum something like that would be - right now it's pretty well divided in all the main topics one would like to discuss: Game Maker, Resources, Design&Distribution.

I think this is actually pretty easy. Move advanced, 3d, extension, and experts boards into the registered only subforum. This makes pretty solid sense as the lite users are by majority novices and when they start asking questions that they know belong in advanced, it'll be a good reminder to register.

Edited by GearGOD, 01 April 2011 - 11:35 AM.

[fawful]

doesn't lite version already come with a watermark on startup? Or has that been removed in some of the more recent versions?