Spyker

Oh silly me. I meant to say decrease compile time, not increase. Just edited the main post and corrected that. I guess that's what happens when you post topics at 2 AM. Well, I plan on going to pick one up today (hoping my local stores sell them, otherwise I'll have to order online). I'll post back with my results later today if I can get one!

Edit: Yeah, didn't do much for my compile time. My saving/loading is much faster though, so that's a plus i guess

@Spyker - that is not going to happen in this generation - it is on the suggestion list for GM:Next though

 

Russell

Dang. Thanks for confirming that it's not coming though, I was holding out on making my own grouping system since I wasn't sure if it was coming natively. Time to get started I guess 

While on the topic of sounds...

Are we getting any kind of 'grouping' functionality soon? I believe an administrator/mod over at the bug reports change saw a post of mine a while back and added it into a suggestions/wish list of some sort.

To give you an example..: grouping the song files into a music group, and SFX into an SFX group. That would then allow me to change the volume, etc. of all the SFX group if need be.

I've tried editing that main post like 5 times and it only posts 1/2 or 3/4 of what I typed. Probably cause GMC is so slow right now. That last part is supposed to say--

Do they load their puzzles off of a server? Or is it all packed into the app? Reason I'm asking is I've got an idea I'd like to take a shot at. It requires a picture to be loaded for each "puzzle". I want to keep all the pictures in the game itself, but will the size increase dramatically? They'd be about the same definition as 4pics1word.

I don't know the game, but they could be packed into the app. Obviously this impacts the size, but there's a few tricks you can do to make things smaller. For example, I've noticed when developing for Android that if you double the width and the height of an image (using image scaling), the image quality doesn't deteriorate too much because most smart phones have a reasonably high DPI and they smooth out quite well. This means that you can use smaller resolution images than you're going to display on the screen. And this means that what normally would require storage for 1 picture could now store 4.

An example: I have a Galaxy S (yes,quite old) with a resolution of 480x800. A width of 480 splits up in two images of 240 each. Square images would be 240 by 240 at max and they'd fit tightly in the screen, so let's subtract 40 of each for borders, and you get 200x200. I could use 100x100 images and double their scales to get them where they need to be.

Textures in GameMaker,that store the images, come in various sizes. Let's take a texture of 2048x2048. This is not uncommon for games to use. 2048x2048 can store 20 pictures of width 100 horizontally and 20 of height 100 vertically. And that's already 400 pictures.

Since I don't know the game, I don't know if it reuses pictures for puzzles. But I would certainly do that myself to increase the number of actual puzzles you can make with a limited set of images. All you need to do is "tag" the images with words that describe properties of the depicted item. For example, a wooden table could be tagged with "wood", "table", "legs", "surface", "brown" and "furniture". Once you create a new puzzle, all your game has to do is select a tag from its library and randomly select 4 images from the library that match the tag.

The effort, obviously, is in creating a useful set of images that may carry multiple tags, and making sure a tag appears at least 4 times in the library (since it's 4pics1word).

That's actually a pretty smart way of doing it, thanks for the tip. Now that I think about it, I don't think the game requires an internet connection so it must have all the pictures packed into it. I think it has up to 200 levels so it's interesting how they handle that, although I'm not sure whether they reuse pictures or not.