Smarty

I'm surprised that it's not on the roadmap, so here it goes.

 

Anyone who has played a number of "multiplayer" mobile games has probably seen push notifications coming by. In short, if two or more players are involved in a (usually turn-based) game, they may receive a notification on their phone / tablet that it is their turn in the game, or that they must perform some action in the game (think WordFeud, for example). Notifications appear even if the game is not running. Tapping the notification starts the game, or switches to the game.

For Android, push notifications for games may be supported using Google Cloud Messaging, which is free. Apple has a comparable service which is paid. I haven't investigated such services for Windows Phone and RT.

 

Note that notifications aren't supported using the multiplayer functionality we already have in GameMaker - the difference is that the app may actually not be running.

 

I'm aware that this feature may require players to grant an extra permission to the game. I'm also aware that we are required to build our own server to issue such notifications to cloud messaging services. But it would be extremely cool to have. 

I've set a splash screen to appear when the game starts up (General Settings, Android tab, Splash screen). I've set my own splash screen which is a simple PNG (it's showing in the settings). I've made it the size of the first room (as the manual suggests) and the game is set for landscape mode only. But for some reason, only the default YoYo Games logo appears when I do a test run (which I obviously want to get rid of). Did anyone get it to work and if so - what could I be doing wrong?

During a step, this seems to be the current order in which events are evaluated and executed (for Left, Middle and Right buttons, as well as for Keys):

(LMRK) (being held)
(LMRK) Press
(LMRK) Release

This isn't logical, because for any button or key this is the order in which they are expected to happen:

(LMRK) Press
(LMRK) (being held)
(LMRK) Release

I'm having an issue with the current order because I use the "press" event to set up things that are being used in the "held" event (and use the "release" event to reset states). As a workaround now I need to set and reset a helper variable to make sure the "held" event doesn't use variables not yet set up by the "press" event (and as a result, the "held" event is postponed one step)

To summarize: please change the execution order of the "press" and "held" events for keys and mouse buttons. I have no clue why they've ever been in this order in the first place.

I use the constants in GameMaker reasonably often. They provide an easy way to experiment with fine-tuning values for lots of variables without having to dig the values up in the events or the scripts. They also help getting rid of magic numbers.

 

Unfortunately, although I try to use self-explanatory constant names, I can't always put enough information in those names and sometimes find myself wondering what I used a particular constant for, and how exactly. So I propose the constants editor gets a third column in which you can set a description for each constant, in plain text.

So there's a Resize event between the draw events that, in HTML5, is supposed to be triggered, according to the manual, once the canvas is resized. I think it is meant to say when the browser window resizes, because a canvas does not resize by itself.

 

So the question remains - did anyone get it to fire? I'm setting up a simple game and then resize the browser window, but it refuses to execute the code in the resize event. It doesn't even fire when I press the key to full-screen the browser window. I've put simple show_message boxes inside this event and made sure that there was an instance of an object that was set to be visible, but no luck. Right now, the only alternative I have is to continually check if the browser_width and _height values have changed since the last step.