Erik Leppen

...to spend most of their time debugging programs they have not made themselves?

Because it most certainly holds for me that I spend most of my time finding, reporting and working around bugs in GameMaker, rather than working on the actual features of my game. Just in the last three days (including today) I have reported nine issues to Mantis, ranging all the way from wishes and small glitches to compile failures.

For some reason with GM:S, it's a rare moment when I can work for a few hours straight on a game without encountering some weirdo, random, unreproducible, or otherwise unexpected problem in the software I'm using. I'm used to working alone and I can be most productive when left alone in a room with a computer and a well-defined task that I know how to handle, but for some reason this situation has been quite rare during the last year and I seem to need other people to do things for me.

Is this a problem unique to GM:S, or do other software development environments have the same issues? If not, why is GameMaker so bugged, and when will its beta period be over?

Also what happened to this bug-fixing week that was promised the previous time I asked YYG to fix their stuff?

I always thought End Step was before Draw, but as it occurs the first Draw of a new instance is before the first End Step? Why?

How can I add newlines to show_message_async messages in HTML5 games? "#" does not work, chr(13) + chr(10) does not work. Is it even possible?

For an idea I have I would need a function that plays a sound with a very precise delay. As it is a rhythmic idea, 1/60 second is not accurate enough, so alarms won't do the trick. I'd need at least millisecond precision; microsecond would be ideal. The function would look like this:

audio_set_delay(microseconds)
audio_play_sound(snd, priority, loops)
audio_set_delay(0)

Would such a thing be possible to implement?

Does 1008's new array functionality actually enable us to cut an array that has size 10, down to size 5, by simply throwing away elements 5 to 9, without having to rewrite elements 0 to 4?

I'm asking, because if we can do that, we don't have to keep variables anymore for the lengths of the arrays (meaning, the amount of elements that are actually in use).