"Savage" an administrator at pascalgamedevelopment's forums, and owner of indie game site http://savagesoftware.com.au/ is the author of the Game Maker for Mac port.

On his forums, he has had some interesting comments on Game Maker for Mac, as well as the C++ port.

Some comentary includes:

• Porting Dx to Open/GL
• The codebase works on Win32, Linux and Mac
• He uses Universal Binaries, thus PowerPC support
• He's commented only on Source File compatibility, not the ability to cross-create Games for different platforms
• The earliest Mac OS with success is 10.4.11
• He has had Open/GL rendering problems with some Mac Minis and ATI Radeons, though I'm not sure if that was PPC or Intel
• Talk of porting runner to ARM, Nintendo DS, iPhone
• The C++ runner (windows versions) still uses Dx/D3D

http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum...hp?topic=5531.0
http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum...hp?topic=5555.0

This is great news... especiallythe linux part!

wow.

Those screenshots show that more than just "make white dots on the screen" works.
And it sounds like the program can cross-compile for Linux, Windows, and OS X.
SDL was a good choice. I'd still like to know about the multiplayer functionality.

That's good news for the Fusion overlay.

I didn't read that into the developers comments at all, but there might be some confusion about what you mean by "the program".

With GM simply stating "the program" could mean the maker, the runner or the created game.

Here is what the developer said,



He is definitely stating that his source for the runner and maker that compiles for Win32, Linux and OS X.

He also implied that the Mac version can't be used to create Windows executables, nor can the Windows version be used to create Mac apps.



My interpretation is that the Mac version will not create Windows executables, though it will read a Windows created .GMK, for porting. And GM7 for Windows (+GM8) will read a .GMK created on Mac. But to create executables for both Windows and Macs, one must have both Windows and a Mac with their respective versions of Game Maker and create executables for said platform.

I'm just wondering, and pardon me if this has been answered, but will the GM mac port be based off GM7 or GM8? If the Mac port doesn't support png files, then porting your GM8 game to mac would be impossible look ugly.

Its based off of GM7, I do believe.

.

I don't know what porting the runner means but if it has to do with DS and iPhone then I'm in. Developing for those systems in GM would be a dream come true. Add with the App store available that opens up even more possibilities.

This topic isn't about people's opinion of Macs. So that's enough, OK?

Sorry KC, you caught me in the middle of a topic-fixing. I was just about to say the same thing myself - we've all heard the pros and cons of Macs. No need to repeat the debate here.

From my probing, it appears that the Mac runner takes a GM data file. Theoretically (and by "theoretically" I mean "I tested it and it works"), placing this in the right place within the App should make a usable game. The only problem is getting the data file created in windows, but in all likelihood it uses the same format as the Windows data file included in the exe.(Edit: Apparently the files are "slightly different", so that basically rules out my plans, but he did say "Again that is not currently on the books, but that does not mean it would not be possible in future. Again I would need to defer that sort of thing to YoYoGames for clarification." in reference to this...).

Yeah, except Steve Jobs Apple is trying to protect his precious prevent anything not made the Apple way from going on the iPhone (flash and java anyone?), so I doubt Game Maker could make games for the iPhone.

For the DS, Nintendo requires you to be a development group with 5 or more people, and you have to pay a lot for the development tools. Like before, I doubt it.


Note: Just because I doubt doesn't mean I can't want...

I meant not for profit for DS but just for homebrew. Imagine All of the GM greats on your DS portably.

Because homebrew is technically illegal, YoYo probably won't be doing that either.

Homebrew isn't illegal.

In the United States, the DMCA makes anything that could be used to circumvent copy protection illegal. Thus, homebrew is illegal. You know the other half of what people do that makes homebrew possible makes illegal ROMs possible, right?

A small update which appears to have slipped under the radar.


EDIT: More on Twitter...

I am recently trying to expand my c++ knowledge and look how applications can work on other systems. It seems that to compile a cross platform application you first need to have written portable code (meaning using no platform specific functions and libraries), then you need to compile on each system using a compiler/IDE like MVC++ (Windows), XCode (Mac) and GCC (Linux), so for Game Maker to compile games over other platforms you would need to do it on each one of them separately.

Now, Game Maker does not really compile so they could have the program carry along the different pre-compiled rundatas and attach them with the data when the user decides to create the executable. The problem is that the Game Maker versions are not synchronized, the gmk format will have changes throughout versions and platforms. I really hope they sort these issues. However I wouldn't mind to use a Mac to create a game on it, after all I would have to test if it works. So buying the hardware would be mandatory.

Portable code refers more to no processor-specific code, because there is no way to do anything useful with the same code on every operating system. In order to actually do something the user can see, you have to tell the operating system to do it for you with system calls. The standard library handles this for you because the system you're compiling on has its own implementation. With things like graphics though, you have to use OpenGL to be cross-platform. But then you can actually cross-compile if you configure your compiler correctly. Basically, if you're still targeting the same processor (in this case, x86), you just have to link the correct library version for the target platform and use the correct exe format. So it's actually possible to compile a program from one system to several others.

But then, like you said, GM doesn't actually compile its games. It just sticks the game data to the runner. If they had all the different platforms at the same version and they kept the format the same (or close enough that platform-specific data could be included at build time without taking too long) they could just carry all the runners and let you generate an executable for every platform GM supports. If they did the cross-platform testing then it wouldn't be such a stretch to just hope your game worked on the other platforms (for most games anyway). This would be really nice.

In fact, when you think about it, instant play games shouldn't need to be re-compiled or re-uploaded to run on a mac. From my understanding, when you hit instant play you only download the game data which should be completely portable. If a mac runner is created then it could easily be "glued" to this data the same way the pc runner is. Yet another reason interpreted languages are awesome

Game Maker on the Mac would be awesome. Only a few weeks away potentially too.

Hi, ive done a search through this forum, but cant find this...
Where can i get the mac version of gm from - i see there are a few beta versions around, but cant find a link
and could i run that in windows?
the reason is im trying to make a gamefor someone else to run on their mac comp.

thanks.

you have to be a mac beta tester to get the mac version, and hint the name. No, the mac version does not work on windows.

i see.
What about gm8? Does that not work on mac??
the reason im asking is i saw a pic of gm8, and it was on a mac

GM8 and GM:Mac are two (moderately) different things, so far as I know.

I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that GM for Mac was actually GM7 for Mac. Probably because they started development on GM for Mac back before GM8 was even nearing readiness for a beta version.

EDIT:

Yep:

http://glog.yoyogames.com/?p=544

The title of this glog post is "GM 7.0 Mac Beta II Released".

The most disappointing thing with GM:Mac will be there non-alignment with GM 8. Combine that with the likelihood that GM7:Mac won't be able to read GM8:Windows' GMK files.

This means if one wants to develop for both Windows and Mac, one needs to develop in GM7 format, thus losing the usage of GM8's sprite editor, proper png support, and new code editor.

Or maintain two different sources.

If ever there was a time for a properly supported YYG's utility to convert or save as GM7 (GMK) format, this is it.

Let's hope Ismavatar is scouring the new GMK format, as we speak.

NakePaulToats: I doubt YoYo Games are stupid enough to do that!

I also don't think they will do it, but I really don't understand why you think it would be stupid of them to do so.

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-dev/
and
http://code.google.com/p/winchain/


That's not because they're not allowed. Flash is just terrible for portable systems anyways (some flash games lag on my computer and I don't recall the iphone having a nVidia GeForce 9800), and Java would be strange in safari because the iphone's keypad isn't external. It's software based.


http://www.devkitpro.org/

iphone-dev and winchain are third party. In order to distribute stuff on the iPhone, you need to use the app store or limit your audience to people who've jailbroken their iPhones.

Same thing goes for devkit pro. It's third party, anything you make with it is homebrew, it requires special modifications to your DS and/or special third party hardware.

Also, those quotes are from way back in the topic.

Game Maker 7 isn't written in C++, which is why the Mac version is coming along so well. Additionally, since Lazarus/FPC is being used, GM7:Mac could be reverse ported back to Windows as well as easily ported to Linux, as savage has done.

I have no idea if Game Maker 8 was moved to C++ or not, but with the runner being in C++, they would have to be rather careful to make it portable and still run quite well on Windows and Mac, much less Win/Mac/Linux.

I suspect that GM7 and GM8 are going to remain separate branches for quite some time, and both will be supported as the latest product, simply because of the incompatibility of GM7 and GM8.

Additionally, it is quite possible that issues with PNGs and such may be fixed already since Lazarus/FPC uses a proper PNG implementation unlike Borland Delphi.

The only way to find out is to try the betas though.

In theory, it should be possible to port the GM7 runner to the iPhone using Lazarus, as well as to Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Android.

Hey, the public beta is out.

And it's pretty glitchy... Will they have time to fix all the bugs before the end of the year?

Yea, Flash runs so terribly on the iPhone platform that a Youtube app would be unthinkable! Oh wait...

I just tried the public beta, and the interface is HOR-RI-BLE. Just some quick things I noticed after using it for 3 minutes:

- No button continuity (rounded/square buttons on the same form)
- Button text is not centered
- Labels are abbreviated/not capitalized (what is hor. speed?)
- Text inputs for single line items (like X position) are multi-line
- Resource menu font is blurry (I don't know if it's anti-aliased badly or what)
- Check boxes that turn into +/- signs when a resource is added
- Same check boxes are next to Game Information, Global Game settings (things that should not be expandable)
- Extremely light interface background is jarring when compared to other Leopard applications
- Buttons are very small
- No separation of toolbar from main interface
- Dock icon is not "Macified" at all - i.e. very blurry/low res

Some other usability issues:

- Clicking the red button in the upper left hand corner closes the application (as opposed to selecting "Quit" from the menu)
- Runner takes anywhere from 30-60 seconds to open up, and asks me if I want to open it every time
- The application includes the runner in the package contents, which makes the simple sprite moving to the right application I made 40 mb (this can be avoided by just extracting the .g70 file and distributing that)

Things I am happy about:

- Menu is actually on the menu bar and not on the UI toolbar (this is the "Mac Way" to do things. For an example on how to do this wrong, look at Matlab on the Mac)
- Maximize button functions correctly

I think that porting GM to the Mac is a good thing and I'm happy YYG would put the time into catering to Mac users. However, I'd like to be able to use GM for more than 10 minutes and not have my eyes fall out so I really hope the UI is updated before its official release.

This one shows a problem with how the program was made. Documents aren't used how they should be, so you can only have one open at once. This is a major problem in my eyes.


Not for me. It shows the registration screen almost instantly, and doesn't ask me if I want to open it first.


That's an idea I came up with when the first beta was released, and I think it's an excellent idea for GMC distribution. Outside of the GMC, people are less likely to care about the 40MB file size, especially when it compresses to 10MB (before Beta 3, it was 20MB and compressed to 5. I wonder what changed...).


Or GIMP *shudder* (though it has an excuse I guess. X11, *shudder* ). While that is done right, a problem is that when you run your game it says "YoYO70 Game Player". At the very least, it should say the name of the game being played.


Actually it doesn't. It fills the application to fit to the screen, this is the Windows way. On Mac, the maximise button should make the window the size it needs to be to fit everything in, or the size of the screen, which ever is smaller.
From a Mac point of view it's wrong, but I don't want it changed .

This is actually a good idea, now that you mention it. GM users will already have access to the runner.


You're right - I guess I should have mentioned "functions how I want it to." For some applications I like the Mac behavior, like Safari's "maximize," but for most I hate it.

If you double click the runner, it should (it did in earlier versions) give you a file open prompt. Select your .g70 file and it will run. I hope it becomes the norm for Mac distribution on the GMC.


Same here. But the iMac screens start at 20 inches, and my MacBook screen is just 13. The OS wasn't really designed to run on a screen that small. Large screens mean you aren't worried about stretching the window to it's fullest to make sure you can see everything. There are plenty of things in the Mac OS I prefer over Windows, and plenty of things in the Windows OS that I prefer over the Mac way. But this is one I'm not sure about.

An empty .g70 file is around 370 KB, so this is a great distribution method.

Also, am I correct in assuming the runner is included with .exe GM files in Windows? If so, why is the runner nearly 30 MB in GM for Mac packages?

The runner is included in Windows exe files. I'm guessing the Mac runner has debug info still in it (or something like that) that would cause it to be that big.

It's not the same runner. The reason the Mac runner is so big is because everything is included. For example, GM uses Direct X in Windows, something you need to install separately. I expect the drawing done with the Mac version is all inclusive, to help with portability (apparently it compiles and runs on linux, says the dev). Another reason is PowerPC support. Snow Leopard uses less than half of the amount of harddrive space Leopard does, and that's mostly due to dropping PowerPC support. GM for Mac is (should be) PowerPC capable.

The drawing in the Mac version is using OpenGL IIRC. OpenGL is pretty much a cross-platform version of Direct3D, the drawing part of DirectX. Including a software rendering engine would also be way too slow, and probably wouldn't add that much size either.

PowerPC support does sound like a plausible reason for at least part of the extra size though.

Where can I download the GM4MAC Beta? I keep going here, http://gm4mac.yoyogames.com/my_view_page.php, which is the same relative spot where I downloaded GM8 for Windows, but it's not there! At least, not that I can see. Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for any help!

Register, and Click on the "Get" link...I suppose

That's how I got GM8 for Windows, but I can't find 'Get' when I go for the Mac one.

The server has been down. Sandy said he wanted the new server installed by this weekend, but you may have to wait a little longer.

So... can anyone help me? I still haven't been able to find it on my own...