Ok so if any of you remember me, you'll know this will be a looong post :P I was with you guys for about a week and then got activated to Baghdad and lemme tell you I've had plenty of time to scheme up new directions to take GM in.

SOooo the stuff I'll talk about:

* The War

* The GM Interactive Tutorial Suite (Releasing this weekend)

* The GM *.* Exporter (WIP)

* The COIN Lab (Concept)

The War

"War…war never changes." It doesn't. I saw/experienced some of the worst shit in my life over there, but am also more humbled than I've ever been. My primary on-base job was a network admin and tech-fixer. Managing a network is exciting…managing a network while getting the crap bombed out of you is about the scariest thing you can imagine, no matter what's going on around you you have to stay focused. Without a network, you don't have communication. Without communication you are all sitting ducks.

'Course some of the things I had to deal with where borderline retarded. Once I was called in to fix a computer and the first thing I noticed was the cd tray was sticky. I asked the sergeant first class why the hell it was sticky, not really wanting to know. "I spilled coffee on it". Oh ok. Come to find out, he was using the cd tray as his coffee holder. Seriously guy?

Anyways definitely a humbling experience, being in a 3rd world country and all. The country (baghdad anyways) is so poor that trash and dead animals literally get piled up hiiiiigh on the side of the roads. The pic above is in one of the repair missions I went on…flew just to run some CAT-5 lol. Def a good experience though…

The GM Interactive Tutorial Suite

Created entirely in GM it is easily the most complicated project I've ever worked on (even more than LISA) and definitely the work I'm most proud of. I'll explain it a bit more when I release it in a day or so, but basically it is GM in run-time mode and a framework for something even bigger. There are two basic "modes" to it, tutorial and sandbox.

In "Tutorial" mode you load a course and pick a lesson, and the program will walk you through whatever the tutorial topic is about. The tutorial will create the objects for you and allow you to play around with them using GML - while it's running - by modifying any of its events, code, and properties. And this is oversimplifying it as you can do a lot more. Essentially, it is GM in it's entirety, GUI and all…but while its running. You'll see what I mean in a day or so, it mimics the Torque Game Builder if you've ever played with that (to which GM is far superior IMO, GM is probably the best tool Ive used).

Sandbox mode is just an extension of that, and allows you to quickly prototype code and see it happen live. So for example, say you have an idea for your ai. Well instead of coding, running, modfying and repeating you simply code and see it happen in real time…this saves you a lot of time! Everything in the following screenshot is fully functional, from creating objects, to renaming them, to editing the code and events…I want to create a complete course before I release it to give you something to try it on.

The GM *.* Exporter

After I create a few tutorial courses, I will code the GM *.* Exporter, which uses the Tutorial Suite as the engine. Because everything is created at runtime, I'll be able to export all the created code and variables into any language using an interpreter. So say you want to export your game to flash, well you select the flash interpreter and it will convert all the GML code into flash code, or java, or whatever. It will turn into a game creation tool in it of itself. Pretty fun stuff. This will lead into my third project, which I'm keeping under wraps for now.

The COIN Lab

This is just a concept I'm working out. COIN stands for "Coding Over the InterNet" and is a utility that will allow you to collaborate on a GM project over the net. I want to create this before the GM *.* Exporter to get some help coding it from anyone who wants to help. Should be easy if theory holds. Apparently m$ already created something similar for documents, but this will be tailored specifically for GM and will allow multiple people to work on the same game at the same time. Again pretty fun stuff. I will also code this in GM. I could easily do this in VB or something and probably should, but coding it in GM makes it…oh I don't know…fun…