These days theres a shit ton of programs and engines out there that let you make games.
Some do a better job than GM, while others…wellAnyway, I think those on the fence about GM should just get out of the yard and move on.I don't foresee any positive future for GM and expect that their methods will begin to get shady soon.So why not check out a few places and see the alternatives.http://www.moddb.com/engineshttp://www.ambrosine.com/index.phpSome even have multiplatform support, something GM is kind of behind on.Personally I like GLBasic, based in opengl and cross platform to nearly everything, however thats expensive for some.Then there's the Unreal Development Kit which is free to use and has a liberal license policy in regards to selling your games.I'd recommend Depths move on to a new engine so we could see it on a handheld ;)
Lets prepose that some move on from GM to green pastures.
Posted by Scott_AW on April 18, 2011, 12:19 p.m.
Comments
@Scott_AW: The same/similar operating system maybe, but usually rather different architectures. Linux is definitely picking up and really coming into it's own, which is nice to see, however it is still a way before it becomes the PC gaming powerhouse, that will belong to Windows for a fair while in my opinion, especially with OpenGL lagging behind DirectX a bit.
Given that most toolkits and libraries that are cross platform tend to be cross platform across OSs and on similar devices, rather than across OSs and devices (aka a library will usually support PCs first and foremost, whether they be Windows, MacOS or *nix, or they may be for mobile devices, across say Windows Mobile, Android and iOS), development tends not to be simplified that much just by having the same OS as a base for the target devices.Anyhow, a tad more on topic: GM is good for what it does and for what it is, it's good for simpler games, it's good for rapid prototyping of games/programs (pretty much all I use it for nowadays). It's not good for making computationally intensive games and it isn't suitable for cross platform development (yet, yoyo seems to be gearing up for cross platform action). There isn't a whole lot in it's league for what it does, given that it is more or less up against engines like DarkBASIC. It has a great IDE, as much as people complain about it, most comparable languages just offer a code window and a simple project manager, as opposed to GM's IDE which allows for importing, automatically loads it for you and in some cases allows editing of resources from the IDE.TL;DR: I'll personally keep using GM to rapidly prototype stuff, but I doubt I will ever make anything in it again.Also, GLBASIC actually looks pretty decent, it seems to offer a fair bit, compared to most other flavours of BASIC (BlitzBASIC, DarkBASIC, etc).I'm actually working on a rapid prototyping framework for my graphics engine.