Post news Report RSS Engine change & new 3D Editor

Changing from GM 8.1 to Game Maker Studio. I revamped the 3D editor to make it more user-friendly and to make it compactible with the GM:Studio engine.

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It's sometimes very frustrating for me to not be able to work on Celaria (or game-projects in general) because of school. :(
So, the whole development is very slow.

So, what is the first major update/change?
Well, i changed the Engine from Game Maker 8.1 to Game Maker Studio.
Why? (Especially because i was mostly against GM:Studio in the past)
There are a couple of factors.

  1. I noticed a strange behaviour of Game Makers rendering engine in the 8.1 Version. The game runs at 60 FPS, but every 2 or 3 Seconds i get a little lag/jaggyness which interrupts the rendering. It doesn't affect the gameplay at all, but it is extremely noticeable. People which are used to 30 FPS gameplay probably arent going to notice it. But People which are prefering 60FPS over 30, are going to notice this. For a longer time, i was thinking that this was something with my graphicscard, but after testing it on different PCs, this was a general issue. I was hoping that Studio doesn't have this issue anymore.
  2. Studio has better Performance than GM 8.1. The "entry barrier" in terms of performance can be lowered.
  3. Support. GM 8.1 seems to have issues with Windows 8. GM 8.1 isn't getting updates anymore, so if in the future some new Update of Windows 8.1 breaks GM 8.1 completely, i'm pretty much screwed.
  4. Shader capabilities. This allows me to make the game look & feel better.

The first video is nothing special. I'm just showing, that the basic 3D Engine of Celaria is running in GM:Studio. (It's a silly video, i know. Don't judge me.)

The problem with the "porting" from 8.1 to Studio is, that i have to rewrite a lot of things to make it compactible with Studio. The rendering was one of that things that i had to rewrite.But also the Loading of Maps, the external loading of custom assets, etc...GM:Studio is sandboxed which i have to get used to it.The next video is the new 3D Map editor which was also ported to GM:studio to make it compactible
With GM:Studio.
As you can see, the editor also looks different. The old editor used the context-menus to edit the entitys in the scene. Because studio didn't support context-menus anymore, i was forced to change the whole control of the editor.

Also at the end of the Video you can see that the game uses now Polygon based collisions.
Previously the game used sprite-based collision checks on the xy axis. Because of the sprites, i needed to have a coordinate system with a very high resolution.Something like 1 meter = 32 or 64 Pixels. The less pixels per meter had, the less accuracy i got for the collisions.
This lead to some problems on the rendering side.The z-buffer wasn't able to achieve a high precision because of the very high numbers in the coordinate system. Now, because of the Polygons, i can scale the whole scene down. (Something like 1 Meter = 1 Pixel)without loosing collision-accuracy. This should also fix some precision issues in the z-buffer.

That was all for now. :)
See you in the next update.

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Jez_Huntsman
Jez_Huntsman

I hope this move benefits you and good luck on juggling school work with game development ;)

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