64Digits Hacked

For the last few months, 64Digits has been down due to switching their server. 

Now, it seems as if someone has hacked the site and replaced the index.php file with one from the gay shock site Meatspin.       It seems as if its back to the normal outdated message from FSX, but this also happened a few times during this hack.   

Until updated, don’t visit 64Digits. It is recording IP addresses and other information.

InstantPlay Clones Come to the GMC’s Forefront

The growing popularity of InstantPlay clones, and the heated discussions surrounding them, has finally forced the GMC staff to take action. In the past few weeks a slew of InstantPlay-type plugins of wildly differing qualities have been promoted at the Game Maker Community. After several days of public fighting among rival developers and critics, longtime GMC mod KC LC hid all of the plugin topics and created a single topic with a notice explaining why they were removed and that the staff was discussing the issue internally. She said the reasons were “a general concern about security issues, errors, and the growing flame war among supporters.”

The worst offender in security issues, Revel Quick Play, had several proposed and working exploits demonstrated. The creator, Revel, seemed to largely ignore concerns and kept posting buggy new versions. Several members besides the Author (including Smarty and NakedPaulToast) called him out in this issue. Revel did not address the issues. This, along with other problems, prompted another member, Caniac, to declare that he would create his own rival plugin following the same flawed protocol handler model (despite much better existing alternatives). His solution never materialized, despite large amounts of promotion pre hoc.

After KC LC hid the topics and announced that a policy was being decided upon, an extremely vocal debate ensued in the topic between various plugin developers, critics, and members of the community at large. While there was near-universal agreement that a competitor to YYG’s InstantPlay was needed, many members expressed strong concerns about security. The general consensus among consumers was that they did not want a ‘collect-them-all’ approach with dozens of plugins. They wanted a simple plugin that would work outside of YoyoGame’s own website. As the topic degenerated into a large-scale flamewar, KC LC hid that topic as well and created another notification post today, this time in a pre-closed topic.

The staff have not yet published their official decision.

GMac Beta – Having Troubles

Unfortuantely I haven’t had a chance to test out the Mac version of Game Maker that arrived in my inbox this week, however there is word out that other registered testers are having difficulties running the program.

Brian Laclair reports:

The GMac Beta was released, with no luck.

It seems as if on Sunday morning (around 6:00AM EST), the GMac Runner beta was sent to around 50 GM users.  Everyone [unverified] has reported the application file has a bug which prevents the user to select which file to run.

This beta however does reveal that most of the program runs on SDL ( http://www.libsdl.org/ ) which in the future will allow the GM Runner to be ported to OS’s such as Linux, Windows CE, BeOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX.

Sandy has yet to reply to any of the error reports on the glog. 

Another user who wished to remain anonymous sent an e-mail to let us know that

So far it seems that the runner is the only thing they released and I haven’t figured out how it works yet. I’ll let you know how well it works if I figure it out.

 I’ll try to test it out sometime this week and if I have better luck, I’ll be sure to report back with screenshots.

GMAC Beta – Signup now

Announced today on the YoYo Games glog was the upcoming private beta program for the highly anticipated Mac version of Game Maker.

The testing will start out as a closed private beta that users can signup for by e-mailing applebeta@yoyogames.com with their contact details, GMC and YYG usernames. The beta program is due to begin by the end of next month and it may be some time before a public beta or final version will be out.
The YoYo Games team is currently looking for those who have a Mac running OS X Leopard, Windows only users need not apply. As for hackintoshes and emulators, it couldn’t hurt to try but I doubt there will be any promising results.

Sandy Duncan also commented to say that although the Mac port should run well on UNIX based systems such as those running BSD, there are no current plans to provide support for UNIX or Linux at this time.

Yet Another InstantPlay Plugin

James Rhodes from roket-games.com has released a Firefox-only “InstantPlay” plugin much like Yoyogames.com‘s InstantPlay. This one has the capability to run any Windows application (not just Game Maker games) and allows you to embed a play button on any web page.

Installation is quick and smooth, and the progress indicator on ‘buffering’ games far less obnoxious than YYG’s, but one still has to wonder about the security implications of a plugin that allows arbitrary binaries to run with a single click.

A previous InstantPlay alternative is the Java-based GMBed (v2.0 beta released July ’08). Covac Software also published GmX, an ActiveX-based system, which has had no apparent activity since ’07.