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.

GM for Mac – Soon…ish

In Sandy’s latest post on the official YoYo Games glog, there has been some discussion about the on-going Mac version of Game Maker that was first expected to be released as a beta way back in March.

According to Sandy, he has an alpha version of the software running on his mac right now and it’s ‘going very well.’ Apparrently there are still a few bugs that need to be worked out with the Lazerus team before its release, but Sandy hopes that it will be available soon (as a beta), possibly as early as next month. He does however say ‘don’t quote me on it’, so no guarantees at this point.

As we understand it, the Mac version will be identical to the Windows version of Game Maker in every way except that the former will lack support for third party extensions and DLLs as these run only on Windows. What this means is most games built to run on Macs will run fine with the Windows counterpart, but some games built for Windows that do use the extensions and DLL functionality won’t run on macs. There is no information at this point on whether an equivalent functionality will eventually be built-into the program for mac users.

It is also unclear whether each GM program will allow you to create binaries for both Windows and Mac or whether you will need to physically have a Mac and Game Maker for Mac to create a Mac version of the game (or vice versa). The licensing of the software also has not yet been revealed, there is still speculation as to whether the purchase of 1 license will grant use of both GM for Windows and Mac or whether users will have to purchase each software package separately.

C++ Runner, GMac, & iPlay update

Almost certainly the result of recent criticisms toward the company, the official glog has been updated twice for the first time in about a month to give progress updates on the current Game Maker related projects.

The glog’s latest post announces that a (limited) private beta of the C++ runner should be available sometime next week. The post also hints to indicate that there are no definite plans to release the C++ runner in the near future even if it works well now and throughout beta testing. Also, for those of you debating whether GM versions will in fact be available for other devices and operating systems, The post refers to Game Maker running on “other platforms” as a plural, almost certainly guaranteeing at least plans for other systems.

Lastly (and somewhat unfortunately), the Mac port of Game Maker has pretty much come to a dead stop for now. Sandy says they’ve “hit a barrier with teh Lazarus toolset” and that very little progress (if any) has been made on the Mac beta. So in other words, don’t expect a beta anytime soon (even though it is already a few months late).

In other news, YoYo Games managed to keep their word this time :). The Firefox 3 compatible Instant Play plug-in (being referred to as iPlay on this site) is now available for download on the YoYo Games website.

Runner & Maker Info

According to a recent post by Sandy Duncan, Game Maker 8 will most likely be re-written in C++, making development for multiple platforms much easier. For now they are simply working on re-writing the runner and porting the ‘maker’ to Mac.

The main goal with the C++ runner is to essentially copy all the functionality of the current runner. When that has been accomplished, additional functionality may be added such as the ability to obfuscate the code, making decompilation of executables much more difficult. The main reason for using C++ Sandy says is for its portability, and not so much for increased performance.

Sandy also notes that there is only a “slight chance” the C++ runner will run games ‘faster’. Since the C++ runner was announced, this ‘chance’ was one of the main reasons the community has been so supportive of the idea.