Asylum Dev Diary 105 – GMS 2.3
Finally I’ve got my hands on GameMaker Studio 2.3 Beta. Unfortunately it has not gone very well.
Some new commands in GML have clashed with variable names in the game. This isn’t too much of a trouble and I was able to locate them and alter accordingly.
The mouse interactions that occur when the player is close to an object that can be examined/collected no longer worked. The process uses a few collision routines to check if an interaction is possible:
- Is the player close enough?
- Is the mouse over the object?
- Is the object locked?
If all of those are OK then the icon changes and the mouse button can be used to perform the assigned task. However, in GMS2.3, and after a lot of head scratching, it turns out the collision_point command has to be checked against the required objects ID, and not just the object reference (as per GMS2.2). So, this little issue is now fixed as well.
An as yet unsolved bug is that when starting the game for the first time and going to the first room/level the framerate drops to 7fps for about 5 seconds before everything settles down and the game jumps to 640+ fps. I currently don’t know the cause for this issue but I’ve submitted a bug report.
The second huge bug is that the debugger/profiler in GMS2.3 crashes if I attempt to run it on the game after the main menus. This has also been reported. This issue makes it impossible to find a cause of the previous issue.
Anyway, for the moment I will go back to 2.2 (I updated the base code) and will check on the 2.3 version when an update is posted.
What else have I actually made progress on over the last week:
I decided to do some experimenting with the transitions from the game to a flashback segment. I have now put together the final sequence which involves the camera zooming into the player, and he in turn looks up holding his head in pain (sound effects later). Then it fades to red and on to the flashback. It looks a lot better now the sequence is in place properly.
And, as I had worked out how to do camera zooming (which was tricky because of the lighting engine) I now do slight zoom in when a dialogue sequence is being performed to help focus on the characters speaking.
The torch is no longer reliable 🙂 It will flicker out from time to time plunging the player into darkness. Fortunately a few whacks of the torch (click right mouse button) sorts out the batteries and brings it back to life. It’s just a nice little feature that makes things a little more tense.
The players width (shoulders) has been tweaked so that he has the same proportions as everybody else in the game (opps).
I’ve added stamina to the game to avoid allowing the player to run all the time. When the player is running a thin circle will start to deplete around the mouse cursor. Once it’s all gone the player will not be able to run until it has been restored (red circle filling up).
That’s about it this time. Stay safe.