Asylum Dev Diary 109 – GMS 2.3 Part 5
Beta 10 of GMS2.3 was released on Thursday (2nd July) and reading through the changelog I had high hopes. And in fact there were promising steps made. Asylum didn’t run normally but in the debugger it started to throw some errors that I could actually address.
These errors, unsurprisingly, were a result of the way arrays have been changed in GMS2.3. My code from GMS2.2 obviously used the old style so I would need to go through and update them accordingly.
Unfortunately correcting these issues didn’t help the game run any better and I was back to the game silently crashing 🙁
So, I decided to contact YoYoGames support directly, rather than trying the beta forum. They got back to me very quickly and explained the issue they were seeing, which was a combination of more array issues and object persistence errors at their end. So, I would need to wait for the next beta release.
Amazingly, on Friday afternoon I got an email from YoyoGames saying that they had released a new beta and that they had successfully played my game for a few minutes. This was exciting news and I raced to install the new version.
True enough the game now runs! Hurray. Development can continue.
And with that I settled down and performed a lot of necessary updates to get the game code up to GMS 2.3 standards and squash a few other bugs that have arisen from other 2.3 changes and enhancements:
- Refactor array code to use new style: array[0][0]
- Update Load/Save routines to handle the changes in array styles
- Reorganise and consolidate scripts for easier management
- Remove redundant scripts – left over from other addon imports that are no longer used
- Reorganise Objects – adding and adjusting groupings to make it easier to locate certain objects
- Remove and replace objects as sprites where needed to cut down on object count substantially – as per previous blog post.
- Adjusted mouse cursor to display on the gui layer to avoid drift when the camera zooms in
- Fix pause menu issue and add hover effect to pause menu items

With development now properly back up and running I will get back to my list of things to do. And, I can start looking into GMS Sequences.