YoYo Games Glog

Thanks for all of your entries (more than 500)

The deadline for entries has now passed

I will create a short list and Mark Overmars and I will decide on the winner(s) as soon as possible.

I expect we will be able to make an announcement this weekend .

Many of you will have noticed that the site has become a bit unreliable lately, especially at weekends.  The good news is we have a significant program of improvements under way.  Later this week we will upgrade the two main servers including a considerable increase in memory on both of them.  The Database server in particular will get 4 times as much memory as before.

We’re currently working on a major upgrade to the software on the site.  Most significantly this will mean upgrading to Rails 2.3 from Rails 1.1.  We’re anticipating a major performance and reliability boost from this as well as significant improvements to the Search capabilities on the main site.  If we have the time we will also introduce a new version of the Beast software that drives the YYG Forums.

@Trollsplatterer has diligently trawled through the GMC, the YYG Forums and the Helpdesk to produce a three page list of bugs and feature requests…most of these will be implemented as part of that change.

There will be no major changes to the look and feel of the website, though there WILL be one important new feature that I’ll talk about in a separate post soon.

Finally, we will add a new distribution and payment  mechanism to the website that will allow us to launch Game Maker 8 WITHOUT Softwrap ….thought some of you would be pleased about that !!

I’m pleased to say that the YoYo Games Forums are back online.  Performance should be much improved, though we have disabled some of the search temporarily.  We have a major program of work on the site under way and we will include an upgrade to the forum software as part of this, so expect more improvements before the end of the year.  Many thanks for you patience.

Some of you may have noticed that the GMC Forums went off-line for a few hours today.  Turns out there was a LOT of old backup and other non essential stuff clogging the hard drive.  Clayton got out of bed and fixed it for you….so the GMC is back up and running and should stay that way !!  NEXT, we’ll get the YYG Forums up and running later today … hopefully !!

Apologies to all of you who have missed the forums on the main website…. however we have some good news !! We’ve written a bunch of new code for them and have ordered a new, dedicated server just for these forums.  As soon as the server is ready (Hopefully by the weekend) we’ll get the YoYo Games forums back up and running better than before.  Sorry for the long delay !

We reckon the Game Maker logo is looking a bit “Tired” (thanks to http://twitter.com/Brad_T for reminding us !).  SO with the launch of  Game Maker 8 we’ve decided it would be a good time to have a new logo.

We don’t have a lot of time to get this integrated with some of the Website work that we’re doing, so I need to severely limit the time available to submit your designs.

We’re looking for a design that is more modern, communicates the vitality and excitement of what Game Maker stands for and fits better with the rest of the YoYo Games Branding.

Deadline for submissions is 9 am (GMT) MONDAY, OCTOBER 26th (i.e. four weeks from Today).  I need a high quality BITMAP (minimum size 640 X 480), winner will be announced by November 1st and the prize is $250 (you MUST have a PayPal account to receive the prize money).  YoYo Games will own the rights to the winning logo, so do not submit any entries of you don’t agree to YoYo Games having complete and absolute ownership of your competition entry.

Submit your entries to newlogo@yoyogames.com

The Five “runners-up” will get a free copy of Game Maker 8 Pro.

The Release Candidate of Game Maker 8.0 is now available for testing. You can download it, as before, through the bug reporting system at http://gm8.yoyogames.com.

For a list of changes made, see http://gm.yoyogames.com/news/changes.html.

Please report bugs (no wished) through the bug reporting system. Please follow the following rules:

- Only bug reports. We no longer want to hear about wishes.
- First check the file at http://gm.yoyogames.com/news/bugs.html to make sure the bug is new.
- Also search the existing bug reports to check whether it has already been reported before.
- Always include a clear description on how to reproduce the bug, preferably including a small .gmk file.

As promised, there’s a new Beta of Game Maker 4 Mac now available  HERE .

It’s a bit bigger than I was expecting, but still substantially smaller than the previous release.

We’ve added a more Mac like look and feel to all of the dialogue boxes and there is now a “Window” menu option on the main screen, which lists the currently open Windows and allows you to bring that selected window to the front.

Finally we’ve corrected quite a few, but not all, of the known bugs.

We much appreciate your help and support…so please keep up the good work testing the Mac Beta….it’s getting closer to being a finished product !

We’re not quite ready to release the next Beta yet, but I’ve been playing with the latest candidate and I want to give you all an update.

1. We’ve added more of a Mac look and feel.  This has been a lot of work as almost every screen needed updating.  Here’s an example….nothing radical. I’m a Mac user myself and I appreciate the subtle changes, hope you do too ?

2. On a more significant note (technically speaking) we’ve made substantial progress on the size of the files.  The Maker is down to less than 20MB (unzipped) from 56MB and the Runner is now more manageable at less than 8MB (down from 40MB  !).  We can make them even smaller by removing PPC support, but we’ve chosen not to do that yet.

3. We’re working this week on clearing the backlog of bugs…at least the major ones…. and hope to get another, much more useful Beta out to you next week.

Many thanks to all of you for testing so far, hopefully we’re now getting much closer to something we can all be proud of and bring more Mac users (like me !!) into the Game Maker family !!

Been a long time coming and I’m worried that we may not have hit the quality bar …BUT…I’m really pleased to open up the GM for Mac Beta to a much wider audience.

What we have is a TIME LIMITED PUBLIC BETA.  It’ll expire soon because I expect we’ll need a final beta release after this one before we’re all happy with it  !

What we need NOW is plenty of you Apple Fan People (I’m one !) to start testing the beta.  Please DON’T upload any games to YoYo as the virus checker will reject them..but PLEASE report bugs to the download site.

The link is HERE please use this to download (the tab is called RUNNER) as well as to report bugs.

Enjoy.