GM 8.1 Announcement

by BRET HUDSON

YOYO GAMES GLOG — A week ago (that's 7 days ;) ) YoYo Games announced the upcoming Game Maker 8.1. Currently, there is no release date, but a free upgrade will be available from GM 8.0 Pro to GM 8.1 Standard* until June 1st, 2011, which means that GM 8.1 will be released in either April or May.

*GM Pro has been renamed to GM Standard. GM Lite will retain it's name.

Pricing
Game Maker 8.1 marks the second time in GM's history that it will have a price increase. This time, however, it will not increase a mere $5, it's going to jump up $15. That would be a total of $39.99 for this product. You may think this is quite a bit of money, but, when you compare it to other professional products like Adobe CS5, it's VERY cheap. The reason why the price is going up is due to the addition of staff members at YoYo Games.

If you own Game Maker 8.0 Pro, you can upgrade for FREE to Game Maker 8.1 Standard (the new name for Pro). If you upgraded from Game Maker 7.0 Pro to Game Maker 8.0 Pro for free, you can upgrade a second time and save even more money!

Store Publishing
YoYo Games will be soon releasing their YoYo Game Store, which allows you to upload games and earn money by players purchasing your games. However, in order to do this, you MUST own Game Maker 8.1 Standard. You gotta remember, it costs money to make money, but usually the money made is greater than the money spent!

Features
Direct from YoYo Games Glog:

• No more Softwrap!
• Changed room editor RIGHT mouse click priorities. Menu for normal, CTRL+RMB for delete
• You can now RIGHT CLICK an object and EDIT it from within the Room Editor
• You can now use the mouse wheel to ZOOM in/out in the Room editor.
  
• Middle mouse button PANS around the room
• A customisable background grid has been applied to the room editor.
• The Image Editor has been updated to use the mouse wheel and middle button for better zooming and panning.
• You can now PAN around inside the PATH editor using the middle mouse button.
• You can now change the default background colour for rooms (when no ROOM background has been set)
• You can now disable background room filling, so you can see the background GRID when no ROOM colour has been set
• A new and improved NEWS system, bringing together news and tech tips from across the community.
• New, more secure .EXE encryption.
• New GML commands such as draw_self() and d3d_light_define_ambient.
• Some custom YoYo extensions brought into the fold, such as os_type and os_device to aid multiplatform coding.
• Better 2D and 3D support with a 24bit ZBuffer and faster rendering.
• Improved code editor features include:



• Faster rendering
• Block TAB’ing
• Better accented character support
• Easier to use Code Completion support
• Customisable background colours.

Closing Game Maker 8.1 Lite and Standard will be coming out soon, so be prepared! The YoYo Games team has worked hard in 2010 and so far in 2011 on making this a reality, and it's almost here! Put your hands up for the crew over at YoYo Games! We really appreciate your hard work so we can use this program, and we hope GM 8.1 is as successful as ever!