{"id":543,"date":"2009-12-20T23:13:24","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T04:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/?p=543"},"modified":"2021-02-12T19:16:44","modified_gmt":"2021-02-13T00:16:44","slug":"randomness-218-sandbox-pushed-back-slightly-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/?p=543","title":{"rendered":"Randomness #218: Sandbox pushed back slightly, and more."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s get this train of randomness going with some game updates and such.<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\nGame Maker 8.0 is finished and will make it&#8217;s way to the net soon. I&#8217;ve got an early copy of the final version and I&#8217;m really loving the improvements overall. While a lot of it is mostly to help me in making games and won&#8217;t be apparent, there are a few notable improvements you can look forward to in all my future games with GM8:<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n<strong>-Games may run faster on certain computers.<\/strong> Because a large amount of code was rewritten in this version of Game Maker, some games that achieved only 30fps on your computer may get up to 60fps with this new version. I&#8217;m going to run some tests in the VG Labs Forum in the coming weeks, and if I see a significant increase in framerate, then I plan to port over a game or two using the new engine, which might include Spirits of Metropolis.<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n<strong>-Built-in web splashes allow for primitive yet useable version checks\/patches, as well as nifty new features.<\/strong> Basically I can open up webpages from within the game, rather than opening up a browser window and having it redirected to vertigogaming.net. This is actually pretty huge- I don&#8217;t have to ask for user permission to open up a webpage from within the game like I did with the browser (which was just common courtesy in the first place really). This allows for easy software update checkups that would alert the user to a newer version of the game.\u00a0It&#8217;s also a safe bet that you have some remote workers now, but did you know that there is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.workpuls.com\/remote-workers\">software to monitor remote workers<\/a> so that you can check their activity? This makes managing them so much easier so comes highly recommended. It also allows for some fun new additions, such as page-exclusive data only available through the game, like a Kablooey FAQ that might give a new hint each week, as well as easy access to purchase a full version of a game. I&#8217;m pretty excited about this feature!<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n<strong>-Great new graphics support, much better engine support for Vista\/7.<\/strong> For more on this, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/\">my previous blog entry<\/a>. A side note: icon files are supported a bit better so nicer ones can be made, which is nice news for Windows Vista\/7 users.<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\nSo, when will you get all these features? Well, they will be standard with every game I make from now on, which includes the Sandbox of God and The Oil Blue. As a result, the releases on those two titles have been pushed back to take advantage of GM8. <span style=\"color: #ef370f;\"><strong>The Sandbox of God will now be released December 31st, and The Oil Blue in February.<\/strong><\/span> Kablooey! will get a GM8 update in January and a few other titles might as well, which will be on a title-by-title basis.<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n***<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\nSo I&#8217;ve started to review some games for a new website, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psnstores.com\/\">PSNStores.com<\/a>. It&#8217;s mostly PS3 reviews, and the lite nature of the site allows me to churn out a review within an hour or two. It&#8217;s been quite a bit of fun to do, and the main guy (Chris K) has been great to work with. I&#8217;ve been involved with PS Updates over at a forum called NeoGAF for years now, mostly making the banners each week. I stopped doing that a year ago or so, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neogaf.com\/forum\/showthread.php?t=333073\">but it was fun while it lasted<\/a>.<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n***<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\nSlumlord27 over at YouTube has been putting together videos of underrated indie games, and I was honored to have Liquisity <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NrnEqsn-LFs\">be the #70 entry<\/a> into the list of fantastic games. Thanks Slumlord!<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n***<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\nYou know, announcing a podcast in late December and forgetting the possible fact that a lot of devs are taking off for Christmas break (ie no time for interviews) ranks right up there with a lot of dumb things I&#8217;ve done, hah. So I probably won&#8217;t get an interview for the first podcast, but I&#8217;ll probably just do the first one before the year&#8217;s end.<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n***<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\nWell things are going to slow down here with Christmas coming up, with stuff returning to normal next week. Have a good Christmas everyone, and cya back here soon!<br \/>\n<!--break--><br \/>\n<!--break--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s get this train of randomness going with some game updates and such. Game Maker 8.0 is finished and will make it&#8217;s way to the net soon. I&#8217;ve got an early copy of the final version and I&#8217;m really loving the improvements overall. While a lot of it is mostly to help me in making games and won&#8217;t be apparent, there are a few notable improvements you can look forward to in all my future games with GM8: -Games may<a href=\"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/?p=543\" class=\"read-more\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-maker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2687,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions\/2687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertigogaming.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}