Version 2022.8 of GameMaker is now available. It comes with stability updates for LTS (Long Term Stable), several fixes and additions to Feather, more effect layer types, improvements to audio playback and more.
Download GameMaker 2022.8 and read the detailed release notes.
Stability for LTS
2022.8 comes with lots of stability updates as we prepare for our upcoming first LTS (Long Term Stable) release.
Feather: New Functionality
In this new release, Feather introduces several fixes and improved functionality.
You can now choose between ‘Strict’ and ‘Relaxed’ mode when using Feather.
‘Strict’ mode will analyse everything that it can analyse.
‘Relaxed’ mode, on the other hand, doesn’t go into as much detail and allows you to use GameMaker closer to the way you used it before.
You don’t have to configure rules for individual messages anymore. Instead, you can now select a profile for the message severity.
Choose between None, Syntax Errors, Type Errors, and All to configure Feather the way you like to use it, or customise it to your liking.
Feather messages can now also be sorted by message code, message, or object, and they can be searched:
Even more filters
Version 2022.8 of GameMaker adds five more filters to choose from in the Room Editor:
- Contrast
- Fractal Noise
- Gradient
- Colour LUT ("Look-Up Table")
- Twist Blur
All the new filters and their parameters are documented in the manual.
Virtual keys and clipboard support on more platforms
Virtual keys are now supported in the browser-based targets Opera GX and HTML5.
You can now also retrieve and set the contents of the clipboard on Android, MacOS and iOS.
Removed Platforms
Some older or less used platforms have been removed:
- Android x86 architecture
- The UWP target has been removed. The GDK extension can be used instead to implement current versions of Microsoft’s social functionality.
- Windows x86 (32bit support) architecture has been removed from Game Options, so now only 64bit executables are available
- As Microsoft are no longer accepting XDK submissions, we have removed this platform entirely, and migrated to GDK (which has been available for a while)
Also included in this release
Tile encoding in rooms
We have introduced a new, faster method of encoding tile layers in your rooms.
If you have rooms containing lots of tile "cells" (either because your room is very large, or because you are using very small tiles) you may find your tiles are now encoded using RLE (Run-Length Encoding) compression.
This leads to smaller file sizes, which can be important when you have rooms with large tilemaps in your project. This also fixes a long-time issue where such projects would previously often sit for a while on a "Found Project Format 2" line in your Output Window compiler log.
This requires a change in the project version, so projects created or opened in 2022.8 cannot be loaded in older versions of the IDE.
Improvements to audio playback
The audio playback functions (audio_play_sound() and its related functions) now accept four optional parameters: gain, offset, pitch and listener mask.
This addition fixes a long-standing issue, where you would call audio_play_sound() first and then set one of the parameters, e.g. audio_sound_gain(), which would not be applied immediately and so you would hear a split-second of the audio with the default parameters.
With the new addition, you can apply a parameter to a sound before it's played so you don't get that glitch.
The changes to audio can be found in the manual.
Happy GameMaking!
