Masterclass Game Design
| Arno Kamphuis |
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Also Mark has shown us what the GML code was for the 3D example available from the Game Maker website. The code itself I guess was about a 100 lines of code for the drawing. Unfortunately I only had a glimpse look over the code but it does appear quite difficult to use the new 3D functions. Mark Overmars also was so kind to explain why there is no 3D game maker. To make a 3D version of Game Maker will require some complex coding for the engine but he is capable of doing so he said. However to use the program there are quite a few things which the game designer, meaning you, should do. For instance you should make the models, you need to arrange for the lightning, you need to arrange for the settings of the camera motion, you need to define how to do collision event.... Basically the programmer needs to define a lot more things, which are game dependent so they can not be preconfigured. Currently when you add an object to the game then you do not need to do much for it. If you add a collision event then it will be executed nicely. However to handle collision events in 3D requires a lot more calculations. So a simple collision event will drastically decrease your game speed. So you need to define the accuracy of the collision, for which collision this event applies and a lot more things such as this. This will make Game Maker much harder to use and as Mark pointed out he is trying to make with Game Maker a user-friendly program which is easy to use for the end user and which does not require much learning to use while it is still capable of making a variety of different things. So no 3D Game Maker. Currently the functions added do not support for things like dynamic lightning and collision detection so to make a 3D game you will require a lot of hard work.
| Mark Overmars and me |
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Also a lot of people claim Game Maker to be slow. Mark Overmars gave us a very simple example. Game Maker can handle about 1.000.000 lines of GML a second (This is an average. It depends on the functions you use and the machine you got). Now a game runs with a room speed of 30. So you still got a speed left of 33.000 lines of code per step. If you got a ball with 100 lines of code in the step event and you got 500 of those balls bouncing through the game you already got 50.000 lines of code. So the game will slow down. However if you program your game good then it is very well possible to create a smooth running game within Game Maker.
At the end of the day Arno Kamphuis gave a presentation on what can be expected within the future for games. Within this presentation he spend a lot of time about the high levels of the current consoles and also did a look at the X-Box 2, PS 3 and the new N-Gage and the Game Boy DS. He mainly focused on the speed increase and the possibilities these consoles will give game developers. Also he spend some time on the new video card and he shown some very nice smooth very detailed animations which can be made by any PC with a N Videa G-Force 5 video card. Also he gave some information about the way a video card works. How does polygon and pixel shading work and what will be the future.
Overall it was a very good learning experience and a very enjoyable day. I have learned a lot about Game Design and Game Maker 6.0. Perhaps I will write a few more stories about Game Maker 6.0 based upon the things I have seen and have talked about with Mark Overmars but that is for another day. Below you will find a few pictures taken at the master class. I am the guy in the brown t-shirt. Also have a look at Mark's very cool laptop, which you see me using because there weren't enough PC's. Also notice the very cool ability to turn the screen 180 degrees and close it so you can have it as a paper with touch screen. 
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P.S. Nintendo was started in 1889. 