Game Maker

What works

The Softwrap screen loads and allows Game Maker to open.
Registering for Pro works.
All of the resource editors seem to work.
The Game Information works.
Global Game Settings work.
Debug mode works.
Collisions work.
Show message works.
Game save and load work.
Opening text, binary, and ini files works.
Transparency works.
Views work.
Extensions work.

What does not

Sometimes when starting up, Game Maker (maybe Softwrap?) crashes and the window doesn't show.
The Softwrap screen won't load at all unless IE6 is installed.
Images on the Softwrap screen and in the tutorial and news section may or may not load depending on configurations.
The tabs on the object editor are stretched out.
In the sound editor, after you press the play button sounds have a pause before they play.
Sounds also have a similar pause in game.
If you click outside a popup (Global Game Settings, About Game Maker, Game Information), sometimes the window glitches and becomes unfocused.
Sometimes drawing doesn't work unless Global Game Settings is set to use synchronization to avoid tearing.
Movement is laggy, even with higher room speeds.
Sometimes Game Maker closes when going to test the game or build the executable.
The code auto-completer has an annoying window border.
Sometimes when saving an executable or testing the game it lags and needs to be forced to quit.
Though show message works, it sometimes glitches.
Transparency for the loading bar doesn't seem to work.
When drawing text, sometimes there are dots underneath it.
Sound doesn't seem to loop properly.
Room transitions are too slow to be effective.
DLLs don't work (make it into an extension).

Workarounds

What was not tested

Specific D&D, code, or constants were not tested unless listed above.
Resources editors were not extensively tested, only basic functions.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Look below at the how-tos for help.

Open the wine configuration editor.

Disable both "Allow window manager to manage windows" and "allow window manager to decorate windows"

You must install IE6

$ wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

$ sh winetricks ie6

 IE6 doesn't work very well but IE7 doesn't work at all.

*Edit by Devon {

IE6 might not work well as a web browser, but it works perfectly as a web page loader in non-browser application.

}

No it doesn't it gives script errors and it sucks

*2'nd edit by Devon {

Then I must have done something different then you because I never got any script error messages when using Game Maker 8.

Mind you I've also tried Game Maker 7 with IE6 to load it's web pages.

In Game Maker 7 I too got the script error message, but never got any error messages when using Game Maker 8.

} I got a script error while trying to change the activation option on the side to 'Re-install existing license'.

With WINE version 1.3.17, exporting as an executable doesn't seem to work. It may just be that some settings need to be reconfigured. If you find a working solution, please let us know.

This how-to shows how to get Game Maker running best. It assumes you have Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat installed. There may be different procedures for different versions/distros.

Make sure you've updated Wine to the latest version(1.3.15). If you haven't, copy and paste this in Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.3
wine --version


The last command should show "wine-1.3.15".

To make Game Maker run correctly, make sure that Internet Explorer 6 is installed. I don't think the other versions of IE work. To do so, open Terminal and copy and paste the following:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks ie6
sh winetricks directmusic
sh winetricks dsound
sh winetricks d3dx9


It will open the installer for IE6 which then allows Game Maker's Softwrap screen to load. Then it installs directmusic and dsound to allow sounds to play. It also installs all the DirectX tricks needed for Game Maker to run correctly.

After that, install Game Maker like normal. If you've already installed Game Maker, it should still work.

After following the above steps, everything seems to work fine, but when running games there is some lag. Because all these tests were run in VirtualBox, the lag and other problems may be nonexistant in an actual installation.

Note: Because of WINE's update to version 1.3.17, exporting as an executable doesn't seem to work anymore. If you find a way to get it work, please let us know.