Game Maker

What works

Installing works, but use the howto below.
Registering Standard works.
All of the resource editors seem to work.
Game Information seems to work.
Global Game Settings work.
Debug mode works.
Collisions work.
Show message works.
Game saving and loading works.
Using text, binaray, and ini files works.
Alpha works in the sprite editor but not by using draw_sprite_ext().
View work.
Extensions work.
DLLs works.

What does not

Format:
Problem. Additional information
Solution

Sometimes when starting up, Game Maker crashes and the window doesn't show.
You can try executing it from the terminal and see if it gives an error.
The updater has a small empty window titled Form1 and it won't close unless you force it to.
Open terminal, type xkill, then click the window.
Showing object's information doesn't seem to work correctly. This is actually a problem with Game Maker not Wine, might be fixed in an update.
Add a Trigger event and fill it with a blank action.
If you aren't drawing anything at all(single empty object and room) then the window glitches and won't draw the gray background correctly.
No fix. If you find one, let me know.
You can only delete resources by pressing Shift+Del when they're highlighted. Otherwise it opens another menu.
^Good enough for me.^ If you find a better one, let me know.
The tabs on the object editor are stretched out.
No fix. Let me know if you find one.
In the sound editor and while in-game, there is a pause before the sound plays.
No fix. If you find one, let me know.
If you click outside a modal window, it glitches and becomes unfocused.
Press F1 then close the help when it pops up
The code auto-completer has an annoying window border.
Go to Configure Wine's Graphics tab and deselect "Allow the window manager to decorate windows."
Movement adjusting x- and y-values can be laggy, even with higher room speeds.
Use vspeed and hspeed. If you find a better solution, let me know.
Show message can be glitchy and make the window unfocused.It is also a modal window
Press escape while it's unfocused.
Transparency for the loading image doesn't seem to work.
No fix. Let me know if you find one.
The fonts have way too many duplicates.
Currently there isn't a fix so let me know if you find one.
Sound doesn't seem to loop properly.
No fix so far. Let me know if you find one. Room transitions seem to go the same speed as changes to the x- and y-values do.
No fix yet. Let me know if you find one
When closing a script window it shows an "Out of memory." error. This might happen when closing the main window. It still saves the data in both occasions.
No fix yet, let me know if you find one. Sometimes there may be issues with interior window transparency.
If you get an "Out of memory." error, it fixes itself. Let me know if you find an actual fix.

Workarounds

What was not tested

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

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Look below at the howto for help.

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(1.3.17). 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-1.3.17".

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
sh winetricks mono210


It will open the installer for IE6 which then allows Game Maker's News 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 and the .NET compatibility.

After that, instead of installing Game Maker like normal, go to Uninstall Wine Software in WINE's menu. Then click the first button, browse to where the installer is and install Game Maker like normal.

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.