GMLscripts.com

xot

Administrator

Registered: 2007-08-18

Posts: 1,240

GameMaker: Studio Documentation Now Online

YoYo Games have quietly launched online documentation for GameMaker: Studio. For a long time GMLscripts.com has provided online documentation for all versions of GameMaker released in the last ten years. For reasons given below, links to some of them have not been published and all will cease to function in the future.

Over the last several months, during the ongoing site update, enabling help file access to all versions of GameMaker was a big relaunch goal. Through some scripting and a lot of regex magic, I developed a simple system to automatically convert GameMaker CHM help files into files suitable for the web and that goal was largely achieved. Getting the GameMaker: Studio documentation online has been troublesome due to the use of mixed-case file names within the help file. On Windows, these are not an issue, but on a web server with a case-sensitive file system, this often results in broken links. This is one reason the documentation has not yet been publicly linked.

However, a bigger issue is YoYo Games themselves. They have been very clear recently that they do not want anyone but themselves hosting their copyrighted documentation. Although I believe hosting this information falls under a fair-use copyright exemption, I will respect their wishes. After a lot of hard work, it disappoints me to say I will no longer be hosting any official GameMaker documentation here.

One of the original missions of GMLscripts.com was to provide a way for the GameMaker documentation to be annotated and accessed. There are always places where things in the documentation can be made more clear or supplemented with examples. Mark "Nocturne" Alexander's hard work on the official GameMaker: Studio documentation has gone a long way towards eliminating that need.

That said, extra clarity is always welcome. I encourage all GMLscripts.com users to visit the GMDeveloper blog. There you can find news, tutorials, and an evolving supplemental guide to GML. It is still in its early stages but I'm hopeful we will see it continue to grow.

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Abusing forum power since 1986.