Mini Update - GML Changes in 2019
Added 2019-04-04 17:14:10 +0000 UTCSome of you might have already seen this blog post by YoYo Games on some new changes coming to Game Maker Language in 2019.
It includes a vast number of highly requested features many coders are very, very excited about. Methods, Chained Accessors, Lightweight Objects and more.
The blog post isn't particularly beginner friendly, which makes some degree of sense as these aren't really beginner level concepts. But they add a ton of new potential paradigms and approaches to things you might want to do in GameMaker and they go a long way toward closing many weaknesses with the language.
I'm someone who basically learned to code with GameMaker. Most of what I know about the things being described here comes from knowledge I've gleaned from other programmers. so I decided to kidnap Lazyeye from obj_podcast (with whom I have planned some further collaborations!) and have a bit of a chat about what these changes mean and some speculative examples of new things you can do. It's coming to a video asap!
The main thing to understand and be excited for in all this, is that these features make GameMaker a much better long term investment. These features are aimed at empowering you to better manage and structure your code in ways you couldn't before. One of GMs biggest weaknesses is that despite it's unmatched speed and agility in getting a project off the ground, it struggles with keeping a project manageable at scale. It almost encourages you to do things in ways that can cause problems later. These new features do a lot to help fix that. Which I think will mean big things for the advanced user base now and also big things for beginners as they travel further down the road.
