Version 8.0 of Game Maker has a large number of improvements over version 7.0. Below the most important changes are described.
Text splash screens can no longer show images. However, web splash screens have been added that can show full html documents with images, etc.
A number of changes have been made to the functions related to sprite and background resources. This is due to the fact that Game Maker uses a completely new mechanism for these resources. If your game uses a lot of calls to functions that load or save image resources on the fly you are strongly recommended to keep using the old version 7.0 for that game.
If you use extension packages you will have to reinstall them.
Some changes have been made to the timeline mechanism that can lead to incompatibilities. In particular, assigning a timeline and starting it are now two separate things.
An important bug has been solved in which collision events where executed twice if two objects have collision events with each other. Some games however might have relied on this bug and, hence, might no longer function correctly.
Game Maker now default shows a News page when it is started. Here new versions will be announced, new resources will be indicated, there is information about competition, and game design tips and tricks. News is shown only once a day. In the Pro Edition this can be switched off. You can always access the news through the Help menu and you are encouraged to regularly check the news for important information about Game Maker.
Game Maker now has a standard built-in tutorial for beginners. It is shown in a panel at the right of the screen. Experienced users can indicate that they do not want to see the tutorial anymore. To accommodate for the tutorial panel, Game Maker is now default started in full screen mode. It does however remember its settings so changing it once to windowed mode will from that moment on start it in that mode.
The new version Game Maker uses backgrounds and sprites with alpha (transparency) channels. This makes it possible to create and use much nicer sprites. PNG files with such information are now correctly loaded. The sprite and image editor have been completely rewritten, including many new drawing options and effects. A new sprite file selector was added that shows the animations in the sprites. Also we bundle a large number of high-quality sprites with Game Maker that you can use for free in your games.
You now have more collision checking options. For example, you can indicate that collisions should be with an enclosed disk and you have better control over the bounding box. The sub-image of the sprite can have a combined mask and you can set the dependence on the alpha transparency value.
A new function splash_show_web(url,delay) has been added that can be used to show web pages as splash screens. You can also use local html pages for this. This allows for a powerful mechanism to e.g. create help pages. A close button is added to the splash screens. Also a number of new actions have been added to show the different types of splash pages and to change splash settings. (The old Show Video and Webpage actions have been removes as the new actions include them. They will though still work in old games.)
A new type of event has been introduced: Trigger events. Trigger events you can specify yourself. You give them a name and a condition, written in GML. After this they can be used in all objects, just like other events. With this you can easily extend the functionality of Game Maker.
The timelines have been extended. The property form has additional buttons to e.g. spread out the moments and to delete or duplicate ranges of moments. Timelines can now be paused and restarted and they can even be played backwards. Also they can now loop automatically.
The possibility to merge games has been replaced by a much more extensive system to import and export resources. The user can indicate which resources to export to a file (.gmres). Next they can be imported in a different game. In principle only one resource can exist for each name. When there is a name conflict when importing the use can specify to keep the original, replace anyway, take the one that is most recently changed, or keep both (not recommended). To be able to do the third option, all resources now keep track of when they were last changed.
The built-in script/code editor has been completely rewritten, making it a lot easier to write code. For example there is pop-up function name completion, argument help, matching brackets, improved color coding, line numbers, on-the-fly error checking, code snippets, and a sophisticated find and replace functionality.
The speed of games that use code has been considerably improved. A speed-up of up to 100% is sometimes possible. Also the loading time for games is often considerably improved. Also when running a stand-alone game.
There are a number of other changes and additions. Here are some of the important ones.
The following bugs were corrected. A number of other smaller bugs were corrected as well.