GMking.org Blog

To be honest, we’ve been facing a lot of inactivity lately. We have a portion of quality content submitted but I’m afraid we will not be able to provide a clear-cut promised schedule or prediction on the next issue’s release date, as it depends on a number of factors. Do know, however, that we are still working on it and the MarkUp project is far from being abandoned.

I’ll take this opportunity to appeal to support. Contact staff@gmking.org if you are interested in any of the following things:

• Becoming an active staff member and writer for MarkUp Magazine
• Contributing a one-off article (Tutorial, Editorial, or “The Making of…” article)
• Provide content suggestions, or any other type of support that you believe will be valuable

MarkUp has always been driven by the support of the Game Maker Community and the active dedication of its staff members. We hope that the respect and enthusiasm we earned earlier on is still present, and we hope the community is still willing to make MarkUp active again, either by individual support or by joining the MarkUp team and shaking things up from the inside.

It is easy to underestimate the power of personal life and the toll it might take on someone’s productivity, and unfortunately both Robin and myself have been hit really hard. We strived really hard in MarkUp’s first year to release on-time month-by-month issues and I think we succeeded to overcome any personal or technical barrier at that time, unfortunately with MarkUp’s second year approaching, it is rather obvious that we have not been successful (for reasons out of our power) to live up to the same standards of activity and productivity (though quality has continued to improve in the less-frequent issues). Sincere apologies for that, but we ask that the community bears with us and continues to support us the magnificent ways as it always has.

Please do remember to e-mail staff@gmking.org if you are willing to provide any type of contribution to the magazine. We hope that if things go well, we will be able to give you guys a great “2-year-anniversary special” issue.

Thanks!

Since GMTV has merged with GMking, we’ve been able to use some of our resources to help with marketing of GMTV.  The latest achievement, a new Drupal-powered website for GMTV at the new gamemaker.tv domain (donated by Phil Gamble of Game Maker Blog).  There are also some screenshots of the next episode up there, so be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.

Hello there everyone,

A new episode of the (not-so-regular) GMCast has been released. Episode five features Robin Monks, Philip Gamble, and Dan Eggers, reflecting on 2008’s events: greatest games, YoYo Games and security, and worst ideas. You can comment on GMCast on the GMking.org forums or the GMC topic of the audcast.

Enjoy!

We’ve been nominated in two categories:

• Best source of Game Maker tutorials and/or examples
• Best periodical publication

So, all you MarkUp lovers out there, go and vote for us!

GameMaker Blog first suggested a possible merge between GMpedia and The YoYo Games Wiki when several GMpedia SysOps were spotted on the SysOp list of the YoYo Games wiki. GameMaker Blog also noted that some changes occurring in the YoYo Games wiki are very possibly related to such GMpedia-YoYo Games wiki merge.

Enough speculation. I guess everyone’s just waiting for a final and official word, so here I go…

For the better good of the community, and keeping in the same pace of GMking.org of wanting to provide comprehensive and centralized resources for game developers, GMpedia.org, a game development (and particularly Game Maker) wiki, will soon be merging with the YoYo Games wiki.

While when we originally approached YoYo Games, we approached them for simple inter-wiki cooperation, they seemed to be excited about a bigger move; a complete content merge between the two wikis. Considering the nature of GMking.org, we were hesitant and indeed rejected the initial offer (multiple times), but eventually chose to reconsider and instead asked YoYo Games do address some of our concerns before we go on with anything. Indeed, we gave YYG a list of our concerns and “conditions” and they have agreed to them, seeing them as fair, and thus we are moving forward with a merge.

GMking asked for removal of advertisements from the wiki section of YoYo Games. We wanted to do this because we felt more motivated and comfortable contributing and assisting in a fully community orientated website. While we have no problem with YoYo Games making profit of course, we feel that this will more define the wiki as something that is related to the community itself. YoYo Games agreed with such demands.

We also asked for the wiki licensing to change to Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0, as to allow more open content to be shared, contributed, redistributed, and have others make derivatives of such work. For those who do not know, Creative Commons is an excellent open license, and GMking.org already uses it for most of its projects.

As part of the deal, we will eventually be looking at some direct or indirect method of “crediting” GMking.org for the contributions. This will be in the form of links on a “Contributors” page or “SysOps” page or even the main link. We’re not too strict about this so you’ll find out more as we go on.

All existing GMpeida Sysops have also been added as YYG Wiki sysops and will continue to actively contribute there.

GMpedia also requested that most non Game Maker content should remain in the new YoYo Games wiki. This includes things like Windows SDK articles, Visual c++ articles, etc. which we believe are also helpful to DLL developers for Game Maker. Articles about more direct competitors such as Flash articles and “The Game Creator” articles will be moved over to other open source wikis.

I’m looking forward to seeing your feedback on this.

Eyas

Hey everyone!

Sorry for keeping you waiting about MarkUp 15. While a lot of the work was done already on the issue, it had halted development for a while due to a shortage of variety of content (NOT quantity). We wanted an additional one tutorial and one more “The Making of…” article, which experienced long delays with their (non-staff) writers.

I decided to continue development regardless of the late content and ask others to provide replacement content if possible. I think it is unfair that a couple of articles should hold the issue any longer, because Issue 15 will a lot have excellent content already and that shouldn’t be held off.

Right now we have already released two internal drafts for the staff. Such drafts are usually lacking in a contents page, a title page, etc. and has some blank spaces and placeholders here and there. The staff is actively reviewing the draft.

If anyone is interested to know something specific about the development process of the upcoming issue of MarkUp Magazine and what’s going on with it, please drop a comment here!

For those of you aware of the Game Maker Knowledge Base, run by nickydude, we have made a dea with nickydude in which all content of GMKB will be moved over to GMpedia. Importing all Game Maker and Game Maker funciton content has been complete, as well as tutorial content. Currently we’re considering importing articles in the “Questions” category but that might take a while. According to the initial deal, GMKB would be eventaully redirecting to GMpedia, however due to yet undisclosed plans, you might see something else happen in the coming weeks.

As for now, GMpedia has 600 articles, the majority of which are Game Maker development articles, with tutorials, function descriptions, examples, and general information about Game Maker releases, etc.

Thanks for all of you whom have contirbuted to GMpedia.org, please keep those contributions coming!

I suppose being with a rather well known/liked entity such as GMTV I can expect to have people wanting to join the staff and get involved. That’s fine and dandy but, when joining someones staff you have to keep in mind that they have every right to reject you. Thus, bringing me to my latest case of discontent.

Recently a GMC user that I will just leave as anonymous sent me a friendly PM basically asking to join the GMTV staff. I did the usual procedure and just simply asked for an audition video so that we could decide if he was worth hiring or not. Give or take a few weeks later his audition showed up on my computer, to say the least it wasn’t very great. I didn’t want to directly tell him he wasn’t hired (he was so enthusiastic about it) so I was going to wait a few weeks and then tell him (I was busy myself) so after two weeks I get a message (via MSN) stating that if I don’t hire him he will start his own show (sounds like a threat, eh?).. long story short I tell him how he isn’t hired, he proceeds to tell me how my show sucksis bad and how his is going to be much better (funny considering he wanted to join).

During the next week I receive messages telling me his progress he has made and he even sent me his intro script, (imo: turns out he is completely copying gmtv even his script was almost identical, he has news and something that’s exactly like our face off). When I confront him of this he tells me about how im copying him and that his show are way better than mine (when there subtle changes between our shows).

He also informed me that his show will be released in three weeks (scary considering he is starting from scratch) he said unlike me he has experience and he knows what he is doing (aren’t I the one with 4 episodes?) so far he has shown me no proof that he can video edit, so I think we can assume he uses WMM. I suppose we can expect another show within a few weeks I can’t say it will be bad until I’ve seen it.

GMking.org’s Game Development wiki service, GMpedia.org, has finally reached its 600th article milestone! Our 600th article was the “temp_directory” article, which discusses the temp_directory global variable in Game Maker.

We’re really glad to having reached such article count, which indeed makes GMpedia.org one of the most comprehensive game development and Game Maker wikis out there (not simply taking into account an article count, but also the nature and length of the articles available).

GMpedia.org is a project of GMking.org, along with other publications such as MarkUp Magazine, GMTV, and the GMking.org audcast. The wiki format of GMpedia.org makes it a very open source of information, but its great and organized structure makes information more discoverable and makes it easier for contributors to know how to contribute exactly. The GMking.org staff is also very dedicated to GMpedia, so we check when new content is added by other contributors and make sure its up to par with our standards, as well as make sure it uses proper wiki formatting, naming conventions, style guidelines, templates, etc.

Anyways, congratulations GMpedia for the 600 articles. Soon they’ll be 1000 I’m sure.. lets start counting days till then !

Topics covered in this audcast:

Cage Match: 00:50

Loads of Game Maker mags: 02:18

G3D Effects library: 04:45

GMTV Merge with GMking: 06:26

Game of the Week: 7:27

Download: MP3 (low) / AAC / OGG

Subscribe to the audcast, and discuss this audcast by going to the GMking audcast microsite.