UPDATE: Attempted to fix some errors with scaling. It now scales up to your resolution's size (rather than by a set factor of 4 all the time) and will automatically choose wide or full screen based on your monitor's resolution. The widescreen switch can be easily removed if you don't want to make sure your rooms work well with both though.

The Idea-----------
If you're like me, you love both Game Maker and Linux. I recently installed Linux Mint, based off of Ubuntu, and I'm in love yet again with Linux! However, I was dismayed to see that Wine still had poor support for Game Maker, leading to no sound when playing a game and an itty-bitty game screen in the top-left of a fullscreen window. However, I noticed one thing that piqued my interest: I was doing this with gm7! Anyone familiar with Game Maker on Linux knows that gm7's registration mechanisms prevented it from running at all, so I knew something was different. I was still unable to register, but I could at least use the lite version. So I decided to toy around with the registered copy of gm6 I had that did work with Wine.

The Problem-------
The two key problems with Game Maker on Wine are the sound and the video...definitely not something to scoff at. There's a fix for both though, as you'll see in the sample provided above. The first problem I wanted to address was sound, since it didn't work at all. Since gm's sound system doesn't work under Wine, how do you fix it? Use a different sound system! Any sound dll should work, though I chose to use the SuperSound dll. It's easy to use, supports .ogg and .wav, and it works perfectly. Take a look at the sample file and the readme for instructions on how to use it. For now: rest assured that you can have sound in your gm games on Linux.

The Solution--------
The next problem I had to solve was video. Gm6 is very buggy when you try to use it in windowed mode, unplayable actually. It works perfectly in fullscreen though...minux one teency weency problem. You can't use scaling. This is extremely annoying for anyone who's wanting to make games on Linux, so I had to find a way around it. Then I remembered a script that I know and love, the Pixel Perfect Resize. Basically it's intended purpose is to scale your game using surfaces so that you can avoid Game Maker's annoying blur when scaling. Its other use, as I found, is that you can finally scale your games in Linux! I've set it to 320x240 in the sample, but you can pick any resolution. For instance, I often use 360x225 for widescreen. That's one that matters on Linux, if you use this script, you should probably include both wide and fullscreen options. I'm will to bet that if you use an unintended resolution, such as 4:3 on a 16:10 monitor, it will be glitchy. Luckily it's a simple matter of changing two variables, res_x and res_y. See the sample, readme, and 9_6's original topic for details on usage.

The Limitations-----
So how could this be limited? A number of ways, even though it's much better than ever before. For one, you need to have registered version of gm6, something that's a little hard to come by since YoYo doesn't offer it. Even though the Lite version now works, it's still impossible to register gm7 in Wine/Linux, so we'll just have to wait for more Wine updates. They keep getting closer though. Another limitation is the room transitions. Because the resize scripts set room properties and then reload the rooms, transitions are either impossible or extremely impractical. I'm not sure which. Other than that though, you should have a completely working Game Maker on Linux. I've only tested this on Linux Mint 5 (an offshoot of Ubuntu 8.04) but it should hypothetically work on any version of Linux with Wine 0.9.49 or above. Again, I haven't tested 0.9.49, but it's the first version that gm6 worked on, so it should. It definitely works on the current version 1.1.14 though.

I hope this has helped out all of the Linux users here. It's one more reason for why Linux is getting better and better.

Good luck!

 By toopz

Comments (3)

1 Wednesday, 29 July 2009 12:49

Bracco

There is a program under development called Stencyl. It will be a Game Maker-like program.
It will be available for Linux, Windows and even MacOS X.
It's not ready yet, but I think it's going to be a good Game Maker substitute.
http://www.stencyl.com/

2 Thursday, 30 July 2009 13:02

LAR Games

Hmm. This does seem interesting, but they don't even have screenshots, and It isn't know how flexible this program will be. Only time will tell.

3 Saturday, 21 August 2010 13:26

helpful hint

There is a working partial port of GM6 to linux (NOT involving wine) - see http://spikycaterpillar.dreamhosters.com/python-gm-runtime/ for details

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