To GML or not to GML...

So... I've been idly thinking... If I had bags of cash, oodles of time, and free rein, what would I do? Well, before I say ANYTHING else, this is nothing to do with YoYo. While its obviously been discussed, we haven't decided anything, and much of what I'm about to say goes against the basics of what Game Maker is all about! So don't get too excited/angry. Now that that's out of the way... what would I like to do? Like? No...LOVE to do...

Well, first... I like GML for what it is. A very simple scripting language. It does what it says on the tin (as it were), and that's a great achievement in itself. What I don't like about it, is that the syntax is a little woolly, and you can't declare types or sizes upfront. This has a huge baring on performance and what you can do to optimise the engine itself. So first and foremost I'd allow types. ints, bytes, shorts, floats and doubles along with strings and fixed size arrays (I think lists should grow, arrays shouldn't; personal preference). Not only are these things which would help you develop your skills, but it also helps you track down bugs. For example, I have an array 16 elements long, but I have a bug that touches element 4000! Currently, the array simply expands and it's hard to track down. However, if I knew it was only ever supposed to be 16 entry's long, I could set that as a fixed array then I'd get an out of bounds exception and hay presto! Bug found!

Next on my list would be structures. BLOODY HELL!! I MISS STRUCTURES!!! So many times in the past few months as we've started to push game out, we've needed to fix a bug, or add a little feature, and I've though, "well, just have an array of x/y coordinates, possibly an index to an object and then a type", only to actually realise.. I'd have to have multiple arrays for this. This is crap. So... Arrays next would be awesome, particularly when merged with real types.

Next up... I'd like objects to have custom functions you could call. So rather than having a script where you pass an object in, you call the objects function directly like so...

     Player.SetHealth( 100 );

This is nicer to me, and would help teach some basic skills you could use as you learn and perhaps want to move into other languages. So it's a plus to me. Not that you couldn't keep the current script method where you pass stuff into it, but I prefer this, it reads better to me, and keeps the code bound together with the object that it affects.

Another thing I'd love to add is the ability to have functions inside a single script. For now if you want a new function you have to declare it in the scripts section. Again, I think this is okay, but you lose the context in which you would probably use the function. Although using the new object function feature above would allow something like this, it still means jumping back and forth in source files for a single function. It would be much nicer if I could simply declare the thing; something like...

BaddieObject  FindBaddie()
{
   //Do something
   return the_baddie_object;
}

bool MoreBaddies()
{
   // anymore?
   return answer;
}


main()
{
     //Do stuff...
     while( MoreBaddies() )
     {
         baddie = FindBaddie();
         baddie.die();
     }
}

Now... technically... you don't need main(), we could just detect your not in a SUB function and do all that for you... so it would look like...

BaddieObject  FindBaddie()
{
}
bool MoreBaddies()
{
}


//Do stuff...
while( MoreBaddies() )
{
   baddie = FindBaddie();
   baddie.die();
}

Which would be okay for beginners I think. I suspect the real GOAL of GML should be to make it open to beginners, but allow for experts to excel in it.

Now what else would I add? Well...I'm a MASSIVE C# fan, so I'd love to add the ability to call .NET stuff. Not only would this open a fully functional plugin system (in both directions!), but would mean we could drop support for things like GML stacks, queues, lists etc. as .NET already has really cool ones.

But what about this plugin thing? Well. allowing plugins to see into the main program via .NET interfaces or reflection would be massive. You could suddenly get access to the entire rendering engine, the variable system, rooms, instances etc. ALL done legally via a simple C# style interface. Not only would Plugins become much simpler to do, but their power would be immeasurable! The whole of Game Maker could then be done as a series of plugins.

Yes I know... veered slightly away from GML, but it's all related. Still, all this is my little fantasy world. Not only would we have to make sure Marks vision of a learning tool is protected, and that everyone else agrees with the direction. We'd also have to make sure we had enough cash to be able to do it justice, and not a half arsed attempt that would alienating the whole community.

So... not quite yet then... Oh well. Perhaps I'll do another post soon on what I'd like the graphics engine to actually be like. We lose so much performance because of the simplistic interface, a more comprehensive one would allow proper throughput and would probably even allow real 3D stuff to be done; not that I'm a fan of turning Game Maker into a 3D tool though....