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painfully-learned-lessons

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Painfully learned lessons about GameMaker

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HTML5.md
optimization.md
README.md
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<h1 align="center">Painfully Learned Lessons</h1>

A straight-forward guide to mitigating the various harms committed upon society by YoYoGames' masterwork of digital torture, GameMaker.

PRs welcome. Share your pain.

&nbsp;

## Stability

### The game is crashing to desktop without an error message.

Try running the game in YYC to generate a C++ project, and then run the generated solution file through Visual Studio's debugger. This'll hopefully point you in the right direction. Even if you can't solve the problem, it'll make for a more informative bug report to YYG.

&nbsp;

### Man, HTML5 is cursed.

Sure is. Strap on the proton pack and take a look at [some tips on busting HTML5 ghosts](HTML5.md).

&nbsp;

### I have an active subscription and/or a permanent license. Why don't I see any export options?

To see your exports, you need to be logged into your Opera account. If you're logged in, but still don't see them, log out and log back in via the blue account icon in the top-right of the GameMaker IDE. This is a bug and will hopefully be fixed soon (issue has been present since version 2022.2.0.71, 2023-03-03).

&nbsp;

### My gamepad doesn't work.

Usually a result of GameMaker missing configuration data for that particular make and model. Might be solved by using [Input](https://github.com/jujuadams/input) or by adding an updated [`gamecontrollerdb.txt`](https://github.com/gabomdq/SDL_GameControllerDB/blob/master/gamecontrollerdb.txt) to your project's Included Files. Nintendo Switch Pro controllers don't work on PC over USB: [try Bluetooth](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Controller:Nintendo_Switch_Pro_Controller#Bluetooth), or use Steam.

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### My game was running fine on YYC, but I changed one line and now my game doesn't compile.

The YYC module should detect changed files and only recompile those needed but it occasionally loses track, especially after adding scripts and objects. To solve this, hit the Clean Cache button (the little brush next to the debug/play/stop buttons in the IDE) to force GameMaker to recompile from scratch. You can also delete specific files from the cache to force a smaller and faster partial recompile but this is often more trouble than it's worth.

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### "An Application Control policy has blocked this file. (0x800711C7)"

This is a rare issue but one that totally blocks the game from running. To copy paste [what u/FatTerrierStudio said on the topic](https://old.reddit.com/r/gamemaker/comments/1sbn942/fix_an_application_control_policy_has_blocked/):

> My game was running perfectly until it wasn't, but not because of a programming error. If you get the same error or one similar, the culprit is likely anti-virus or Windows Smart App Control (SAC) blocking a runtime file. For me this was FileIO.dll
> 
> To fix this: Windows Security > Virus & threat protection > Manage settings (under Virus & threat protection settings) > Add or remove exclusions (under Exclusions) > Add an exclusion > Folder > C:\ProgramData\GameMakerStudio2
> 
> Also add an exclusion for C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Local\GameMakerStudio2
> 
> AppData is hidden by default on Windows, so if you can't find it: File Explorer > View > Show > Hidden Items OR just copy and paste the path directly (and add your username). You may need to restart GameMaker after this, but I was able to run my game without restarting.
> 
> And, finally, if you don't download software from questionable sources, you can disable SAC: search Smart App Control > Off (just know that re-enabling it can be a pain)

&nbsp;

## Performance

### How do I make my game run faster and smoother?
This is called "optimization". [DragoniteSpam](https://github.com/DragoniteSpam/) wrote an excellent [post](https://forum.gamemaker.io/index.php?threads/the-ultimate-gamemaker-optimization-tier-list.122141/) on the GMC which has been [archived on GitHub here](optimization.md).

&nbsp;

### I am getting performance issues on Windows 11 and newer versions of Windows 10.
Also often caused by a broken/missing/outdated Visual C++ redistributable. [Try installing this](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679) (Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4).

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### My `fps_real` is high but `fps` is low and performance is bad.
`fps_real` only measures what you're doing on the CPU. You're likely GPU-bound. Turn off graphical effects, turn off shaders/effect layers, reduce particle counts, reduce rendering resolution, draw less to the screen. Use RenderDoc to identify particular pain points.

&nbsp;

### `delta_time` shoots up really high when I drag the window. What's going on?

While GameMaker's animation system does not advance when frames are dropped, (such as while dragging the game's window around) the value of `delta_time` will. This means `delta_time` can get much larger than you might expect which can break timings in your game. You should cap `delta_time` to mitigate this problem.

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### `<insert library name here>` is taking up 50% of a Step in the profiler and I am very worried about it.
The GameMaker profiler is deceptive and the percentage measurement is nigh useless due to the way it's calculated. The bit that's actually important is the time taken to execute the function. If the execution time is less than 1ms then you're getting your knickers in a twist about nothing.

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### I added an object and my `fps_real` went from 5000 down to 4000. Help!

Don't worry about it. `fps_real` is mostly useless and the only thing it's really good for is making people panic needlessly.

Frame rate is [inversely proportional to frame time](https://www.desmos.com/calculator/d4hvus9oys), which means that (among other things) small differences in very small frame times will have disproportionately large effects on the `fps_real`. What you really care about is the **frame time,** or the amount of time it takes to deliver a frame. This means you have a budget of about 16.6 ms to do all of your Step and Draw event processing if you want to maintain a refresh rate of 60 frames per second. An `fps_real` value of 5000 means that your entire game is finished with its update tick in **0.2 milliseconds,** and an `fps_real` value of 4000 means that your entire game is finished with its update tick in **0.25 milliseconds.** That's a difference of **0.05 milliseconds,** which is negligible.

Whatever you did to make your `fps_real` dip, you can do it another 300 times and still hit a 60FPS target.

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### I want to hit 5000 FPS when measuring using `fps_real` because that means my game will play better.

A variant of the above. `fps_real` is a poor metric to begin with, and targeting a framerate far above the update rate of every display in existence is unnecessary. If you *really* want to target very high framerates, shoot for 240FPS when measuring with the native `fps` variable. To be clear: this is still ridiculously high but at least it's somewhat reasonable.

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### GameMaker is lagging whenever I add instances to a room.

Turn off Feather (at least for the duration that you're doing lots of heavy room editing).

If you still want to use Feather, starting in **GMS2023.11** you can go into Feather preferences and hit the `Do not analyze project for Room Instances with auto-generated names` and/or `Do not analyze Room Instances` options to alleviate the worst offenders.

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### I'm using GameMaker Studio 1 and my game has performance issues I can't figure out.

Try using [gmsched](https://github.com/skyfloogle/gmsched).

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## Graphics

### I am getting a shader compilation failure in GameMaker 2023 / 2022 / GameMaker Studio 2.
Often caused by a broken/missing/outdated Visual C++ redistributable. [Try installing this](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679) (Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4).

&nbsp;

### I am getting a shader compilation failure in GameMaker Studio 1.
Often caused by a broken/missing DirectX 9c runtime. [Try installing this](https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8109) (DirectX 9c via DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010)).

&nbsp;

### What's going on with Spine?

See the special [Spine](spine.md) page for some pointers.

&nbsp;

### The GPU scissor functions don't work properly.

GPU scissor functions operate in "surface pixel space". This means that you need to set up the scissor coordinates by counting pixels on the **surface itself** instead of pixels in the room or on the view.

When using scissoring on the backbuffer in the Draw GUI events, the surface pixels to count are the number of pixels on the window itself. The scissor functiona do not respect GUI offset or width/heighr/scale.

*(For those into their graphics programming, the GPU scissor test happens in normalized device coordinates. GameMaker presents this to us as a familiar pixel metric instead of the actual normalized coordinates.)*

&nbsp;

### On consoles (especially Xbox) my rectangles and other primitives are offset for some reason.

This is a known issue and maybe it'll get fixed some time. In the meanwhile, you'll need to manually adjust the rendering position of primitives yourself. On Xbox, for example, the top-left corner of `draw_rectangle()` will need to be moved right 1 pixel and down 1 pixel. This impacts many primitive-drawing functions cross-platform - happy hunting!

&nbsp;

### On Nintendo Switch the colour channel order looks off when I'm using vertex buffer functions, shouldn't it be the same as other OpenGL platforms like Linux?

It should be but it isn't. On Switch, the colour order is the same as Windows even though the graphics backend is OpenGL.

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### My font sizes in-game are not the same as in the graphics mockup.

If you've created a mockup in Photoshop, Figma, GIMP, etc. and then tried to replicate it in GameMaker, you may notice that the font in GameMaker is rendered somewhat bigger than in the mockup despite font point size being the same. This is happening because of inconsistent DPI settings: image editors often have their default DPI at 72 while GameMaker's is 96. To fix this issue you, multiply the image editor's font values by 0.75 (so 48pt in Photoshop becomes 36pt in GameMaker Font Editor) or change the DPI in the image editor to 96 pixels per inch (without resampling).

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### What is GameMaker's GLSL ES version?
1.00 rev 17. Older versions of GameMaker have patchy support for standard derivatives, and no current (GMS2023.6 and before) versions of GameMaker natively support vertex texture fetching outside of HTML5.

&nbsp;

### Nothing is drawing and I see "Draw failed due to invalid input layout" in the Output log.
This happens when something you are drawing does not provide the attribute data that your shader needs. For example, if you apply a shader that expects texture coordinates, onto a draw_rectangle, it will fail. A common workaround is to have different versions for you shaders depending on what you're drawing (e.g. shd_basic, shd_textured, shd_textured_normals, etc).

&nbsp;

### I used a vertex shader on my sprite to move it but the sprite vanished?
This is usually caused by the runner's own, [frustum-based sprite culling](https://manual.gamemaker.io/monthly/en/GameMaker_Language/GML_Reference/Drawing/GPU_Control/gpu_set_sprite_cull.htm). If a sprite (or tilemap or other graphic) is outside the frustum the runner won't put its vertices in the batch to begin with; your sprite is never sent off for rasterization and the shader never even touches the thing. If that fancy vertex shader is trying to move a sprite from out-of-the-view to in-the-view then the likely culprit is this sprite culling. GameMaker introduced a function to disable sprite culling in version **2024.6**. Don't confuse `gpu_set_sprite_cull()` with `gpu_set_cullmode()` though; these are two different guys.

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