GMTE: GameMaker Touhou Engine

[deice]

hello! this is a thread about a game engine i'm currently developing and wished to advertise with members of the touhou community.
in short, it's a shmup engine that comes pre-built with mechanics implemented from mainline touhou games such as spell cards. it's made specifically for full game projects, and thus has (hopefully) intuitive systems that help the end-user easily construct bullet patterns and stages to their liking.

please keep in mind that some things from the engine may not carry over too well if you use GMS2 (idk if that one supports direct3d for example)

homepage, you can find a lot more info here: https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/home.html


this has been a pet project of mine for some time, but given i still have school and stuff, don't expect larger updates too often. if you do want real-time updates:
https://deice.neocities.org/rss.html

that's about it for this intro post, i appreciate any and all feedback

[WishMakers]

Hey there!  Nice to see someone else using GameMaker like I have been for so long, haha.
I took a look at your project file on your website and it's surprisingly organized!
I will definitely tell you that there is much room for optimization (for one thing, having different objects for each color of delay cloud and bullet type is unnecessary) but I'm liking what you're going for so far!
Also props for using GM:S1 still.  I didn't want to give it up, but at some point I had to lol.  (I'm using GM:S2 now.)

If you ever have any questions on the technical side don't hesitate to ask myself or possibly even Popfan (we've been trying to push GM:S to its limits for some time now).  Best method of contact is Discord.  Can't guarantee I can answer *everything* but we've seen a lot and not many people around here use GM:S.

I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes!

[deice]

hey, thanks for the super fast reply and positive feedback! glad to know someone took the time to look at what i did

I will definitely tell you that there is much room for optimization (for one thing, having different objects for each color of delay cloud and bullet type is unnecessary) but I'm liking what you're going for so far!

yea you're super right now that i think about it, there's no reason to not just pass the sprite to any function that creates them and have one universal object, can't believe i didn't notice that haha

[Hyouiibara]

I extracted the file, but there's no application there, only gmx file that I don't know what to do

[Branneg Xy]

I extracted the file, but there's no application there, only gmx file that I don't know what to do

It is still at an alpha stage Phase so,after checking the extracted files, you have to first open or import them with a version of  "Game Maker ",after having it installed,though there is also a good number  .png files to preview (e.g. sprite subfolder-> image subfolder).

[Hyouiibara]

It is still at an alpha stage Phase so,after checking the extracted files, you have to first open or import them with a version of  "Game Maker ",after having it installed,though there is also a good number  .png files to preview (e.g. sprite subfolder-> image subfolder).

How can I download the "Game maker"? I'm quite new to these things, so I was confused

[deice]

How can I download the "Game maker"? I'm quite new to these things, so I was confused

https://www.yoyogames.com/get

^ this is the official place to purchase a yearly/lifetime monthly licence for use of gamemaker studio 2 dependin
the engine was designed for use in gamemaker studio 1.4 which is currently discontinued as a software, so there's no official channel to acquire it.
once you obtain your version of choice, this link tells you how to import the GMX into the program:

https://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/001_advanced%20use/008_exporting%20and%20importing%20resources.html

from there, i recommend looking at some GML tutorials before reading up on GMTE's documentation:

https://gdpalace.wordpress.com/learn-gml/

[Hyouiibara]

Thanks! I'm looking forward to the update of the GMTE! (Really wanna make a Touhou fangame)

[deice]

new version out: alpha 1.7

what's new:

-loose lasers
-streamlined delay clouds and particle effects
-survival cards

more detail:
https://deice.neocities.org/content/blog/2020/may_18_1.html
https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

appreciate all feedback

[deice]

necrobumping for new version

we got:

-replays (they don't exactly work all the way, thus the version is 2.0pre rather than 2.0 proper)
-bullets are now super easy and don't require making 500 objects with copy-pasted code
-loose lasers now completely usable

more detail:
https://deice.neocities.org/content/blog/2020/august_29_1.html
https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

[deice]

bumping for good and bad news regarding replays

good news is that after a lot of tinkering i figured out the exact issue as to why the replay seems to desync most of the time, it being that during random small intervals, the replay will be exactly one frame ahead of the actual play session, causing the amount of random calls to desync, making any bullet patterns with random values in them at all completely different.

bad news is that this seems to be an underlying problem stemming from the way GM runs games created in it (possibly related to it not having frameskip, not 100% sure), meaning i'll likely have to overhaul the entire replay system if i want to get it working, dashing all hopes of a quick update. apologies

[WishMakers]

the replay will be exactly one frame ahead of the actual play session, causing the amount of random calls to desync, making any bullet patterns with random values in them at all completely different.

wait wait wait.
ok so I also had this issue when i was making my replay system before, and I thought I had just made a logic error there, changed the starting value to be -1 instead of 0, and things worked fine.
i'm just surprised the same thing happened to someone *else* using GameMaker haha

now if at the end of the day there are some shenanigans going on under the hood, you could always do what i did and essentially never rely on gamemaker default *anything* if i don't have to.

[deice]

more good news fellows. since alpha pre-2.0 i made a schedule where whenever i would work on GMTE i'd spend an hour trying to fix replays and then just do other stuff to prevent progress from completely halting.

so here we are with all of the planned features for the next version complete, with replays still broken. the solution proposed by wishmakers sadly proved ineffective since the 1-frame desync isn't constant so just delaying playback doesn't really affect anything.

i'll try my best to juggle this, another project of mine and school so hopefully 2.0 proper can come out soon.
the main features to be excited about are:

-support for multiple bosses simultaneously
-stationary/anchored lasers (if i'm not using the proper term, think rumia's moonlight ray)
-the ability to let the player make choices during dialogue

thank you for your patience.
also this is the second most viewed topic on new RaNGE what

[deice]

just posting to say that the project isn't dead, expect an update in the coming week or the week after, thanks for sticking around

[deice]

2.0 is out

https://deice.neocities.org/content/blog/2020/december_15_1.html
https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

sadly replays were a bit more of a monster than i had initially thought, read post above for more detail
main new features don't differ from what i listed a few posts ago, thank you for your time

[deice]

got some fantastic news for you lot, i've managed to get a replay in without any desync whatsoever.

turns out the main issue was a lot less profound than i had thought, it was just a matter of making the default blue fairy that shoots red rings generate a direction for the bullets when it's created rather than when it stops moving (likely meaning the desync regarding them was caused by some gamemaker sub-pixel movement shenanigains as it's speed isn't a whole number)

even though there's still one way to make it desync, i'm just making this post to say that a new update with working replays is (hopefully) coming soon

stay tuned, as there's only two more versions before we enter beta (if i remain on schedule haha)

[deice]

replays seem to work completely now, big update coming soon, just need to make a lot of updates to the documentation
apologies for the longer-than-expected wait, the testing for this was extensive

in-depth explanation of the downward spiral of fixing replays below for nerds:

Spoiler:

once whatever was causing the fairies to desync was fixed, i had initially thought that replays were completely in a working state. however, when doing some just-in-case debugging to make sure some little things happen on the exact same frame, i noticed that in the replay, the player dies a single frame earlier than what happens during gameplay. after a few more tests, i had confirmed that this had the ability to desynchronize the replay as well.

this puzzled me as i couldn't think of why this would happen, even after looking through and trying to debug some of the code for bullet collisions and player death timers. nothing really came up, and for days i would try to do incredibly stupid things like making the player read an extra dummy input during the replay, or pausing the timeline for a single frame but all of this made the desync significantly worse.

finally, i decided to just

make it so the replay ghost dies a frame later
this caused 0 issues (unsurprisingly, if the player deathbombs on the last frame during gameplay, they'll stay alive either way and deathbombing a frame later to desync the replay isn't possible as inputs aren't read while the player is dead, what foresight eh) and after a few more days of confirming every potential scenario i could think of, it seemed to have fixed everything.

however, i will still try to look into why exactly this happens as i update the engine, as it could be indicative of larger issues down the road.

[deice]

2.3 finally out

https://deice.neocities.org/content/blog/2021/march_1_1.html
https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

what's new?:

-replays (not broken this time i swear)
-stage and spell practice
-lots of bugfixes and streamlining of the data saving functionality

[deice]

last alpha version, 2.4

https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

as i'm sure you could tell, this was a very fast update, meaning there isn't too much new stuff.

-replays of practice modes can now be recorded
-items function like they do in real touhou now (can't believe i put this off for so long)
-easier to specify things that are constant throughout the game

[deice]

bumping just to inform that beta 1.0 is almost ready so anyone following can be assured the project isn't on hold or anything, it should be set to release in around 2 weeks or so

other than curvy lasers finally being added, there's a lot of new streamlined methods of pattern customization and a fair amount of QoL improvements, look forward to it

[deice]

finally in beta

https://deice.neocities.org/content/blog/2021/may_14_1.html
https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

as promised:

-lasers that curve
-bullets can now have actions like curve/accelerate/split controlled by built-in timers, same with bosses and movement
-a bit of cleanup and more miscellaneous customization

[deice]

the video series mentioned a while back has finally started to be published!
the first video (and all subsequent ones) will be available here:

https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/video.html

tell me if there is anything you don't like.
as for the next version, expect it relatively soon

[deice]

beta 1.3

https://deice.neocities.org/content/blog/2021/july_7_1.html
https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

huge (not in size but in functionality) update:

-a lot of customization options for bullets, too long to explain briefly
-last words
-fixed some bugs with the example stuff, implemented some misc visual stuff from touhou (item/boss markers)

[deice]

beta 1.4 is out and it's likely the last update

read why here: https://deice.neocities.org/content/blog/2021/august_13_1.html
changelog: https://deice.neocities.org/content/gmte/change.html

for mods: probably keep this thread open for a bit and then close it if there's no further questions/concerns? idk what the policy on that is