Let me give some information.

There will not be a version 6.2. The next version will be 7.0. It will be released at the beginning of december. At the end of october a beta is planned.

Major changes are:

- Better ana additional room transitions, plus the possibility to define your own

- A new extension mechanism , making it possible to extend the functionality in many different ways. Three extension packages will be provided: one for accessing all sorts of Windows Dialogs, one with 50 room transitions, and one to access the printer. I hope this will in the future lead to many more extension packages.

- An extended file inclusion mechanism

- Better splash screens, e.g. to show a movie in the game window.

- Many other small additions and bug corrections


I hope this satisfies the curiosity of people for a while.

Mark

Let me explain the extension mechanism a bit more. You can either create a DLL file with a number of functions or a GML file with a number of scripts (by exporting these). Also you can optionally create a help file. Next you create a description file. This file describes which functions are available in the DLL or GML file, which of them should be visibile to the user, what constants you want to add, what the help file is, what other files are being used by the packages, what other DLL or GML files it depends on, what initialization function to call, etc. All these files are then put in a folder extensions in the Game Maker folder.

Now when a user runs Game Maker, under the Global Game Settings there is a new tab called Extensions. Here there is a ist of available extensions. The user can select which ones to use in the game. The functions are then immediately available, they are recognized by the script editor, and they show up in the function help at the bottom of the script editor. Also, all help files of extension package are accessible through the help menu.

When a game is run or an executable is created, automatically all relevant files for the used extension packages (the DLL, the used files, the dependent DLLs, etc.) are included in the executable. The users does not have to do anything for this.

The main differences with the current DLL mechanism are: no need to have a separate set of scripts that the user must import, also GML based, more versatile, help integration, and no need for the user to take care of inclusion of the right files.

I also plan myself in the future to make more additions available in the form of extension packages and I might even take some parts out of Game Maker and turn them into extension packages. This would indeed reduce the file size of games. (Although unfortunately this size will be considerable larger in version 7 anyway, cause that is required for compatibility with Vista.)

Mark