Does it belong in a museum... or my game?

This is a post about practicality of using variously old GameMaker versions and what it'll take to make your project run correctly for most users.

If you are still using GameMaker: Studio instead of moving to a more current version (perhaps you should - it's been almost five years since GMS1 support has ended) and you are doing extension work or anything else that demands conversions between raw pixel data and surfaces on Windows, you might have noticed that buffer_set_surface doesn't work on some computers - no matter what you pass in, no pixels appear on the surface.

Though the better way to put it would be "buffer_set_surface doesn't work anymore".

This is a post about the matter.

This is a kind of a blog post that you probably don't need unless you've already had an encounter with its subject.

This is a blog post outlining the various formats that emerged over the two decades of GameMaker history (there being few dozen of them now) and instructions on how to open them in various GameMaker versions.

A sample model from GameMaker Model Viewer and its raw data

This is a blog post about the structure of GameMaker's (now-legacy) 3d model format.

Output sample

Ever work in GameMaker and find yourself thinking "I wish I could log the contents of this buffer without pausing and staring at it in the debugger"?

A little post about a little GameMaker script to randomly return one of the values while minding their "weights" - in other words, a "biased" version of choose.

If you've been trying to import older extensions into GameMaker Studio 2.3.1 or newer, you might encounter these error messages time to time:

wrong number of arguments for function buffer_get_surface
wrong number of arguments for function buffer_set_surface

This is a small post on how to get rid of that: