Posted February 11, 2023 by Yal
Today I learned that the GameMaker function get_string will soon be deprecated. It was used in some of the editors and they will break.
In the Open World version of the code (the newer rewrite) this isn't going to be a big problem - more or less all of the editor functionality was handled with a visual menu object and it was only used in the skeleton animation editor and the atlas array editor for a small handful of things (reading assets by name).
I've uploaded a new version that fixes this using get_string_async (for new projects) and the changes are pretty simple to implement - the gist of it is that you send off the message like normal (with the exact same arguments, too) but handle the actual code in an Async Dialog event instead, essentially cutting everything below the get_string call and pasting it in the new event:
Changes for the Skelani Editor are similar, but we additionally need to keep track of what type of message we sent so we can use the response for the right thing, I just added a basic string variable in the keyboard events + a switch statement in the Async Dialog event for this:
This is going to be a massive problem for the legacy version of the engine, though, since it does not have the rewritten level editor (and backporting it is unfeasible since a lot of little things changed in the legacy-to-open-world transition), so I've made the decision to take down the GMS 2.3 legacy source code for further purchases (GMS 1.4 version will stay up since this update won't roll out for GMS 1.4 though).
If you're working on a project using the legacy version of the engine in GMS2, do not update Game Maker past the 2023.1 version until it is released, and make sure to keep backups of your project source files.