ah! that did the trick, steam got all the redists and stuff that i apparently didnt have and the game launches fine on both itch and steam! thank you!

grabbed pretty much everything from the redistrubutable page and directx, restarted, and still the same error :( 

OH yeah i meant the redistributables, that was the post i followed first before making my own post and nothing changed, not even a restart

hi! im getting an error launching the game?9 ive installed visual studio 2015, 2017, 2019 to see if it'd fix it and it didnt :(

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Create Event
for object obj_Constants:

Error defining an external function.
at gml_Script_sqlite_DefineFunction
############################################################################################
gml_Script_sqlite_DefineFunction (line -1)
gml_Object_obj_Constants_Create_0
gml_Room_SetupScreen_Create (line -1)