Yeah your'e right about the music editor. Anvil studio is fine for making midis and I expect it will be a lot better than Marks. Im expecting it will be for midi anyway.

It's nonetheless useful to include at least basic means to create something in the field of music - the argument that 'everyone has MS Paint anyway' could easily be used to invalidate the sprite editor, if not. If Game Maker is to live up to its name there's no reason why it should serve some aspects of the creative process and not others.

As for icons, great. It can't possibly be difficult to allow the loading of non-.ico images for icons (especially as most conversion/editing programs seem to be able to do so with next to no effort whatsoever), so why not? There are 'lots of freeware programs' for nearly everything Game Maker does - isn't that the point?

what exactly do you all consider "support" in this manner?  you can already load png's into gm.  so, is what i'm seeing you cats chat about referring to the fact that perhaps gm will now convert all files to png instead of the (totally crappy and overblown bit size) bmp?

if that's the case, this is cause for one serious celebration  :o

and shoot, if he could rock in a simple piano roll music creation package, then life will just be that much grander.

there's no reason that it should be such a pain in the booty to get decent music playing in your game (and yes, i count using a dll as a pain in the booty).

Well, sprite_add() currently doesn't support PNG.  (So for loading up external resources on the fly, I still have to depend on formats such as bmp, gif or jpg).

When people say 'png support', they are mostly refering to the fact of supporting alpha'd png's (or ones with an included alpha channel).  Currently, the only way Game Maker can do alpha channeling is by using 2 sprites, one being the alpha channel while the other being the visual sprite.  This is done by using the Game Maker function sprite_set_alpha_from_sprite();  It would be nice, however, if sprite_add() supported this natively (tho, I have a feeling Mark is only going to make the sprite editor support it...which would be a shame.)

~Brandon

"Add function to load ... with an alpha channel."

I hope this is a misuse of the word 'load'. *Adding* sprites with an alpha channel on the fly would be great. If not, it's badly using great potential as Shaltif said. I'm grateful that so far the registration has been a one-time fee. I'm stocked to try the beta when it comes out.