The Game Maker's Apprentice

I have recently started reading the book The Game Maker's Apprentice by Mark Overmars and Jacob Habgood.  I am using Game Maker Studio free version 1.2.1130, and I ran into a couple issues.  The book references to Game Maker version 8, which is the old Game Maker.  The layout for Game Maker Studio is very similar to the older version so the translation doesn't seem to be a problem.



The first issue I am having is there are two actions the book calls for that do not seem to exist in GMS(Game Maker Studio).  The two actions are "sleep" and "show high score".  I did some research and the "sleep" function was removed from Game Maker in the new version, and I could not find any information about the "high score" function.  I hope I can find a work around for these actions as the book calls for them quite often.

The second issue I ran into was in chapter 4.  The free version of GMS only supports the creation of 15 objects.  The book states that the free version is sufficient to use with the book, but in chapter 4 it calls to create more than 15 objects.  As a result of this issue, I ended up at a road block.  I am sure it is partly due to the fact the book references GM8(Game Maker 8), and GM8 probably doesn't have a limit on the amount of objects that can be created.  I really enjoy this book, so I decided to purchase the standard version of GMS.



So far the Game Maker's Apprentice is a great read, even though it is outdated the information provided is priceless.  I will keep the blog updated with any other issues I run into.  Regardless of the issues, I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Game Maker.

Update : I figured out a work around for the sleep function in Game Maker Studio using the Set Alarm action. I also did some research on the High Score Table and there is a way to display it using Game Maker Language (GML), unfortunately I have not learned any GML yet so I haven't been able to implement the high score feature.