Almost hundred users now. Though not very many functions; this just ain't right. We plan to develope this site now, and we have already begun.

1) An affiliation system
2) A shoutbox
3) A comments page

Affiliation, you all know what that's good for. It means we can share all of our great tutorials with more people. That's a good thing. And then theres the shoutbox, through which people can communicate. Communication is good, hopefully there will be some discussion going on in not too long time. Looking forward to that. Last but not least, the comments page. Our site it getting kind of big. Soon more than 200 articles, you bet it takes some time to look them all through. Now though, with the comments page, you can always keep up to date about where new comments have been made. This means you can find questions and answer them fast, or you can ask questions and trust them to be answered soon. Really useful, at least for me, who earlier haven't got a clue about where there have been questions to answer.

We are planning a upload function, and I hope it will be up by this week. It will be fast and painless, of course. Probably it will also allow hotlinking, something more sites should do. But of course, not all sites are willing to hand out server space for free. Our hope is that this new service will be popular among Game Makers.

Maybe a forum would be good for this site as well, what do you think? I don't know if anyone would come here to discuss. It would certainly be funny if people would, I'd love more deep discussion especially on subjects relevant for this site, such as how to write good tutorials, how to teach gm, how to learn gm etc. we'll let the shoutbox run and see how it is used. Maybe that can give us a clue.

And then there's our service that almost noone knows of, it seems. All members can write their own tutorials and publish them at this site. I think it is a really good opportunity for a lot of people, whose homepages doesn't got a very good visit-rate. This page has lately recieved more than hundred visitors a day, consequently. It's sure to get read here... and we have more than 400 comments, that two per article. I guess I'll have to try to inform people somehow!

Statistics from the survey is hopefully coming up in the near future as well. Some parts has already been published, although not at this forum. I currently got somewhere between 300 and 400 participants I think, it should give us a pretty good picture of Game Maker users. I'll try to write a bit about it as well, make some conclusion for those who do not have the time to do so themselves. I usually want to write about I do, like I do right now.

The newly released "Team Index", that can be reached through the menu, is a result from the survey. It's pretty extensive, if you look for affiliates or for a team to join, that's definitely the place. I can tell. I've got a lot of positive response from the GMC as well. That's nice of them. Otherwise I'm always pretty disappointed about the response I get there.

If you still read this, then you are one patient reader. Or you find interest in this homepage. Hopefully theres a combination. I have lately recieved some questions, from that other service "Ask a question"; but I have to tell you a lot of them I cannot answer. They are far too specific. "I have a game and in that game is a rope and that rope...", I can't answer such questions! 1) it's not of public interest 2) I often don't know enough about the system. You got to think about that when you ask the questions, and you got to think about leaving the right information, including e-mail.

Just some few weeks ago I got an e-mail, through that form, from a person who wanted me to help her a little, cause she wanted to make an educational game for her granddaughter. She got it all figured out; there would be a train pulling letters, and the letters would arranged in a certain order and... etc. it was so inspiring to read, I really wanted to help on this one. What better thing can you use Game Maker for than to learn you grand dagughter read?

Well, my point then. I tried to contact her for some missing key info that I would need, but after a few minutes I recieved a message from the operator, and obviously the e-mail was incorrect! That's just sad. Barbara, if you read this, then please return with an accurate e-mail and I will try to help you. Although I hope you have already solved it using my other tutorials!

When looking over my statistics, I'm actually starting to wonder how people uses my tutorials (and the examples, contributions from Erik and more, let's not forget them). Are they inspirational factors or do they actually solve problems? If they solve problems, then I really wonder how do people find them... cause according to my statistics almost noone run searches. I dare say we have a quite extensive list of tutorials and solutions to different problems here, to find something "manually" must be a lot of work. I therefore encourage people to use the search-function more.

If you use them as inspiration that's good too though. I remember myself when I started with Game Maker (and I have to add, I hardly knew any English, so tutorials wasn't very good for me) I mainly played around with other peoples work and made new things with them. This way I learned a lot of things, and I was introduced gradually... this is a tip for all of you. I have seen it being mentioned in my survey as well, that treats this question, how do you learn gm.

Wow... this was one long post. My intention was not at all for it to be this long; I was expecting myself to be in bed like 18 minutes ago! Well, now that I have mentioned almost every part of this page I might as well mention the last, and I can change the title from being just some "new functions" to "The GMtutorials Bible".

The last function that I was thinking about, however, is also found in the menu to the left. It is called "Translations", but it's not actually translations, hehe. Well, some kind of translation it is. It's provided from Altavista, the search engine and they call their service "Babelfish". It doesn't translate to any language that I know very, therefore I can't tell the exact quality but I asked at the spanish forum a while ago and they said that it was okey, actually. Most online translators ain't okey, but this seems to be a little better than they normally are. It seems to be coherent at least, although not very natural. It's understandable (and it's free . Maybe it translates some programming terms as well though, I'm not sure. I've seen most qualities of translators and some of them even translate functions...

Well. My easter holiday is starting from now on, and I have a week to do what I have to do. Will be some busy days, I imagine. I wish you all the best easter ever as well and happy vacations.

Thank you.