#Game maker studio 2.0 how to#
#Game maker studio 2.0 code#

Now how do we use an array practically? Exactly the same as we would use a normal variable, as shown in the following examples: The array was only initialised with 5В positions, but we've tried to get position 7 - since arrays are numbered from 0, array is position 7В - therefore the game generates an error and crashes. For example, this will cause the project to crash when run: You should always take care to only access valid array positions, as trying to access a value outside of an array will also give an error. If you already know which items you want to put into the array, you can add comma-separated values between the brackets when declaring the array: However, if you try to access a value in an emptyВ array then you will get an error. This tells GameMaker that the variable ' my_array' is an array, and you can then add values to it at any time in the future.

You can also use the GML function array_create() to initialize an array withВ a fixed size, and you can even create 'empty' arrays with noВ values, for example: NOTE: The HTML5 export is the exception to the above rule, and when targeting that you should initialise arrays in consecutive order from 0 upwards. The speed difference is negligible for smaller arrays, but larger ones should be optimised as much as possible in this way. This is not strictly necessary but is the optimal way to do it as it will reserve a space in memory that is the exact size of the array, whereas if you initialize an array from 0 upwards, the memory has to be re-allocated for every additional value added (so for a ten-slotВ array, initialising it in a loop would change the memory allocation ten times). You will notice that the array has been initialised backwards, with the last value being defined first.

#Game maker studio 2.0 code#

This simple code will initialize a ten-slotВ array (from 0 to 9) to hold 0, ie: each slot in the array contains the value 0. This is important to remember as it means that you have to do a certain amount of planning before using arrays, but it is easy enough to initialize one using a repeat loop like this: Initializing an array just means that we give each slot of the array an initial value in preparation for it to be used elsewhere in the project code.

#Game maker studio 2.0 how to#

We've shown how to check an array for data, but how do we create the array to start with? First it has to be initialized before we can use it or GameMaker Studio 2 will give us an error. It's worth noting that the contents of an array alwaysВ startВ at 0 and can never be negative ! Creating Arrays SoВ essentially, an array is a container with a number of slots to store values, and each position in the container has a specific number to identify it, which is what we put in the. If you did the following:ДЄs you can see, you give the array a variable name and then a value in square brackets, where the value is the position in the array to get the data from. The above code gets the value from position 0 ofВ the array ' a' then outputs it to the console, which - based on the contents of the array shown in the image above - would output 125. To access the array you would do something like the following: This is called a 1D (one-dimensional) array, and as you can see the array is stored in the variable ' a' and contains multiple values. The image below shows a schematic for a basic array: An array is simply a data type that is assigned to a variable, and it can contain not just one value, but multiple values. Before going any further let's clarify what an array actually is and how it's structured.