Designing Games with Game Maker - YoYo Games

It can now be indicated whether or not the Close button must behave like the escape key or
not. If not, there is a new event in the Other events that happens when the user clicks on the
Close button. So you can now assign different behavior to the Close button and to the escape
key.
Room transitions
The room transition mechanism is changed and extended, giving you more control over the
transitions and adding many new transitions, like fade-ins, pushing the images, blending room
images, rotations, etc. It is now even possible to define your own scripts to do the transitions
(but this is rather advanced stuff). An extension package with additional room transitions is
provided.
Data structures
A number of additional functions have been provided to deal with data structures. For
example, data structures can now be copied, there are functions to write data structures to a
string and read them back. This string can then used to e.g. save the datastructure to a file.
Also there are more functions for grid data structures to e.g. copy and add parts of grids.
Including files
The mechanism to include files in the executables has been considerably extended. For each
file it can now be indicated under what filename it must be stored and where it must be
stored. There is a choice now whether or not to include the files in the editable version of the
game. Also there are functions to export the files at a different moment than the start of the
game.
Adding sprites and backgrounds with alpha channel
There are now functions sprite_add_alpha() and sprite_replace_alpha() to add or replace a
sprite from a file that has an alpha channel (such as png files) to get nicer transparancy
effects. Similar functions exist for backgrounds.
New registration mechanism