GameMaker 2024.800 Beta 2 moves GMRT (GameMaker RunTime) into Open Beta. GMRT is the new runtime and toolchain for building games with GameMaker

GMRT is currently in development, but we’re releasing the beta to developers who want to help us find compatibility issues and try out GMRT’s new features.

A setup guide is available for those who wish to try out GMRT. If you have any issues, let us know by submitting issues to our repository.

Why GMRT?

GMRT is a complete redesign of the runtime and toolchain (basically everything that happens after you press “Run”) with a few key goals:

• Give developers the ability to easily modify and extend the runtime functionality
• Allow developers more control over the build process of their games
• Improve runtime performance
• Allow GameMaker to support other scripting languages and target platforms easily

GMRT leverages a number of different technologies which allows us to achieve these goals. This lets us provide access to these technologies through GMRT for developers.

We also aim to provide extensions and tools for developers to code and debug their games through other code editors such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Performance Improvements

GMRT opens up new opportunities to optimise for performance due to the new ways in which games are compiled within the toolchain and how GML is handled within the runtime. While we’ve yet to properly begin optimising, we’re already seeing improvements over the current runtime on benchmark tests.

Webgpu api (experimental)

NOTE: The following experimental features are very likely to change over time. Because of this there is also no auto complete or syntax highlighting setup yet within the GameMaker IDE.

GMRT is currently working on compatibility with the current runtime features. While not everything is there yet and a lot of testing is still needed, we’re in a position where we can start to work on some of the new features we intend to provide through GMRT and share our experiments with you. One of these experiments is a GML API for WebGPU.

Since GMRT has a unified rendering backend (unlike the current runtime where there are multiple rendering backends for different targets) we’re able to provide access to this during runtime.

Effectively this allows developers to build their own render pipelines from within GML.

It also allows you to use Compute Shaders in your custom pipelines.

The rendering backend is based on the javascript WebGPU api and we’ve provided an example project and some basic documentation to get you started.

When will it be ready?

There’s still a long way to go with GMRT so we wouldn’t recommend switching over from the current runtime just yet. We’ll be keeping you updated as things progress and we’ll be adding more features over the next few months to get feedback on the various things we have planned.

We’re currently focussing on the Windows target right now with the aim to get all desktop platforms done by Q4.

After that we will be focussing targeting web assembly, then mobile platforms, and finally consoles. We hope to have GMRT out of beta during the later half of 2025.

We would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on GMRT and any suggestions you have. If you have questions or simply want to know more, we encourage you to join the discord channel.

Written by Luke Brown