Hey,
I use GameMaker to teach kids about game design, and with the awful direction Yoyo is going with Studio (especially when it comes to the free versions of the program our kids use), I am super pumped to see this project and using ENIGMA in my class in the future.
Sorry to hear that, you've been brainwashed. The free version is a good way to get started. The standard version is very affordable. What bad direction can you give any example ? Don't forget that YYG started with an existing project they took over from Mark Overmars and his product was flawed. They had big limitations in what they could change and improve without warranting a complete rewrite which was out of the question. GM has gone a LONG way since they took over the project from Mark. The bad direction they took is when they decided to make their software uniform across all platform, sacrificing some windows functionality for windows only developers. However, these are shortcomings that could be worked around. If you look around you will see that lots of amazing, very popular games were released with GM Studio. Sure the software would be great if it were completely rewritten and not contain any bits of the mess that Mark Overmars left them with, but a full rewrite is not going to happen anytime soon.
I've downloaded ENIGMA, and while I've had some success making simple games in LGM, I have had zero success compiling any of the old GM8.1 or GM7 projects my students have made in the past. 'All fail at the C++ level.' These are all simple games made using exclusively drag & drop coding, so the only place the kids could have mucked things up with their syntax would be in object or variable names.
There you go. ENIGMA is very lacking and weak and incomplete. You nailed it, SIMPLE games. In no way does it come close to competing with GM. To really compete it would have to have 100% compatibility (fullset of GML commands). It might never be fully compatible to import over your projects but at least if it was compatible one could re-write the games directly in ENIGMA. It's not as if the kids are coding complex projects anyway. If ENIGMA can't even properly compile most older revisions of GM games that tell you that something is really wrong.
It seems like the drag and drop code is being parsed in such a way that the syntax for simple things like if/else statements is getting garbled. But it seems weird that I'm having these issues across the board, so I'm wondering if there's any possibility there's some obvious issue on my end I'm overlooking. I running ENIGMA in Windows 7 64-bit from a folder on my desktop (for now). The GM files are all in a directory on the same HD.
There is no clear future for ENIGMA, if you look around development is stalled and going nowhere. I too had big hopes for ENIGMA and was shocked when I saw that some simple projects I imported from GM6/7/8 did not work either, some where simply D&D, but I tend to use more GML now. Very disappointed.
Currently the only advantage I can see in using ENIGMA are for windows projects that require some of the obsoleted commands that were foolishly removed.......but what good is it when compatibility is so low, and such infrequent updates.......
Do yourself and your students a favour and stick to Game Maker, the good news is that those kids are young, so by the time ENIGMA matures and is a true competing product, the kids will have become adults in their 30s maybe 50s, and too old to worry about game maker anymore and by that time they might have studied C++ instead........