ENIGMA Development Environment

No joke, it's been built into Windows since XP, and Microsoft has an installer for you to access the hidden feature, so it's not a rough hack.
http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/virtual-desktops-windows/

You're welcome, and yeah that one does work pretty well.



The first level seemed a little glitchy to me though, it wasn't animating properly and was running on the outside of the circle. But once I restarted it was fine and so was every other level, so I am guessing that was a wild fluke.

When this happens you just need someone to send you a PM, happened to me before and I just had to wait for somebody to PM me. I PM'd you so that should fix it.

Hahahah, that's amazing sorlok! You're my hero! 

No as Harri said, Flash is not an open standard, HTML5 is here and Flash is dead. We would much rather support the SVG format which is much more widely supported.

You're all partially correct in my opinion as someone who has written code for all of the graphics API's and their various versions.

Direct3D9 is honestly the best of the Direct3D versions, and is far superior to the GL1 and GL2 specs. Direct3D has software vertex processing and the ability to emulate shader model on cards that do not support new features, which has always been a huge positive for developers, in OpenGL it's really not feasible to do without duplicating tons of code. GL3 starts going in a new direction and provides more options, you can have both sampler objects and per-texture sampling information, the choice is yours. Direct3D10 also started going in the lower level direction, but in the wrong way, DX10/11 require a substantial amount of code to get a basic rendering context. This is obviously expected, but the code for Direct3D10/11 is so much more verbose than it is with OpenGL3/4.

OpenGL "Next Generation" is in the works as well. They're planning on deprecating all old OpenGL versions and starting anew in favor of an API more like Mantle.

I think it's overhyped.

They aleady finished, it's called GLES.

As to DX12/OGL, I'm not 100% familiar with all the technical aspects, but can you do everything DX12 can, in OGL or are there feature specific things only supported in DX ?

DirectX12 will really not offer anything that the other API's do not. Direct3D9 used to have image loading and could read various formats for you without extensions, but it's going lower level now so it doesn't have anything super special to it anymore. There are really only a few things that Direct3D10/11 have that will soon be superseded by the other API's, software emulation (which will be obsolete and no longer needed) and the illusion of threading (which Mantle has already addressed)

If I remember correctly I could have swore someone helped Overmars, like one of his colleagues or something along those lines, with the Direct3D support and a few other features of the original GM.

The Game Maker's apprentice too has other authors.
http://www.pompanobeachhigh.com/documents/holley/game_makers_apprentice.pdf