This is a great feature but unfortunetly i never got it running in Game Maker itself. On mobile platforms it can look different but then again, you will need pro for developemt on these anyway I would argue most 2d games made with game maker could easily fit into modern gpu memory at once so 99% of the time you wont really need it. The standart-version groups everything into default, so if can and will happen that some textures are not very good organized (for example, your walk animation is spread over 2 or 3 textures). So at best you can reduce the need for v-ram of your game. Game Maker loads only the textures the room needs or if you generate an object that uses sprites from this texture. So for example you have a RPG, you could group one texture set (sprites, backgrounds, textures) into multiple groups. This is a nice feature if you expect your game to become big and resource heavy.
I'm not planning to export to Android so although I hate that Standard is 'closed' to dlc should I change my mind and worthless if I were ever to buy Professional (since there's no upgrade discount) I don't think this is a problem to me.
I only just heard about team dev tool alternatives a couple of hours ago and so don't know about them much but would you recommend them? Was it easy for your friend to set up and you to use? I'm just going to assume it is unimportant to me since I haven't needed whatever it is so far I have done a google search and can't seem to figure out exactly what texture control is. Do you think you might develop iPhone games somewhere down the line? Do you already have other solutions for texture editing and version control? Personally, a buddy has gotten me hooked on Mercurial over Subversion, so the team stuff doesn't excite me, but the other 2 points justified the extra $17. I've only just started using it, since the flash sale was what justified the purchase to me, but these are wholly dependent on what you expect to do. Modularity (the option to add web/mobile exports later) Originally posted by Arch4ngel:Between Pro and Standard, there seem to be 3 really important differences: