When comparing Oxygine vs GameMaker Studio 2, the Slant community recommends Oxygine for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Oxygine is ranked 18th while GameMaker Studio 2 is ranked 67th. The most important reason people chose Oxygine is:
Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Games can be built as HTML5 applications
Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS.
Pro Functionality can be extended with a bunch of available extenions
All of them available publicly at github.
- oxygine-movie for playing Theora movies with alpha channel
- oxygine-sound player for ogg sound/music with streaming
- oxygine-freetype library
- oxygine-billing for in-app-purchases on Android/iOS
- oxygine-spine for playing Spine animations
- oxygine-magicparticles for playing particles made with MagicParticles
Pro Will be familiar to users of ActionScript3/Flash API
If you are familiar with ActionScript3/Flash API, then you will find it easy to begin working in Oxygine. Oxygine is much like Flash in C++, as its Event Handling model is very close to that of ActionScript 3 and SceneGraph.
Pro Easy to use C++ API with optional C++11 features
Oxygine is written in C++. It provides easy to use API, which is designed with "do more with less code" philosophy. It uses a managed scenegraph system that takes care of rendering and updates, and provides ability to extend with custom rendering and updates.
Pro Free, open source and cross-platform
Oxygine is a free framework that works on OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5. It's licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Robust
It's very rare to experience bugs with Oxygine.
Pro Allows playing movies with alpha channel
Using oxygine-movie extension for Oxygine you could play in your game any videos encoded with Theora codec.
You movie could have alpha channel and used as simple sprite instead of classic spreadsheet animations.
Pro Allows for flexible contol over draw processes
Pro Fast
Pro Quick prototyping
Pro Good user interface
Pro Well-optimized engine
Pro Has a trial version (but limited functions, can't export)
Pro Many unofficial tutorials
Most GMS1 tutorials are fine for GMS2
Pro Highly customizable IDE
Although users must work within the IDE and editor, GMS2 has many options to customize the look and feel
Pro Good documentation
Pro Huge, generous community
Cons
Con Inactive
The project does not seem to be active: there has been no new commit since mid-2019, the Twitter feed for the engine stopped posting news in 2018, and the forum is offline as of May 2021.
Con Little community support
Oxygine is a young framework. It was first released in 2013 and has yet to gather a large community. As of February 2016, the forum had just 123 members.
Con Not many tutorials available
There are not many tutorials available that teach developers on how to make a game with Oxygine from scratch. Because of this, it may be harder to pick it up or to start learning game development by using this engine.
Con Not the best scripting language out there
GML is just weird; if you want to learn programming, it is not the best because it teaches bad habits and has many odd shortcuts and shortcomings that won't transfer to a real language
Con HTML5 export is buggy, doesn't "just work"
Con Quite expensive
Windows ($100) + HTML5 ($140) + Mobile ($400) + UWP ($400) is $1,050, plus $800 anually for each console export separately. But doesn't do anything any of the free engines can't do, and the stability and tech support aren't great.
Con Unstable
Users frequently report crashes and hangs, particularly when working with assets, and the software uses a complicated underlying meta-file structure that may become corrupted and cannot be rebuilt
Con Limited support for OOP
Con Small development team
The core programming team is only 5-10 people, with about 30 employees total, so bug fixes can take a long time to be addressed, and there aren't many official tutorials
