Away from home today, so I decided to try something mostly unrelated to what I've done before--loading files from the Internet. Since online databases are one of the things I do, I think it might be interesting to draw info from them into a program made with GameMaker, either as a way to make a sort of custom app for accessing the information, or just pulling live information as an alternative to only using whatever data the game has been built with. In this case I used files from the DohBell database. Since the cover thumbnail images are stored in one directory with standardized naming and each single/album is guaranteed to at least have a Regular cover, then it is easy to get a valid cover image URL from a random number.
So I made a simple sprite and object for a button inviting myself to Click. When it's clicked it picks a random number from 1 to 600 and tries to load the regular cover JPEG for that number. When that's done it goes to a new image loaded event (since to just wait for it would cause the program to pause indefinitely) that assigns that loaded image to a new "rect" object. Then to make things a little less boring and more like some kind of screensaver, I made the rect object so it picks things like a random size (from quarter-size to full size), a random speed (1-3 pixels diagonal per frame), and made the images bounce off the edges of the window.
Result: it works. Though you'll just have to trust me that things were actually moving around.
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