NOTE: Twitter has geared up and improved security for their API, changing login to use OAuth. Unfortunately, it makes the extension below obsolete. It's still online as a proof-of-concept only.
This is a Game Maker extension used to send Twitter messages. It uses an unmanaged DLL that calls into the managed .NET runtime library to connect with Twitter. It sends an HTTP POST message to send an update. The reason for doing it this way was because Game Maker can only call into native code, but the circumstances for making/using this were competition-based so 3rd party libraries were allowed (all code must be original). Yes it's kind of a judgement call. Anyway there is no standard C++ networking library that provides enough abstraction, but the standard .NET runtime library makes it easy.
In Game Maker, it provides the following functions:
twitter_set_user(user :string)
- - Call this first to set the Twitter username to use.
twitter_set_password(password :string)
- - Call this to set the Twitter password. The game author may want to take some form of security measures.
twitter_send(message :string)
- - Tweets a message.
twitter_set_timeout(timeout :real)
- - Optional. The maximum time, in milliseconds to wait for a network message to be sent. The default is 5000 (5 seconds).
The user name and password only need to be set once.
The extension was built for/tested on Game Maker 8.
Download Game Maker Extension (.gex)
The source code is compiled using Visual Studio 2008. There are two project files, one that builds the DLL itself and one .exe used for testing the DLL. I made the DLL into a .gex using Extension Maker.