Please be aware the registry editor is a fairly advanced Windows tool and it's easy to cause significant damage to your Windows install, so ensure this is carried out by a system admin.
We'd recommend following this guide once using a fresh install on one machine and then copying the registry data to all machines you wish to apply the no-internet change to.
Please also be aware that this guide applies to Educational copies of GameMaker: Studio only - retail copies of Studio will ignore any change you make here and carry on showing internet features.
Disabling Internet Access
Make sure you have run Studio 1.4 once, then ensure Studio is not running and open the Windows registry editor by using the Windows key + R, then type in "regedit" without the quotes and press enter.
Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\GMStudio\Version 1.0\Preferences in the tree, as shown above.
Locate the "DisableInternetAccesss" option (if you have not run Studio 1.4 yet, this option might not exist and you will need to create it). Modify its value and set it to 1. Okay the change, then close regedit.
On Windows 7 and above you shouldn't need to log out or reboot in order to apply the registry change, so you should be able to open Studio and see the change immediately, but be aware on XP and possibly Vista systems you might need to reboot once.
Functionality Lost Or Changed Within The IDE
From now on your Studio won't use the internet when you start it. This means the tips/demos/tutorials feeds won't update themselves on opening GameMaker, which can avoid errors with firewalls and proxy servers, but also the news feed won't load and isn't viewable within the product. On the Welcome screen this will simply show a white screen instead of the browser window, whilst inside the IDE when it has loaded fully the news feed page simply won't be shown.
You won't get menu entries for the GameMaker: Marketplace or GameMaker: Player (both major new additions in 1.4 releases) and so the use of the Marketplace will be blocked.
Additionally, links to most external resources which opened a browser window, such as many Help menu items, are now blocked.
Accessing Demos And Tutorials
If you disable internet access within GameMaker you're now limited to only accessing local copies of demos and tutorials (and only those demos or tutorials which your local copy of the feed file knows about, so you won't get new ones appear as they become available).
If a user/student attempts to create a demo or tutorial which is not already downloaded onto that machine, they will see a prompt that they cannot download the remote file and to ask an admin for the files. A similar prompt will also appear if they try to update the feed buttons. You can see an example of this prompt below:
Accordingly, we now provide a zip of all demos and tutorials in the correct structure for unzipping directly into place in this FAQ. If you download this file and then pass it around each machine and extract the file as documented in that other FAQ, this will give you all the required files and avoid any issues with not having internet access to download demos and tutorials.