This Week in Game-Guru - 1/22/2018

As mentioned previously I should probably get off blogger soon.
Is it just wordpress these days or is there anything else of value out there?

It dawned on me I'm basically doing the job Lee and crew did years ago back when Game-Guru was still fresh and had life to it.  

ENGINE UPDATES:

The following video has all of the latest details and updates on the Game-Guru engine.

That's right, literally nothing, zip, zilch, nada.  Just one cryptic post from Lee about another unrelated project (here) that was received rather poorly by the increasingly salty natives.

NEW ON THE STORE

https://www.tgcstore.net/product/30999 - BSP made a new m9 pistol.  Looks very decent!
https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11002 - Tarkus continues his efforts in the world of audio for Game-Guru.  It's a smart move and he could easily translate it cross platform if he so chose.  I like his work thus far. This 'star cluster music pack' has a really professional feel to it.  The tracks are well done and have a heavy ambient-style synth vibe to them.  It's slower than his other stuff but definitely has a good feel to it for a space-based game that is not fast paced.  The free samples practically sell it for him.  Even though I'm an owner of his previous work(s) I feel this one has a real good flow to it.  I may purchase it myself soon!
https://www.tgcstore.net/product/31002 - Corrosion's 'enhanced AI'.  Probably is enhanced but I'd prefer to see a video if I'm spending that kind of money on an unproven product.  I'm an AI geek myself; I spent several thousand lines of code writing a pretty landmark AI program that went on to be the basis for the Reaper bot code.  Color me hard to impress, if you will.  Without a video to show the differences, it's hard to justify spending 7 dollars on something that could only be marginally better.  Considering how bad the AI is currently, this is significant.  If anyone purchases this, please let me know what your results are!

THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS:

So in more relevant news (to me, that is), there's a lot going on with third party programs.  To me, this and Lua coded items are where the action are at.  Lee simply takes too long to push his updates and as a result, we're forced to do a lot of the heavy lifting if this thing is ever going to be a functional product.

So first off we have OldPMan's excellent "Normalizator" (wow, what a mouthful) tool starting to beta PBR support.  This is a huge boost to people like me who haven't got the time to invest in learning a whole new workflow for PBR assets!

More info here:  https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216095?page=6#msg2594115

Also we've had some lively discussions on voice synthesis (robo-talk) software: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219214

And also we have a great thread on converting assets from Makehuman to Mixamo to 'FBX2GG'.

Lastly, I should also mention my own work here.  I recently created a Notepad++ Lua API for Game-Guru.  It's a simple piece but was a time consuming slog with 2400+ lines of XML code to write up.  It will basically auto-complete, give hints, etc for Game Guru and it's associated Lua functions. You can get more info on that here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219215

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219234 - Bugsy continues his work on his Wolf's previous FPSC game: Direct Action.  The sequel is called "Direct Action 2" (surprisingly enough) and has some pretty good teaser screenshots:

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219060 - Duchenkuke has given up on his flagship product 'Cold Contract'; This is unfortunate.  Another high quality potential Game-Guru developer is taking an undefined hiatus from Game-Guru due to production issues.  This is, in my opinion, the biggest plague we have ongoing right now.  We really have a significant hurtle in using Game-Guru with respect to producing titles, primarily our ability to actually 'convert into standalone' and memory issues.  The memory issues, in particular, really cause serious problems in larger projects.  It's a damn shame that yet another great project is being dumped because this issue couldn't get resolved.

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219206 Lastly, while it's not a WIP, Wolf made a pretty great lightmapping tutorial.  This is the type of thing we need more of.

IN MY OWN WORKS

As mentioned, there's my Notepad++ API that is free for download to help developers get the most out of their Lua coding in Game-Guru.  On top of that I've been intermittently working on my upcoming kit(s) for Game-Guru.  They're heady projects though so it's really eating up cycles to do the things I want to do.  I realize that if I was a slightly better programmer in Lua this probably wouldn't be so tremendously difficult.

That said I've made a lot of progress.  I've integrated weapons and healthkits into my system (ammo was the first thing I used) and now need to find a way to get the enemies to do what I want them to do.  All in all, I'm a solid 2-4 months away from being able to release either of them at this pace.  Maybe as things clear up I'll be able to allot more time.  As it is though, it's only a little here and there.

That wraps it up for this week.  Keep an eye out for an update coming down the pike.  We should see some really great stuff soon if Lee ever deems to open the floodgates.

This week in Game-Guru 12/11/2017

ENGINE UPDATE PROGRESS REPORT

So we've all had a week or so to chew on the new Public Preview aka Open Beta of the PBR-enabled, DX11 configured Game Guru and.... it's buggy.  I mean it's good in a lot of ways, but it's seriously buggy.  I myself have encountered numerous problems with existing media's implementation (mostly based around the old shaders having lack of compatibility with DX11).  This is going to break a lot of people's old media which may not be a bad thing.  I personally am starting to wonder why Lee didn't just split this off into a separate project.  Doing it this late in the game seems ... a lot riskier now that it's actually reached beta phase.

With respect to my own works I tested my Lighting Kit and Weather System.  The Lighting system works fine.  The Weather system requires some adjustment.

Primarily you have to:

• Open your GG folder.  Mine is in c:\program files(x86)\steam\steamapps\common\game-guru
• Open the files subfolder, then the effectbank subfolder, then the reloaded subfolder.
• Edit settings.fx in notepad.  Find this line: // #define ADDSKYBOXFOG 
• Remove the // from the front.  Save the file.
• Edit the setup or settings (i can't recall and will update this later), find forceloadtestgameshaders=0, change it to a 1, save it.
• Restart game-guru.

That takes care of the fog issue not affecting the sky.
To update the  weather so it works (I will update my system after public preview becomes an official release so if you don't want to do this part, just wait):

• Find the bagweather decal folder in your game-guru entitybank/purchased/bag folder.  
• Edit the FPE file(s) for each weather decal.  Change effect_animate64.fx to decal_animate64.fx

Done!





I'm hoping Preben and Lee get this stuff sorted and these bugs sifted for a good release post-new years.

NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE

Unfortunately people are clearly winding down for the holidays so not much activity going on the store at the moment.

Lots and lots of sales though.

One new thing on the store is Tazman's bloody snowmen.  If you want that kind of thing, it's there for you.

FREE STUFF

In the world of free scripts and objects we have some really excellent stuff this week.
Amenmoses has produced a script which does some pretty impressive things with balls and physics.  Specifically it drops/spawns balls from the air which actually respond to physics after spawning.  Impressive stuff.  Check it out here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219068

Graphix has provided some really nice PBR-enabled free barrels!
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217932?page=5#msg2591866

Bod has given us more goodies this week - primarily a hay bale, pitchfork, and this neat laptop:

But this week everyone got eclipsed by LOTGD's release of several character for free use.  They are of exceptionally high quality.  I for one am humbled by this offering as it's really the kind of thing you'd expect to pay 5+ dollars on the store for.   You can find that here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219057?page=1#msg2591614

There's also this nifty scorpion he made on the same thread here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219057?page=1#msg2591822

THIRD PARTY TOOLS

Looks like Bored Of The Rings (BOTR) released the newest version of his heightmap to GG tool.  This tool now has a functional GUI and some better tuned settings.  Definitely check it out!
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218876?page=2#msg2591885

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY

In the randomly creative arena we've got some real winners this week but I think this one takes the cake:

I mean wow, this literally makes my week. SCHNEEKY has also made a Christmas-time Yule log, which was pretty cleanly done.

And in the realm of actually 'Holy crap this should get released' works of creativity:
Duchenkuke has done some really amazing things with his "Cold Contract" game.  Looks absolutely awesome, the lighting is great!

Keep a real close eye on this one.  This is going to be a real show-stopper once it's released.