This Week in Game-Guru - 4/9/2018

Apologies for last week.  I missed the update completely as my day job as Chief Linux Systems Engineer is reaching it's yearly crescendo (culminating in early May) and so I'm finding myself exceptionally busy, compared to what I would only term the 'off season' where it's much easier to focus on secondary tasks, which unfortunately this blog falls into.

As such you may notice for a few weeks a reduced focus on this blog but I promise you it will return as soon as I can steadily manage it.  I'd like to give a quick shout-out to Graphix for a freebie he sent me (unsolicited) as thanks for the blog.  Give his products a look here - he's been doing some great things with the new PBR system. 

OFFICIAL GAME-GURU NEWS:

Not sure what I can say here.  Work continues, Preben is doing a lot of fantastic things with the shaders for DX11 but there's some serious issues that are still being worked on.  So as such we're stuck with a more updated public preview edition but hopefully will see movement forward towards a stable 'release' sometime soon.  To be sure, this is not the upgrade path I'd have chosen if I were Lee.

NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE:

Teabone (the king of clutter objects, IMO) has released a few new pieces of high quality clutter objects, notably some paintings.

There's also some interesting medieval horror objects by Lafette that literally the first words out of my mouth were (and I quote): "Wow!  That's.. really really nice.  I mean that's absolutely top shelf stuff."  And the best part is?  They're EXTREMELY WELL PRICED.  I mean the entire pack is something like 7 dollars, US.   This is something on the level of Wizard of ID level of quality, for a fraction of the price.  Definitely worth the investment.

FREE STUFF:

There's a fairly large body of 'free stuff' to go through:
First of all, Bod has made some new PBR remakes of his old stuff that look great!
Second we have Lafette (same one as above) making some 'free little mountains' which honestly are fantastic!  I hope to be able to include them with my book!
Thirdly we have a 'free PBR industrial pack' by JPH Games. 
Here's a script for making a MOHAA (Medal of Honor, Allied Assault man I haven't played that game in a lonnnng time) style bomb script: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219519
And lastly there's a pretty great script set of RPG style functions. 

All in all, a pretty solid week for freebies!

THIRD PARTY TOOLS:

Some news:  The Heightmap Importation tool is being integrated into the GitHub source - eventually!  Still, this is a huge bit of news and I'm excited to see it finally getting it's day in the sun.

Also GG loader by Preben has gotten another update of some underwater shaders.  That guy has a lot of free time.  I don't know how he does it.


RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY:
There's too much to cover (cries quietly)...*takes a deep breath*

Bugsy added cubemapping to some objects in his Redacted2 shooter - https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216903?page=3#msg2595699

Murmia, that weird game by 'beanz' is coming along nicely: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218909?page=1#msg2597459

Death House of Barker Creek by new creator 'HellreaperX' looks like a solid first attempt: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219542

Urban Explorer by Tarkus1971 looks promising but needs some fine tuning: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219549

Lastly there's a really fantastic update by Cybernessence that needs to be seen to be believed for his Cogwheel Chronicles masterwork.  His day night transitions are looking good! https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=4

IN MY OWN WORKS:

The book is making steady progress though a lot of the lower hanging fruit is taken.  One interesting tidbit I posted online which readers of this blog might find interesting is my analysis of what's wrong with using the base AI without a navigation mesh for it:

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219508#msg2598602

Check it out.  I'll discuss it in more depth in the book, by a large margin.

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.