This Week in Game-Guru - 1/15/2018

This week will be a little brief as well.  Not much overall going on as people still recover from winter.  However, you will definitely want to check out the 'In my own works' section as I've been doing a LOT of really interesting things this week.
 
ENGINE UPDATE PROGRESS REPORT

So a few little things have come to our attention; first of all it seems Lee has an issue tracker he's working on.  This should help keep things more organized and help him knock out bugs quicker.  He will also be able to isolate and track things that are getting out of hand or have a lot of complaints.

And while this isn't 'new' engine news, I did discover that global.lua has a significant amount of fairly new Lua commands.  I mean probably on the order of around a hundred or so new commands.  Things that are exceptionally useful.  I highly recommend you check them out.  ForcePlayer is a fun one, for example.  I created a riverbed with a current, a tornado effect, a conveyor belt, etc.  Lots of interesting stuff now that there's some physics enabled commands in Lua!

NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE

There's a few new things on the store.  Teabone has put out a few new scripts, notably an in-game clock system, useful for those who don't want to spend more for my Time of Day and Weather system but just need a simple clock.  It can be found here: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/30991

Also of note, the ever-strange Colosso productions has put out a decent pack if you like a colorful, retro style.

I personally like his work on skies though the models for me are not my cup of tea.  Artistically, I understand his desire for bright, crazy colors.  It's not my cup of tea, but it might be yours.  The pricing is decent enough and can be found here: https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11001


FREE STUFF

While it looks like Bod is working on a few new things, he hasn't released them yet.  Once they're released, they'll be here first thing.

Beyond that not really seeing much else at this time.

THIRD PARTY TOOLS

Someone posted a virtual voice creator by IBM.  Apparently it's pretty sophisticated though I've not had a chance to play with it yet.  Robovoice is not my favorite thing but does have it's uses from a gamedev's perspective.  Check it out here: https://ivva-tts.sl.haifa.il.ibm.com/welcome

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY

This week brought a pleasant surprise in the form of a new face taking an ambitious series of first steps towards a Game-Guru project.

Peri posted a video for an out of the ordinary promo for a game he's working on.  Overall, I like it.  It lacks polish, but has promise.  If he can clean it up, keep it functional (a big difficulty in Game-Guru!) and produce it he might have a winner.

IN MY OWN WORKS

So in my own works, I'm working on several plug-in and go kits for Game-Guru.  The one I will discuss today will be the 'RogueLike' kit.  The RogueLike kit is coming along nicely, with some interesting code fixes to make it work within GG's Lua framework.

I learned several very interesting things Lua related recently; things which have been a total game-changer with how I handle tables.  First off, is that you can specify the table name with a hashtag in front to get the most recent element of it.   I don't want to say too much without giving away the farm, so ... bing is your friend here (screw google, the goddamn commies).  Second, you can get your object id for direct manipulation by simply using variable 'e'.  So ... if you are trying to build a level you don't have to use g_Entity[e]['obj'] or anything like that.  Just use e.  Then you can call functions off 'e' which will in turn allow you to disable/enable things, hide/show things, etc.  It's really pretty impressive and much better than the hardcoding I did for the lightkit.  I may even go back and redo the code for it to make it more dynamic.


It's really brought me forward pretty far.  Now with respect to the RL kit, the idea is that Game-Guru has significant difficulty with moving between levels and unloading resources.  Memory problems abound.   Ideally we'd do much of our work on several major levels, then build links between them, right?  Unfortunately in implementation this results in frequent crashes.  However what if you didn't have to leave the level?  What if you just kept working with existing resources, over and over again?  You could frame out a single level and just beat it to death with random numbers and automatic generation.  Granted, there's limits to this type of system but it's fairly popular and I can see people wanting to buy it.
At this point I've developed a very sophisticated teleportation system and also an item spawner.  The item spawner I just solved last night and it will really open up the doors to all the other items of this product I plan to add.  Once I can implement it fully we'll have some really cool stuff available!

I plan on posting an update video later in the week to give you guys something more visual to chew on.  That all hinges on whether I can get the enemy spawning code working the way I want.  I'm going to take a few pieces from smallg's stuff but mostly it'll be 90% my own work because unfortunately what I am asking for from Lua is HIGHLY specific.

What this will, in the end, allow you to do, however is build several rooms that link to each other, build enemies, treasure, etc automatically and have some basic systems to use off that.