This week in Game-Guru - 03/05/2018

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ENGINE UPDATE PROGRESS REPORT

I think it's fair to say we've been waiting a while for a real update.
Public Preview 2 is out and we've had some time to evaluate it.  It's not as bad as the first public preview, in my opinion, but it still has miles to go as evidenced by the github repo issues log: https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues

This is disturbing because I think when we started down this road to DX11 we never expected we'd be sitting on the same FUNCTIONAL stable version of Game-Guru for nearly a year.  We're going on 10 months now since the last real update to Game-Guru.  I cannot understand why the decision was made to not at least offer simple proven bugfixes to the base DX9 edition.  I cannot also understand why the DX11 edition wasn't spun off into a separate purchase option but that's just me being my usual Capitalist pig self.

NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE

My LightKit is on sale this week for $2 USD: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/30936
This week can be boiled down to two distinct updates of new content:

First - we have a whole western themed town, which is a fantastic addition to the store and really fits a pretty empty niche.

This is just a fraction of the immense asset list.

 
On top of that, it has a significant degree of quality that makes it worth the $19.99 pack price being asked.  The kit includes around 80 models in varying levels of quality from 100 to 6000 polys with one outlier in the 9000+ range.  Some of the models have an extremely simple design but the texturing is expertly done.  For this guy, that's hugely important.
The artist Sula has the pack available on the store here: https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11009

Second we have a sort of 'dueling tree competition' between m2design and honkeyboy.

I'm not sure why, but both of them have submitted trees to the store for your perusal.  There's already a lot of trees on the store but hey, what's a few more right?

FREE STUFF

 - GraphiX continues his free weapon parade with this awesome drill-bit shooting gun: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219394
I'm always in favor of new free weapons, as they are time consuming to make and usually cost a fair amount on the store.  So anytime someone is generous enough to provide even something halfway decent, it's a boon for the rest of us.  This however is a really nice piece with excellent texturing.  Not wild about the colors but the actual textures look great!

 - Dvader came out of the woodwork to provide some interesting water wave code with the new PP water lua functionality: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219404

THIRD PARTY TOOLS

Just a reminder I haven't updated my Notepad++ API yet for the newest PP commands.  I'll get to it soon enough :)

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l39r6rnaFo - A new developer put together a solid looking ' lush forest ' in Game-Guru.  Good stuff.
Dimoxinil updated again with respect to his PBR work.  Still looks phenomenal.

Wolf's change to Acythian - He updated saying he's renaming the project listed as Acythian to... something else.  He's going to start a new project for Acythian that he feels is better suited for it.
'Guns of Solo' - Not a bad first try for a project, in fact a pretty good one.  Levels look well designed, use of custom assets is decent enough.  I have to say it's a pretty good attempt and I hope he takes the time to finish it.

IN MY OWN WORKS

 - added several thousand words to book, almost finishing one of the final chapters on selling, legal information and dealing with hostile customers.
- current word count sits at 37,000+ out of a projected 120,000+.

Getting there :)