This Week In GameGuru - 11/19/2018

As you can see, I'll now be cross posted not only at gamedev.net and blogarama but also here on the GameGuru site itself, which is pretty awesome!

So for those of you who are not aware, I've been writing these reports for a very long time at my blog, spanning several years - all the way back to the FPSC Reloaded days.  There's a ton of extra content there such as my tutorial list: http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com/p/my-tutorialstechnique-evaluations.html

and the reference list of everything from FPE errors to light values: http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com/p/reference-list-for-gameguru.html
 
This is a relatively quiet week, so if you missed last week's update (Which is not listed on the GameGuru site as I needed to skip it to get caught up for future content) you can find it here: http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com/2018/11/this-week-in-game-guru-11122018.html

Official GameGuru News

This week was a huge update from the standpoint of actual Game-Guru news as you can see on the front page.  This week we got our third public preview update, which represents a sort of 'last beta' before it actually is released as a final release.  This public preview allows us to test thoroughly all the upcoming changes in the next major release.


https://www.thegamecreators.com/post/gameguru-public-preview-update-3

The list of changes is substantial and ranges from a better physics shapes, new model changes for better animating and physics responses, better importing, improved particles (a massive update), a HUGE AI update done by smallg & Lee, and of course the usual smattering of minor bugfixes.  It's completely worth taking a few minutes to review the huge list of updates on the actual news link above.

As always I recommend making a copy of your stable version of Game-Guru before downloading the PP update via steam so as to ensure you are secure in case of serious issues with the PP release.

What's Good In The Store

So this week we have some really excellent cartoon cars by Reliquia:

These should be part of a pack!

A very well priced (underpriced, even) monster by LOTGD(80 cents!): 


Teabone's been steadily producing scripts for you to purchase now available as a reasonably priced pack:

And lastly, by 'Moshroom' - probably the coolest thing I've seen in a while - a full JRPG script kit!  It's on sale now for 13.00 which is a VERY reasonable price for such a complete script setup.

Get it here at: https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11059

Free Stuff

Not much going on here this week but Maiacoimbra did do several colorings of the medieval weapons and the futuretek shotgun. 

Third party Tools and Tutorials

This week we have a tutorial on how to reduce polygons you can find here:
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219982
And some interesting image compression software I have yet to test out, might produce better results for DDS files:   https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220248

Random Acts of Creativity(WIPs)

Graphix has been working on his particle weather effects and recently showed off his fog effects.  I'd love to integrate support for these into my weather system!
You can check out a video of it here:  https://youtu.be/IC__yQpDPp8

We also have an update by Vincent Hendricks on his medieval game which is coming together rather well:

Now for my personal favorite of the week.  Teabone made one of the coolest 'monster/trap' entities I've seen in a while, something I've loved for a long time since my early years playing DND:  The Gelatinous cube!

I absolutely love the gelatinous cubes.  They were always some of the most interesting and difficult monsters to fight; nothing worse than a giant living blob of acid to ruin your day!

In My Own Works

Well, I finally hit 120,000 words (122k, to be precise).  This does not mean the book is done, far from it.  I have two major sections to write:  The model importer and the advanced Lua code section.  Once those are done, I'll be sitting around 130,000 words, which I will probably trim down to 125-122k after editing.

After editing (should be wrapped up by mid-December) I'll then start taking the 150+ pictures I need for the book!

Then I get the joy of formatting it and typesetting it for the publisher, sending it to my editor for one last review, then sending it to the PUBLISHER's editor, then so on and so forth until it is finally accepted by the publisher (CRCPress) in February or so.

Still, I'm very happy with how this has come along recently and it's great to finally be making REAL progress on this.