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Wednesday, May 29, 2019

This Week in GameGuru - 05/29/2019

A word of warning before we begin - my wife is due to deliver our 3rd any day now.  If and when I go in to the hospital for our newest (a girl) to arrive, there's very likely to be a lapse in this newsletter for two to three weeks. For now, I will continue to provide my articles as long as I am able.
 

GameGuru News


The natives are getting very restless.  Six months of bugfixes were promised and many are anxiously awaiting what is mostly anticipated as a very large update.  TheGameCreators have been extremely tight lipped about their current workings so it's lead to a significant amount of speculation from the community with respect to worry about a lackluster or nonexistent release.

I personally have heard musings from those close to TGC but it's all hearsay at this point.  I do have a good idea that we'll see a big update including multiplayer due to official releases from Lee on the forums but for the moment we're all sitting and waiting.

This anxiety has culminated in a master thread here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220783

If you have been following my newsletters you will notice that I've been focused significantly on the works from third parties such as AmenMoses, Cybernessence, BOTR, Preben, and others.  This information is significantly more useful to me than speculation on what Lee is doing. I think a lot of the community hasn't really caught on to the fact that once code is released to GitHub, it's no longer a one man show. I myself have gone into the code many times to find an answer I'd never find elsewhere. While I appreciate any core updates being done by Lee, at the same time I know at this point community development will give us much more bang for the buck.
 

What's Good in the Store


Nothing that I saw really piqued my interest.  Of note though are the new seller rules for the sales section so make sure you scroll through the sales at the top.  Sellers are restricted to 60 sales in a 6 month period.  That means essentially 10 per month. These can only run for a maximum of 7 days.

The sales are also randomly shuffled on site reload so the order will change every time you view the main page.  Bottom line is there are a lot of sales up right now.  Notably Graphix has a significant amount of high quality PBR assets available for a good price.

BSP has 3 weapon packs on sale.

Sula's wild west pack is on sale.

Wizard of id is selling two major packs.



Free Stuff


https://elgatongames.com/detail/38/?fbclid=IwAR3_7UOKqSlKtWq915tWKuvJJ5Vse1gVre-Srbnu4o0yn13FFeD-RigpRZE Maiacombra made a South American City skybox.  Very interesting work and definitely could have solid in-game use for many.

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220750 Graphix provided a free new explosion to replace the default media. 
 

Third Party Tools and Tutorials 


Game Launcher Creator is on sale but also added some features this week.

BOTR has been working on creating FPSC to GG pipeline tools to help people get assets and levels from FPSC into GG.  This, in my opinion, is huge.  FPSC provides a massive toolset from a level building standpoint and could really open things up for level design. 


This is an import of the Metro Theater Level.

Granted, it's a weird pipeline building in FPSC and importing into GG, but this sort of cross pollination helps break the limits we're dealing with.  More info here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219806?page=4#msg2615725


Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)


Cybernessence has apparently, based on something I said *shocked look* decided to add multiple grass types to his branch of GameGuru.

You can see three different vegetation types here.




I'm seriously excited about seeing this change in the live branch. Here's to hoping he merges what changes he has soon so we can at least get current with his work. Details can be found here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=6



Defy's been posting some interesting videos of his experiments with the save-load system, AI, and other core functions in GG.


In My Own Works



I've been working at length with the projectile system in GameGuru, I will do a write-up in the near future when that's done.  At this point though I have a good handle on the system and feel very comfortable creating everything from rapid-fire plasma guns to flamethrowers. 
Here's some examples of this (please note the sound is out of sync due to the program I use being a poor choice for video):
So there's been a lot of good progress there. I still have miles to go, but once I'm done rest assured it will find it's way onto the forums as a tutorial post.

The publisher has been bouncing cover art and design notes at me.

Chapter 1 on the left, cover art on the right.
 
The above shows some of what I'm working on.  The cover art is mosaic tiled to ensure I don't break any confidentiality clauses.



Tuesday, May 21, 2019

This Week in GameGuru - 5/20/2019

GameGuru News


There's lots of ripples in the water, but nothing breaking the surface yet.  So far, a fairly tame week for news.  Nothing on github.  Nothing on steam.  Nothing on the forums.  Officially, at least.  I'll hold off on rumor-mongering until something more concrete forms.

What's Good in the Store


This week the store was flooded by new products and packs.



Fredgames77 has put out a new 'Pack Modular School' and a 'Futuristic street bike'. While the school is a fairly completely set of models, it's also extremely expensive when compared against the baseline for similar products on the store.  I guess we'll see if that baseline goes up or his price comes down.

Sula continues to add a tremendous amount of old European cars to his portfolio.

Corrosion added several "HD" modeled soldiers if you feel you need more masked gunmen for you game(s): https://www.tgcstore.net/artist/221852

The most exciting stuff this week came from Belidos and Pasquill, respectively. Belidos finally released his very impressive isometric dungeon kit:



Which includes seven sub-packs with a huge pile of items in each one.  The best deal, of course, is to buy the main kit which for $9.99 as a sale price gets you access to the entire kit and caboodle. This pack is well worth the buy price if you're looking for a great entry into the 3D isometric genre.

Next up is one of my perennial favorites - Pasquil.  Pasquil has put out a clutter kit of high quality, well mapped PBR assets that are also low poly.



The price is very reasonable at a scant 7 dollars for what is essentially a full library of great outdoor clutter components.

Free Stuff


Tarkus1971 provided a free music track: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213190?page=5#msg2615615

Harrywever (AKA Dagored) provided two new free skyscrapers:



You can get your version here - https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/210761?page=6#msg2615542


Third Party Tools and Tutorials


BOTR added some more dev notes, he is apparently working on an HM2GG 4.0 - https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219806?page=4#msg2615685

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)


Cybernessence posted some new pictures of his water shader.  I truly hope his changes get integrated into the GG core ASAP.  It's great seeing some fresh development, even if it's not by TGC directly.



https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=6#msg2615674


In My Own Works


This week I released my final batch of edits to the publisher (due 5/20) along with some minor changes to art and wording.  This however, marks the final bit of changes I can do easily without 'major costs' before the Aug 19th print date.
I also got a picture of my book cover. Looks good. The cover art is what I discussed with my publisher and the format looks good.  Mostly minor issues.

For those interested in the custom assets, I'm currently working on a flamethrower, which is 90% functional using the particle system.  It's fun to use :) 

I've also been on the hunt for some issues with my projectile weapons and other weapons I intend to release with the book. One turned out to be my own personal install - a complete reinstall resolved it. So one down, many to go.  I'm really looking forward to release some of these excellent assets!

Monday, May 13, 2019

This Week in GameGuru - 5/13/2019

GameGuru News

A wild Lee Bamber appeared in the forums and made a few quotes:

"Looks like the cat escaped the bag, but yes, I have been putting much time and coding into a non-Steam multiplayer system that improves on what you have right now. I am using Photon which means you can set up your own free server for your games, and then as your user base grows you can subscribe to Photon paid tiers if you need more than 100CCU (https://www.photonengine.com/en/server/pricing).

It should also support host migration and rejoins, so you could effectively keep your game running on your PC and users can come and go from your level as you please (not quite MMORPG but a nice start to a possible persistent world). Naturally, the non-Steam option was to allow you to save out multiplayer games and allow friends to play your multiplayer games without needing GameGuru, but all these details will come in time.

Just posted quickly here to assure you that no donations for this feature are required, it's happening as part of our primary feature development We are also planning to put an expert freelancer on the case with the issues board too so watch this space for an assault on your bug reports as we finally put your donations to good use."

This can be found here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220661?page=1#msg2615407


He also made some comments with respect to MegaPack3's changes you can find here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220751

Lastly, I don't know how long this has been in play, but there's been a change where you can put bug reports in on steam. If you're tracking the issues log on Github, here's another point of interest for you: https://steamcommunity.com/app/266310/discussions/1/

What's Good in the Store


This week I added my 4K Space Skies to the All skies and Time of Day system pack, along with increasing it's price significantly to reflect the addition.  Current owners will be able to find the new 4k skies upon checking for store downloads.

Beyond that we have some excellent work from Valentin321 who has put together several packs this week:

He's added a Fire equipment pack, an electrical measuring equipment pack, and a village pack.  Most are well priced and include reasonably good assets for the price point.

Nomis3d has a huge repository of mid-priced, higher tier assets that he's putting a kit together for an exceptionally low price - 9.95 (on sale).  I highly recommend you grab this kit if you're into military or soviet gear.

Looks like Sula continues to put PBR cars up at $2 a piece, however I'd really like to see these fine automobiles made into a pack for extra value.  That and pressing purchase 30 times in a row isn't fun for anyone.

Pasquil has thirteen traffic objects bundled into a single download pack that look well worth the investment as well if you are building a city scene.

Free Stuff


A free cartoon farm was posted for download: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220746

Lafette put together an impressive robotic arm for download...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS78pd1zKng

You can get yours here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220474?page=2#msg2615507

Dagored put together some free skyscrapers: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/210761?page=6#msg2615455

Graphix made some very decent paving slabs for those interested: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217932?page=14#msg2615432

Some great stuff is going on in the realm of Lua code as well.
SmallG posted a way to swap between third and first person: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220747?page=1#msg2615389


Third Party Tools and Tutorials


Corno_1 has removed access to the EBE V2 editor. It's unlikely to return.

A significant quantity of updates were posted onto BOTR's thread of his various third party tools.  One interesting note is he did answer my question about integration of these tools into GG's source and it looks like he is going to pursue that in the future. For a full list of what's going on with his software, check here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219806?page=4#msg2615531


Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

Protascope is furthering it's development (via Synchromesh).  This excellent title I think will really demonstrate some out of the box thinking for other GameGuru gamedevs and should be looked at as our engine's 'portal-style' frontrunner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXz37EsJJdQ

Nice work, synchromesh!


I'm particularly impressed with his ability to build a unique environment in a challenging engine that looks engaging and fun.

The Cogwheel Chronicles, another frontrunning GG project, is coming along very well.  I spoke at length with Cybernessence about his upcoming changes that he plans on adding to GameGuru and he's very interested in implementing a dynamic lighting solution.  I'd love to see some extra focus on this as others would as well and I'm sure TheGameCreators would likely sweeten the pot with some donation funds. He's also posted some updates here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=6#msg2615288

Make no mistake - Cogwheel Chronicles is an important project to watch because it essentially will act as a techdemo for upcoming third party changes to GameGuru's github codebase.


In My Own Works


This last week I got hit with all 23 chapters of the book needing edited by the 20th.  That's a lot of work in not a lot of time.  This final push for editing is to make the August 19th deadline. I also have been working with one of the artists, specifically the man making the weapons.  We've gotten pretty far with some of the equipment, notably this SMG that is designed as a panic-fire weapon:



Please note none of this is final, but the basic concept is like 95% close to the final product.
Beyond that I'm working on trying to figure out why my projectiles system isn't working for one of the weapons, but so far everything is coming along really well.
I plan on doing a detailed write-up of everything afterwards on how to really own the custom projectiles system.

Monday, May 6, 2019

This Week in GameGuru - 05/05/2019

GameGuru News

This week in GameGuru we have several 'info drops' of interest.  Firstly, if you missed it, on youtube was a recent video by Lee with respect to using GG Loader with GameGuru.  This could, perhaps, signal a shift towards a more formal cross platform pipeline between AGK and GG.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcMrV7OqfeQ

Also recently a DLC pack deal was posted with this snippet of information:


"It's been a slow start to the year for official updates, but rest assured a lot of activity is happening in the background which we'll be able to reveal to you in the near future. What we can say for now is that we are working on aspects of the file management system for better compatibility with Windows 10, some multiplayer technology additions, a little code refactoring and upgrading the internal source code to Visual Studio 2017.
May will also see us tackle a few of the points you have posted to our issues tracker, so if you have something you would like to report and it's not yet recorded on GitHub, you can do so here:
https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues"

This lines up from what I've heard unofficially. If you take a look at the 'AlphaSite' code base, you'll notice a lot of recent moves towards adding Photon Multiplayer code and VR support.  While this is all very interesting and potentially game-changing it also is somewhat worrisome as an outside observer as there are nearly 265 outstanding issues on the issues tracker and I truly hope we see more than a 'few' bugfixes.  This engine's incredible potential is being hampered by a backlog of bugs and quality of life improvements for critical features such as a meta-searchable entitybank, better UI controls and improved terrain functionality.

I am, however, extremely hopeful that the new update will include at least a good chunk of fixes for outstanding issues such as the math error for the widget (where it slides exponentially if you are on the 'backside' of it.). Time will tell, but historically it's proven that every major update typically brings back a large number of old users to 'give it a whirl'. 

What's Good in The Store




This week it looks like Valentin321 has continued adding to his repository of Soviet themed assets.



Sula put in some last minute cars, old european cars that are oddly remniscient of the old American Chevy Nova (from the 80's). 



A few packs were added, notables are Graphix's beautiful picket fence kit and BSP's very impressive 2k skies pack volume 2

Also my Time of day and Weather kit + Skies pack is on sale this week for 12.95 until the 10th.  Make sure you get your copy if you haven't already gotten one! I will be adding the new 4k Space Skies to this kit shortly and increasing the price to reflect it, so if you want to get those skies for a bargain, this is the best time to do it!

Third Party Tools and Tutorials


BOTR continues to grind out work on his heightmap importation tool for GG.  He's now getting a split-loading system in where you can load multiple terrain types.  It's an interesting experiment, get more details here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219806?page=3#msg2615271

AmenMoses posted a video of his highly impressive physics-based gear library that is a work in progress but will likely see release soon for those who don't mind getting their hands dirty with Lua code: https://vimeo.com/334314785

Wolf did a great write-up on '10 easy tips to make working with GG easier' which has some pretty high quality info in it, like how to make any plant into functional vegetation. Many of the these are covered in my book as well but it's nice to see the information making it's way through the public sphere!

Dvader has been breaking into the map file and digging around.  Interesting stuff, I remember trying the same thing about a year ago and eventually giving up after running out of time. 



Free Stuff


HarryWever(Dagored) put up a free windmill for those interested: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/210761?page=6#msg2615188 - They look great with the dynamically cast shadows from the built-in sun. 

Amenmoses posted a script for Graphix's free piping that allows functional gauges: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217932?page=14#msg2615070



Amenmoses also put together a variation on his vehicle script to make a very cool little boat: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220055?page=1#msg2615182


Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)


Recently Belidos showed a very interesting video of his recent work on an isometric RPG kit which included an inventory system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FslhDHYSwHM

And because I inadvertently missed it, there was a fantastic piece of work demonstrated by Bod and Amenmoses showing multiple vehicles which can be driven via video.  I would recommend this highly as a must-watch: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220598?page=2#msg2614858

Teabone's recent work on his D&D inspired gelatinous cube has come a long way - I'm definitely liking the progress:


He's put a lot of time into trying to size it properly and get the 'jiggle' correct.

Ignite has some new interesting details on it's design philosophy and recent updates: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220722#msg2614998
Notably he's added:
Three light sources, each with different behaviours (actual weapons shown are placeholders atm).
  •   Movement penalties based on light choice.
  •   Death, respawning, and resetting of light source attributes.
  •   Safezones.

Good stuff. I always like to see people thinking outside of the box.

Solar's project, 'Resist: Revolution' is apparently still being worked on and some good screenshots were recently posted:






Not bad at all!  Keep up the good work guys.


In My Own Works



Recently I posted some teasers to Facebook and various areas of Discord of the weapons work I'm having done by an artist via Commission.  It's come along well.  We're about halfway through the list of proposed items and so far I'm really pleased with the results. I've also been working heavily with GameGuru's gunspec file and projectile files to help create some impressive effects for these guns ranging from flamethrowers to plasma launchers. I'd say I feel as if I have full mastery on this and will likely do a write-up on it in the near future or try to get a last-minute inclusion to the book.

In the meantime, enjoy the screenshots of some of the guns that are still works in progress but are nearing completion:




Once we're all done I'll release these for purchase on the TGCstore ahead of the book for those who don't intend to buy the book (which will include free versions with it).

Again, for those who are interested, the book's publication date is AUGUST 19th, 2019.  I hope to see you all soon with details about additional features I will be including with the book!