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.