This Week in GameGuru - 09/23/2019

This article represents solely the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions or views of r The Game Creators, it's employees, or subordinates.  It likewise does not reflect the views or opinions of www.tgcstore.net and it's staff.  The author receives no compensation for this work and it is done solely as a service for the GameGuru community at large.

GameGuru News

The public preview of the beta changes arrived and the changes are about what was expected:

per https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221133
A bevvy of performance-related fixes were done including the draw-call batcher.
* F11 in Standalone no longer causes PBR debug layers to be rendered
* New DOCDOC system added to code allowing a new 'Docs\SETUP INI Description.txt' doc to be auto-created
* Improved MIXAMO FBX Importing (2-chain-finger in T-POSE), simply select 'Uber' in 'Is Character Field'
* Added Convex Hull collision shape to the physics system, use by setting COLLISIONMODE in FPE to 9
* Fixed EXPORTASSETS flag in SETUP.INI to correctly export unencrypted full entities with standalone  

Overall the results are positive but users are still reporting some errors - it's important to recall that a public preview is essentially the same as an open beta.  It is widely accessible but not an official 'stable' version.  Report your bugs!

What's Good in the Store

Erart made a somewhat bizarre but kind of cool 'magical hand' weapon.  You have to see it to understand what I mean here:

https://youtu.be/Cg8_jFwhSOc

You can get yours from: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/33493

Tools and Tutorials

This week the GameGuru youtube official channel posted more tutorials.  Some of these are better than others but I think for most advanced users the useful ones would be the ones on blender and fbx imports.

Free Stuff

Smallg's transition from coder to modeller is still going strong - get your free models here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221130

Fumar built a beautiful house you can download to add to your collection:

Get your copy here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221118?page=1#msg2621303  

He also built a bench: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221118?page=1#msg2621110

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

This week we've got a lot of works in progress.  Let's start with this one by C4ever08, a project titled called "Dietara" that we've covered before with lots of updates on it:

I admire the scope and personal touch of the landscape.

Full details are available here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220994#msg2621235

Cybernessence updated/refreshed his art for the hero characters in his Cogwheel Chronicles epic:

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=7#msg2621264

He also has additional updates on his work on modifying the drawcall optimizer for his own purposes: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=7#msg2621068

Solar has lots of updates on his Resist: Revolution game here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218343?page=3

Lastly, one of my favorite store authors, OldFlak, started work on a new project in the Sci-Fi vein that looks fantastic by my estimation:

Get the full scoop (and plenty of great looking screenshots) here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221152

In My Own Works

I'm really happy to see the response my book on GameGuru has gotten.  I haven't gotten any kind of official figures but I can honestly say that this thing was a labor of love.  I'll never break even on the time I invested or the money outlaid for things.  I'm *STILL* dealing with some minor cleanup of items before they go on the store, though I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be up this week.

In the meantime if you have purchased my book I'd really personally appreciate it if you'd stop by the listing on Amazon and write up a quick review of it.  You can do that here: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-GameGuru-Michael-Matthew-Messina/dp/1138612634

I guess we'll see!

This Week in GameGuru - 09/16/2019

This article represents solely the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions or views of r The Game Creators, it's employees, or subordinates.  It likewise does not reflect the views or opinions of www.tgcstore.net and it's staff.  The author receives no compensation for this work and it is done solely as a service for the GameGuru community at large.

GameGuru News

It's a big week in GameGuru with some huge moves in store for the engine.  Just take a look at some of the commits over at GitHub for an idea of what's going on:

Time to unpack this for the less technical.  This last week a beta update was released for closed beta testers.  The primary focus on this was the addition of Preben's draw call optimizer. 

Now draw calls, straight up, are sort of the end-all be-all for performance with respect to rendering. Sure, there's other variables but if your draw calls are too high, then your renderer is working too hard and it will cause bad performance. 

From my book An Introduction to GameGuru: Chapter 21 "Optimization" -
Draw calls represent at least one, possibly more, of every object being ‘drawn’ on the screen.  This is a highly important bit of info, likely the most important performance information statistic next to the raw FPS count.  Draw calls should be around 250 with a top end of around 500.  Once they go beyond those numbers, it will start to seriously drain performance on even top end systems.  The trick here is to run through your level and if you see a place where it spikes, try to determine which objects can either be replaced or removed to kill the performance bottleneck.  Please note that officially draw calls are actually each material of an object, so PBR objects significantly increase draw calls and can easily overwhelm a scene if you don’t take careful steps to optimize object quantities and positions.

What Preben has done is create a draw call batcher that groups together draw calls for similar entities to avoid calling the same thing many times.  This reduces the total number of draw calls considering that most entities are not only used one time in a level but a great many times. In fact, he even expands on my above explanation by detailing that every 'draw call' reported in GG is actually to be multiplied by 10.  This multiplicative effect means that the difference between 500 and 1000 is much more pronounced and can have a massive performance drain.

He explains it very well here in a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EDVD2I6OdY

Initially the beta had some serious issues that were rapidly remedied and so far the results have been excellent with often 30 FPS added to a single scene WITH NO OTHER OPTIMIZATIONS.

Moreover this now has trickled into a Public Preview (open beta) build which will help hammer out the next big release.  I'm really proud of how TGC and company have stepped up after nearly half a year of no updates - if the keep rolling on this we may yet see this engine become vastly more capable yet.

Also a reminder that the contest is still ongoing with a huge amount of prizes available.  I am still considering if I want to give a copy of the book away but I think I might, just to help kickstart this thing.  What do you all think?

What's Good in The Store

While not *TECHNICALLY* on the store it bears mentioning that a new pack was released by TGC. As usual, their quality is generally a cut above most store content and so it's a great value if you are looking to supplement the basic 'modern warfare' assets that come with GameGuru.

This is, in my opinion, a clear winner for TGC.  It supplements a model base that comes with every instance of GameGuru but gives it much more to work with.

On the store itself there's a huge amount of fantastic work available for great prices.

Notably this week:
Pasquill posted a beautiful Russian utility truck:

Gtox posted this great giant ant (ala 'it came from the desert'):

He also made a pretty wicked scorpion:

Teabone made a very detailed orange, focusing on his strong point of easy, simple set pieces:

There's this really cool retro music pack for sale: https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11152

And Team Wolf posted an 'all my models (152 in total)' pack for 12 dollars!  This is a fantastic deal and I'm actually buying it after I finish writing this post up. 

This is a mere 10% of the high quality models you receive for $12

Really good quality stuff for a very reasonable price - I urge you to give it a look here: https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11151

It also bears noting that there are two very superb artists putting up some great deals on their own works, notably BSP and Rolfy - definitely check out their store pages!

Free Stuff

This week a number of freebies went up.

SmallG apparently has gone from scripting to model design in an apparent departure and has gifted the community with a few new pieces to work with:
A low poly witch
A robot
and A simple low-poly car

Newcomer Fumar posted a gorgeous model of a Church: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221118

And belidos gifted us with a low-poly style tower: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218362#msg2620561

Thanks so much to all the creators who give to the community!

Third Party Tools and Tutorials

First of all is this really great FPE file editor with model viewer.  This is a pretty interesting tool I'd love to see integrated into the editor itself.

Apparently bored of the rings is still giving out his old tools via private message if you are interested.


Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

Cybernessence dropped in and gave a huge amount of info on his project here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=7#msg2620877

Apparently he's been using the drawcall optimizer to great effect!

In My Own Works

Nothing I can discuss currently but more details to come so keep an eye on this space.
Once again, thank you to everyone who has purchased my book or helped with it's production. I really appreciate all the kind words and encouragement!

This Week in GameGuru - 09/09/2019

This article represents solely the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions or views of r The Game Creators, it's employees, or subordinates.  It likewise does not reflect the views or opinions of www.tgcstore.net and it's staff.  The author receives no compensation for this work and it is done solely as a service for the GameGuru community at large.

GameGuru News 

This week in GameGuru, TeaBone made a contest for the discord which has since been cross-posted on the forums.  I had intended to run my own contest but it makes zero sense to run two separate contests.  As such, I am going to have to hold off on my book contest until this one runs its course.  Otherwise things will be, flatly put, a mess.   I am still considering whether to add my book to the literal PILE of prizes available to the contestants.  If you are a GameGuru creator, it really behooves you to check this out!
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221084

Things have slowed down from the record pace on GitHub but I can confirm some behind the scenes action continues so keep your eyes peeled for further improvements and additions to the engine in the coming months.

The usual spate of fixes tends to be batched in february, may, august, and november.  We're a little off from that pace but I'd expect a big drop around Oct-November.

What's Good in the Store

Valentin321 has added to his excellent Carousel on the store by making a whole pack for an abandoned playground.  These are great looking models and if you are looking for a moody, abandoned park feel it will fit right in!

Free Stuff

Lafette provided a bonus for owners of his mystical dark age pack.

Third Party Tools and Tutorials

The official GG channel continues pumping out videos (good for them, with an engine like this it's helpful info for most people who don't want to wade through thousands of hours of livestreams like certain blog writers did for a book they recently wrote). The new 20 minute vignette format works much better for the average user, I suspect.  Though if you want to get into the meat and bones, I do highly recommend watching some of those multi-hour streams.  Some really good info can be found in them.

The patcher DannyD is working on has gotten additional love too as seen by this interesting screenshot:

 Of particular note is the 'Asset Manager' being worked on by Graphix.
 I cannot stress how absurdly impressive and necessary this tool is.  It does everything the former 'styleguru' did, only better and much more of it.  You can manage your menus, your graphics, you can control your 3d asset library, and more.  It's really an incredible tool spearheaded by someone who is doing a fantastic job of putting together a third party supplemental component.

I can't even cover all the pieces this thing has.  It's a huge boon to the community and we should all be enormously thankful and appreciative of Graphix's hard work on it.

Check it out here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220932

A video demo can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkU5dUNIEQ0

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

Duchenkuke put together this clever intro for a game he's working on.  Cutscenes are always interesting to dissect, see if you can figure out all the little methods he used! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5zpdAtG1u8

Amenmoses put together a pretty impressive bit of physics in a nice video clip for us.  I'm reminded of a certain game that shall not be named - really impressive stuff.  https://vimeo.com/345560130

In My Own Works

I've been fielding question after question with relation to my book.  I've received dozens of private messages, discord chats, personal messages on the forums and the like.  I'm super happy everyone has purchased it seems to be enjoying it.  It's been quite a ride and I'm happy that people are already extracting value from it.

Life's not been kind to me but for the moment I have an artist cleaning up some of the original cybernoir assets I had made up so that I feel comfortable with their release.

An example is here:

This flying car has been updated to PBR and yet still retains much of the original artistic style.  I'm really looking forward to getting this stuff out the door!

Once I get that all ready to go I'll post the final version on the store for everyone to give a whirl.  As usual, book purchasers will receive it for free, non purchasers will need to buy it on the store.

Thanks again and see you next week!
Mike

This Week in GameGuru - 09/04/2019

This article represents solely the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions or views of r The Game Creators, it's employees, or subordinates.  It likewise does not reflect the views or opinions of www.tgcstore.net and it's staff.  The author receives no compensation for this work and it is done solely as a service for the GameGuru community at large.

I wish I could describe the absolute chaos of my life right now.  It is impressive, in a biblical sense.  This unfortunately has impacted my ability to do these updates.  I will continue to attempt to get these out in a reasonably timely fashion.

As such, this week the work almost didn't get done.  I have a lot of ground to cover and a limited amount of time to dedicate to this so let's get to it.

GameGuru News

Let's just say some interesting things are going on behind the scenes.  I am not at liberty yet to discuss but I think many of you will be pleased with the end result of it.

Cybernessence has continued his excellent modifications to the engine which I still eagerly anticipate seeing added to the main engine branch.  Some of the changes he's made are monumental in effect.  One big update is a draw call optimizer that he's used by Preben that seems to make enormous impact on the engine's ability to batch draw calls and improve speed.

Currently a great number of big items are in the pipeline or implemented:

1. Draw Call Optimizer
2. Convex hull shapes
3. FBX importer
4. Makehuman pipelining
5. Trial version of GG
6. Other known/discernable updates (If you check github it's clear there's a VR/Multiplayer angle being worked in the background just by gleaning little bits and pieces). 

There's also more beyond that I'm aware of but not at liberty to discuss.

What's Good in the Store

Unfortunately can't do this this week.  This is far and away the most time consuming part of my weekly updates and as such I cannot afford the time for it at the moment.  I hope to get back on the train for this next week. This week it was 'do this and delay until monday or don't do this and get it out this week late'.  I chose the latter.

Free Stuff

Belidos posted some free medieval characters (always nice to get characters!): https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221044

A track I accidentally  overlooked was added for free by tarkus1971: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213190?page=5#msg2619604

Third Party Tips and Tutorials

TGC keeps posting more tutorials, now in a second more detailed series:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oHsxCMoD9g

Random Acts Of Creativity (WIPs)

In by far the largest component of this, I have a huge amount of updates to cover.

Bonesy is continuing work on his Cyberfi game, now including some of the assets available to purchasers of my book.  Nice to see this stuff finally filtering down.  I'm still working on getting it on the store but if you have purchased it and want the assets early, please let me know.

Teabone posted a beautiful forest screenshot in which he's tuned and optimized his forest using many of the techniques I outline in my book to get a smooth 58-60 FPS with many trees:

Synchromesh has evolved his Protascope game to include Dagored's excellent drone entity from his sci-fi set (I own it myself and love it).

Also newcomer Maverick put together an awesome looking airship out of what looks to be a mishmash of EBE and free assets. Nice work!

Maverick also made this great looking waterfall and used a clever solution to do it - an inverted smoke decal! 

Peri32 made a fantastic video literally as I was typing this of his walkcycle for a Taxi-Driver inspired game based I assume on the movie from the 70's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A22mDKiP5DE

The environment is top notch and it's a great use of GG's abilities near as I can tell.

In My Own Works

Well, the publisher posted the files online... then removed them.  So now I have to get them to add them back in.  *shakes head*.  Like I said, my life is pretty chaotic right now.  I have final touches being done to the art for the 'Cyber Noir' pack that is free for book purchasers.

A teaser of what to expect for assets:

And some weapons too:

So keep your eyes peeled and make sure you keep some info on your purchase so I can validate it to give you a code :)

Lastly, I'm working out the final details with TGC on my book giveaway contest.  There will be some minor stipulations but three copies will be up for grabs.  I should have this finalized for next weeks report!

Thanks again to everyone who purchased a copy of my book.  I deeply appreciate your support on this labor of love. I've recently started getting pictures from purchasers:

This to me is the coolest part of this whole process - seeing an actual copy in hand for purchasers!