This Week in GameGuru - 04/15/2019

GameGuru News 

Nothing currently.  I've put out feelers with Deb and the team @ TGC for more details but so far there's nothing to report.  Github shows no forward momentum at this time either aside from a single ambient occlusion error listed on the issues tracker.  Details available here:

https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/commit/786ab7246e0b6d64f008ff30d81b0bef7fc518ac

So assuming we're hitting a phase of community development in the future I can offer one bit of hope for those still using GameGuru or new to it - Cybernessence.  His work in progress, 'The Cogwheel Chronicles' has a lot of custom code to it which will eventually find it's way (per his words on the forum) into the engine itself.  That said, I think many of us would truly appreciate some forward motion from the core team at TGC so here's to hoping their silence is indicative of that work!

What's Good in The Store

This week I added my pack freebie "Lonely Ice" to two different packs - owners of the 4K HD Space Skies pack will get it - as will the many Bonus Sampler Pack owners out there!  If you're looking for a low-priced way to check out one of the new 4K Skies, this is definitely the best option.  The Bonus Sampler's normal price is $1.50!

Beyond that we've got some other excellent work on the store this week:

BSP appears to have taken up the gauntlet I threw down with my skies and put together some good looking earth-based skies in high res (2k by 2k) -  https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11099

Dagored put together some awesome exploding bridges.  I can see some serious potential with these.  Take a look at them here: https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11100

Long-time artist "Northern" put up what looks like the beginnings of a picnic kit.  There's no pack to speak of yet though the models are of moderate quality and would be suitable as elements in most GG quality games.

Of particular note this week we have Gtox's 'Scarecrow' which features some really slick animation and fits the horror theme well. 

I highly recommend picking this up if you're making a high quality horror game in GameGuru, you can find it here: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/32636

Third-party Tools and Tutorials

This week Defy posted what I'd call one of the most important threads for GameGuru in 5 years - a very detailed breakdown memory consumption by the map size and some tips on how to keep that size down.  If you're an advanced user, you need to read this: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220706

I will be keeping it in my reference list on my blog (http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com) as well.

Also this week MaiaCombra put together a fairly basic tutorial that is worth the 20 minutes if you're a new user on how to make a horror-style game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9V5ZJJTONs


This week we also found out Vishnu Packer has added GameGuru Support:

This should help distribution of GameGuru Games for the layperson. 

Bored of the Rings is adding a fix to autowelder soon - details here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219806?page=2#msg2614590

Free Stuff

Lafette made a building for everyone: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220474?page=2#msg2614566

JPH made some PBR trees: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219734?page=2#msg2614521

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

This week saw some notable projects add to their portfolios as well as a few new ones.


LentheMan continues his work on his train scene for the cowboy shooter:

You can see the lighting start to really come together here.

Tarkus1971's 'Urban Histories' game had a video posted ... see it here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220589?page=1#msg2614408

Maiacombra is putting together an outdoor military-style shooter: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220701

Scienceboy came back to his long-refined project "Twin Worlds" and posted some interesting teaser screenshots:

You can see more here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/208185?page=9#msg2614553 

And as mentioned in the news section, Cybernessence has some interesting work he's been doing.  Lately it appears that he's working with light probes to create a flashlight shadow from the dynamic flashlight light source.  Remember, he's mentioned these changes will get merged into GG when he's completed so this bodes well for the rest of us.

He provided a demo picture that is 'highly exaggerated' to give some sense of what he's doing.  Granted it doesn't look pretty but remember this picture is more of a technical demo than anything else:

Per Cybernessence: "Hugely exaggerated picture for illustration. There are no lights other than the sun in this scene. The sky and floor are being treated as ambient light sources (the probe fired as I approached) - notice the red from the floor on the wooden boards around the top of the building."

More details here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=5#msg2614527

In My Own Works

This week I got my first batch of verifications from the publisher.  I also got wind of the pricing and asked about that - it appears the pricing is going to range from around $50 USD to $69USD.  That's a touch higher than expected.  I'm waiting for some words back on that as I know that's a bit much.  In other news, weapons development for the sidecar materials going with the book is coming along well.  I am pleased at what I've gotten thus far and look forward to revealing the full breadth of materials once the book is released.  Purchasers of the book will receive a copy of them for free, along with many of my other products including the Advanced Weather and Time of Day system.

Technique Training: Updating Game Guru to HD

NOTE THIS PARTICULAR TUTORIAL IS HEAVILY RELIANT ON ALL OF THE PREVIOUS ONES.  PLEASE BRING YOURSELF UP TO SPEED HERE: My Tutorial and Evaluation Page.

So it's no secret Game-Guru is really weak in terms of performance.  I've covered several topics in the past ranging from more advanced lighting techniques to improving the way reshade handles your graphics.

What I've found in the past is it's really difficult to work with a lot of the stock models.  There's simply a cutoff for what you can get from a model that's pushing 512x512 SD textures.

Before we continue, what I'm talking about here is something called 'texture depth'.  I'm sure by now you've probably heard the acronyms "SD" and "HD".

Taken from some chinese blog, but suits the purpose.

Basically the less pixels you dedicate to the quality of the texture surrounding your model, the less 'depth' it will have in the sense of how detailed the picture can look. Here's an example.  The stock asylum graphics are .. acceptable .. by Game Guru standards.

SD is really anything under 720 pixels wide/high. Most games tend to use standard divisors of 8 so you have like 256x256, 512x512, etc.  This tends to max out around 4096x4096.  This is primarily because of the graphic cards capabilities.

However you are using a 2048x2048 texture that's divided up into multiple subcomponent textures.  This basically makes each effective texture 'SD quality'.

Some are more, some are less, but all are SD.

Now to spruce up the texture, what I do is go is open it up and immediately resize the texture to 4096x4096; then proceed to sharpen the picture significantly.

It's hard to see with this scaled down snapshot, but trust me, it's there.

The resultant image has much higher fidelity.

Now the real trick here is fully utilizing ALL of the mapping available (when necessary) for Game-Guru textures.  Game-Guru can handle basically four types of mapping:

• The standard UV map - this is your _D file.
• The normal map - this is your _N file.
• The specular map - this is your _S file.
• The illumination map - this is your _I file.

Generally speaking, most models only include a _D and a _N file.

In the case of our asylum texture, we have a specularity file as well (_S).  This particular addition gives a slight shinyness to the textures, making them seem wet or slimy.  You can only see them with the entity shader set in the tab-tab options menu set to 'Highest'.

These settings are what I found using in combination with reshade as producing the best visual result for the asylum.

Default walls, unmodified.  Looks ok.

Now that looks .. ok.  That's the best you're really going to manage from stock assets and some really basic lighting.  Now if we modify the specularity file so it's a lot more pronounced on certain areas.  The basic specularity file is pretty clearly just a black and white image of the original _D file which is fine unless you want to really highlight areas.  Now tile generally tends to have a shiny edge because of the enameling on it.  So what I did is took the original image and modified the luminosity settings in paint.net to give it much higher contrasting on the black and whites, causing a more clear delineation in the shiny areas of the texture.

Old on the left, new on the right.

Side note: If you don't HAVE a specularity file with your models, you can generate one simply by making a black and white image, saving it as _S on the end of the filename and then modifying luminosity (or using edge detect even) to create bright white spots.  Specularity maps work by using a greyscale of the image - the more 'white' it is - the shinier the surface will be.

The final result, in combination with static lighting ends up looking like this:

 Note the cleaner texture lines, better shine on the walls, etc.  It's really a vast improvement over the original configuration.

While a lot of this is trial and error, it's a big piece of improving your work to at least be within striking range of more up to date engines.

One final note:  I personally run this setting in reshade's mastereffect.h file:
#define USE_HDR_LEVEL        2    //[0 to 2] HDR Level: Rendering bitrate. 0: RGBA8 | 1: RGBA16F | 2: RGBA32F

2 seems to be the highest fidelity setting possible if you're interested in HDR quality imagery.
Ciao!

Addendum to original post added here on 1/4/2017: http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com/2017/01/addendum-to-hd-game-guru-post.html