Protogenic Subculture, a private pack design by Wolf!

Wolf remains one of my favorite artists on the store, as well as off the store.  You'll find a link on the right to his personal page as a result.

He's got a good eye for creating interesting and unique shapes.  His designs are among the most daring shapes you can find available for Game Guru.  Also important to me is that he shares a passion for Sci-Fi; specifically cyberpunk.

Purchase Protgenic Subculture HERE!

Cyberpunk, for those who don't know, is a specific sub-set of Sci-Fi which revolves around neon textures, rusty pipes, gears, a sort of grungy technomancer look that really looks great in games.  Deus Ex, for example, could be considered Cyberpunk.

Or, according to a '94 issue of Mondo 2000, meet the above criteria.

This kit is not available on the TGC store.  It's privately sold.  It's also well priced (currently costing $10, get it while you can!)

Some of these clutter objects are very large, like the satellite array, which is EEENNOOORMOUS

It features a whopping 79 total entities.  Most of them are clutter objects, but brilliant ones that are low poly enough to be used in many, many projects.  Further, a great many are illumination mapped so you can get illumination effects when you add lighting.

Please note, actual pieces are shown above from the kit.

Basically the concept here is you take a city scene and modify it to make it more cyberpunk style.  This can be done very rapidly by simply building a standard city (use my instructions, if you need help!) and simply adding the pieces of flair, as it were.

Here's a quick example:

Literally the barest minimum here, two objects added to a building.

You can do a lot with these pieces.  The mazes of wires, the advertisements make for a rich setting.

They also go well with his other pieces by following the same trend; you can use pieces from the Mega Pack 01's future set if you are looking for another good bargain to mix with these.

Overall, I'm exceptionally pleased with this.  It's been a great investment and will do much to improve my levels as they move forward.

For the money this is a fantastic value.  These set pieces will give you a lot of mileage.  My only complaint is that they look better in his editor than they do in Game-Guru.  But honestly, that's really par for the course at least until Game Guru's renderer improves.  Regardless, they still prove to be quite capable and worth the pickup.



IN THE INTEREST OF DISCLOSURE I RECEIVED THIS PACK AS A REVIEWER'S KIT. IT DID NOT IMPACT MY ANALYSIS OF THIS AT ALL.  I RECEIVE NOTHING FOR PROVIDING POSITIVE REVIEWS.

TGC's 'Sci-Fi DLC'

So it's been a while since my last post.
I know, I know.  But to my credit - most of that time was spent shovelling.

York PA got dumped on - we got as much snow in one day as we get on average for a WHOLE WINTER.   So I've literally spent every night shoveling, every day shoveling.  It's left little time for creative pursuits.

On top of that I've had my hands full with life stuff such as my second son's upcoming birth.  That means Dr's appts, calling around, finding sitters, etc.

I never expected the level of traffic my little post to John Romero would generate and I'm happy for it.  No more excuses.  Time to knuckle down and get to work.

I've waited a long time for the vaunted "Sci-Fi DLC" by 'The Game Creators'.  I have several of their other packs (having been a FPS Creator Reloaded gold backer) and much of the content is unfortunately redundant or kind of amateurish.

That's not the case here.

The kit comes with a whole slew of useful items:

• 23 Building parts
• 7 Characters (alien, space marines and a spaceman)
• 11 Collectables
• 73 Decals
• 34 Interior sections
• 21 Rocks
• 43 Scenery items
• 3 Martian terrains
• 3 Martian skies 

Now given my store entries are purely of skies, the skies are minimally useful to me.

I don't care about the custom level they made aside from the bits of script I can rip out and repurpose.

So let's talk price.  Currently it's on sale as a promo - 14.99 USD.  That's a really good deal for a ton of very high quality assets.  Take a look:

 One of the many characters included - looks similar to a custom one I made!

A little note on the characters - all of their component parts are included in the character creator!  Which while not a fantastic builder by any stretch (the base parts are just dreadfully bad) the new heads/bodies breath lots of life into the system and further diversify user-created products.

Lots of the interior elements look really good too as set pieces:

 

 Like this little guy in his glass womb.  This is perfect for any sci-fi horror game.

I've spent a long time looking for various parts that go together as a whole and while this was originally designed for ground-based games - it works really well for a number of sci-fi pieces.

 

The outdoor pieces look way better than the preview shots did, final post-work looks great!

The indoor pieces in my opinion though are where this set really shines.

 

In particular there's a ton of decals and graphics which allow a lot of flexibility for stick-on neon lighting or displays to add flair for each room.

 

This console is modular and can be built with additional monitors and displays, for instance.

All in all I'm very surprised and pleased with the level of quality they brought to the table and ten out of ten times would buy this again, especially considering the pittance they are asking for.

Another important point to consider is that they regularly add pieces to the DLCs.  I know for a fact a drone set is coming soon after they put finishing touches on it.  The fantasy DLC is also getting stuff despite being in the wild now for around a year or so.

The bottom line on this is that it's a quality piece to own especially if you're into the genre, like I am.  Give it a look!

Thanks to TGC for the pictures which I took from their DLC store page.  I'll try to add some of my own graphics later or give a few sample shots as time goes on.

 

Friday Status: 12/18/2015

In the real world, I've accepted a full time position as Linux IIS Admin w/ The Bon-Ton Corp.

Things are going to get a lot busier for me, I suspect.

So status, in no particular order:
1) Neo-Monagasque Chronicles Book Two got a shitty review from a friendly reviewer.  That was ugly.   I'm not really sure how to fix the story problems he has with it, or if it's worth fixing at this point.  It kind of gutted my interest in it though.

2) Mechwarrior Dark Age Javascript game.  On hold, as mentioned previously.  No new work will get done on that till next year.

3) My Sci-Fi WIP has a bit more work done.  Working on cleaning up the lighting and finishing up the first zone's layout:

 Revised lighting.  Still having trouble with that primary pillar in the foreground.  The spool on the left is just a placeholder for more stuff later.  I want this entire area to look like a busy docking bay which means people, places, lots of workers and palettes of goods. While I like the lighting, I will say one significant negative is how the overhead lights look off now.  More work is going to need to be done.

More revised lighting.  Spotted some issues here -

• Natural lighting should be seeping in from above, it is not.  Meaning I have to adjust some of the ambient levels or fake it.  
• My coffee sign fell down, because I had to adjust the physics values of the entities.  A simple mistake, easily fixed.
• Light post on right is poorly positioned and looks like it's off.
• Needs more 'reason' to come over here.  I want to turn these machines into functioning entities, shouldn't be too hard. At that point the hard lighting used for illumination/shadows should really help push the player towards these machines.

This was originally an outdoor panoramic scene but because of an engine issue (shadows displaying on empty space) I decided to fool around with making it part of the ship and it came out really well.  So now you still have a window to space but you can see the ship more naturally as part of an extension of the actual player's experience.  The docking bay itself is actually an old free model done by cosmic prophet for dark city (or was it nuke city?).

This area is my first real "crew" area; it's clutter and design is specifically oriented towards giving a more human feel for the ship.  I'll have a few people sitting, eating, cavorting.  etc.  There should be a lot more decoration to give you the feel that this small mess area is a nice through-way for travelers.  There are a few mistakes here though.

• One of the panels (mid center, slightly left) for the roof shows misaligned ceiling textures.  This simply needs rotated.  
• The area needs more lighting in general to put shadows on the interior elements.
• The far pouch actually is the first secret area and I need to hide this better.

So as you can see, this is coming along well but progress is slow because I have little time to work with this regularly.  I want this to give a nice solid feel; this first level (Receiving Bay) will actually be somewhere we visit again later - it should have a trashed feel at that point as things have gone to relative shit.  

More to come!   For now, I'm slowing down as it's end of the year; holidays are winding up, I have a lot going on in my life (Baby, Job, Holidays) and mostly I'm just taking it as it comes.

Forthcoming reviews:  The "Deep Space" package by oldflak
                                      My comprehensive 'must have free stuff' list - part one
                                      Wizard of Id's warehouse pack.
                                       Errant AI's Arcade Pack.

Deal of the week:  https://en.tgcstore.net/pack/10703  - ... 600 dollars worth of resources for 27 dollars.  Holy jeeze!

Project(s) status Friday: 12/11/2015

I started this morning off with disappointment.
Got told flat out by TGC that some of my art (Note, I'm not a great artist so this isn't horribly surprising) was of insufficient quality for the store they have.  Given the level of some stuff that's on there either they are upping their standards or I just *REALLY REALLY SUCK*.

Sigh.

Well, on with the project status.  My wife, as many may or may not know, is pregnant.  So we're anxiously awaiting our new addition in a few months.  It takes up a lot of my time.

What time I do have is spent at work, with the kid, doing housework, or very infrequently - playing games.

Every monday I sit with my 5 year old (Soon to be 6) and do some game-guru 'daddy time'.

Anyways... today I wanted to have an update ready but turns out someone posted some 'free weapons' that were blatant plagiarism and as such kind of mucked up my ideas for today's review post.  I may do a different one later, but not right now.  It frustrates me to be stymied like that.



Current project status:

1) NMC Book 2 - still waiting for beta readers to get back to me.
2) Javascript Mechwarrior Dark Age game.  No further progress (currently no desire)
3) Yet to be named "sci-fi" FPS game - good progress!  Figured out and corrected internal shadow systems, can now proceed normally.  Looks like I'll be getting a free scientist model from one 'henry weaver' and that will help CONSIDERABLY with some of the efforts I'm moving forward with.  Combined with the lackluster character creator (though I've done some interesting things with the face mapping) I have a bare bones set of 'original' characters plus some bad guys.  Now comes level design, then population of levels, then scripting, object placement for pickup objects, tuning, refinement, etc.
4) The doom analysis is complete for Doom 1.  Interesting stuff in previous blog posts  here here and here!
5) I promised to look at zombie AI code but someone already found the issue - so that's off the list.
6) I need to take more screen shots of my WIP.


At work, I'm writing a script to use puppet to deploy salt-minion on SLES SP3/4.  Irony level rising.

BSP's SCI-FI weapons pack

My original BSP weapons (pack 1) review is here.

I have been waiting a long time for something like this.  I've had a Sci-Fi project on the back burner which I have wanted to do for a long... LONG time.  Years before even doing anything with FPSC:R.

So without hesitation, I purchased the kit.

  Hot damn.  Sci-Fi always gets the blood pumping.

 I was not disappointed.

This kit cost a meager 8 dollars; that's a pittance for what you get:

5 guns, one low price.

Lets review the 5 weapons given:

You get the IronFist Shotgun.  I have to say as a firearms owner and enthusiast - this thing is awesome.  It behaves EXACTLY as I want a "Space Shotgun" to behave.  It fires out of an eight round drum magazine and the animation is smooth as butter.  It's easy to handle and frankly just feels good.  

Next up is the Quasar Gun; this is a full-auto carbine which has a good bit of recoil.  Of the bunch, its my least favorite aesthetically though it does have a pretty nice alien feel.  I really enjoy watching the drum rotate as it fires.  It features a thirty-two round box magazine which then feeds into some kind of accumulator drum that rotates.  There's one minor flaw and really my only complaint here.  If you really go frame by frame on the box magazine it shows some pretty gigantic bullets.  I don't really care honestly because it happens too fast for the user to notice but it is a fault and bears mentioning.  That said, ejected shell casings are PERFECT on all weapons - no more full cartridge ejections! 

The S4-VC6 pistol is a fantastic weapon; it's a nice all around weapon with good visibility of the gloved hand.  Now normally I'd complain about how you can see the hands but honestly I don't plan on using non-standard weapons and if I do, I will simply reduce the weapon's visibility via configuration files.

 

A pre-alpha WIP screenshot of my upcoming space-shooter.

The Sniper R400 Panther is a well rounded sniping weapon.  I have a confession to make - I hate sniping weapons in this game engine.  They are quite simply too strong.  They make the game exceptionally easy on a number of levels.  This gun, however, feels balanced and decent with it's twelve round stick magazine- unlike the base level 'remington hunting rifle' that comes with gameguru.  It's a good weapon in most circumstances and basically acts as a long range 'upgrade' to the pistol.  It's also gorgeous in the right lighting.

The Typhoon is straight out awesome.  At first I thought "oh great, another full auto gun."  But in truth, it's a weapon unto itself with a fifty round magazine of what are effectively pistol rounds.  It does less damage than the Quasar but slams out the rounds so fast and cleanly it is my preferred weapon of the bunch.  This little monster feels fantastic and is right at home in any Sci-Fi game.

One important note: All of these guns actually come with an alt-fire mode.  Literally press left-alt and you get a melee attack animation that's not shown in the video or really documented at all.  Your character lowers his gun and throws out a quick right hook.  It's a nice freebie and makes the 'what do I do if I have no ammo' situation less difficult to work around.

Overall opinion and observations: This pack is extremely well priced.  You get 6 weapons for the price of 4, effectively, which is a helluva deal.  The weapons all feel unique enough and their respective weapon boxes/ammo boxes look great too.  The muzzle flash on all of these guns is SPOT on and looks fantastic.  The minor flaws of the other weapon packs (recoil, gun feel, ejected weapon cartridges, etc) have all been clearly lessons that were learned from.  BSP has outdone himself.

If I had to buy just one: It's 8 dollars.  Just buy the pack.  There's really no reason not to.  But if you are absolutely trying to be as cheap as possible - get the Typhoon.  It's too fun not to have.