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Showing posts with label bored of the rings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bored of the rings. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

This Week in GameGuru - 01/13/2020

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


Not much, unfortunately.  Work goes on behind the scenes, so I hear from those in the know. I cannot divulge the specifics, unfortunately.  Nothing on github but some excellent stuff is coming, near as I can tell almost a generational leap for GG. Time will tell from a public view but all I can say is that from my viewpoint I see a lot of things clicking together right now in a way I haven't seen since early 2016 or so.  

What's Good in The Store

Wolf has released a massive 2019 Sci-Fi pack and I own many of these already. I use them with regularity but a few new items also appeared in the form of a 'booster kit'

Just one of many of the superb assets in the booster pack!
You can get your copy here: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/33832
On to another favorite - a fantastic 'torch light' script by Teabone.  I have to say as someone who wrote up a whole LightKit of my own, I'm impressed by the simplicity and function of the torch kit. Check out this video for an idea of what I mean:

This script is a total bargain at $2 for any fantasy project: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/33858



Third Party Tools and Tutorials

           It bears reiterating that 'Bored of The Rings', a forum user, has been developing many excellent tools that are pretty much a required faire for anyone serious about using GameGuru at this point.  They are reasonably priced and I highly recommend picking up your own copies.

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221333 - This is the heightmap importer he's diligently worked on which is now up to version 5!

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221285 - This is the FPSC autowelder tool which can LITERALLY IMPORT ENTIRE LEVELS FROM FPSC INTO GAMEGURU.
It also can pull dynamic entities, weapons, etc over.  It fits a critical pipeline for those building indoor scenes - you can build your indoor scenes in FPSC and import them into GameGuru.  Really quality stuff.

In the interim, I know cybernessence (another GG user) has been working on some amazing things of his own.  Per his words:
"Just added wake effects for ships and water and sky (sky scroll clouds) transparency based on configurable co-ordinates so airships can punch through cloud layer and subs can dip below the waterline without texture plane intersects. Looks pretty good. Added numerous lua lcommands such as getting limbs for HUDs, so can add particle effects to FP hands and weapons. Loot chests are now populated by 'add entity' commands - so money (or any asset) can be dynamically loaded at run time ... lost count of all the changes made to make the game better now to be honest"

I for one am still praying he'll include some of those in the core branch of GG on Github.


Free Stuff


Nothing I could find this week, sorry!

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)


New user Mav3r1ck has been building some really excellent fantasy dungeon crawls:


The above is apparently a boss fight arena.


I love the dark and red look he's put on using some custom assets and lighting.  Great work!

Avenging eagle's interesting game with torches and lighting as a core mechanic is coming along splendidly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmKBugPxWPM 


And lastly we have more teasers from Duchenkuke's fantastic Dark Skies game:
   

In My Own Works

I've been getting back into the swing of working GameGuru intermittently now that life is making more sense!  I want to thank everyone who has purchased my book, I want you to know it's been very fulfilling to provide something that so many are able to own and appreciate!

My more current works will involve some scripts being released on the store (two of them for free) in the near future.  So keep your eyes peeled!


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.