Search This Blog

Showing posts with label bugsy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bugsy. Show all posts

Monday, January 22, 2018

This Week in Game-Guru - 1/22/2018

As mentioned previously I should probably get off blogger soon.
Is it just wordpress these days or is there anything else of value out there?

It dawned on me I'm basically doing the job Lee and crew did years ago back when Game-Guru was still fresh and had life to it.  

ENGINE UPDATES:

The following video has all of the latest details and updates on the Game-Guru engine.

That's right, literally nothing, zip, zilch, nada.  Just one cryptic post from Lee about another unrelated project (here) that was received rather poorly by the increasingly salty natives.


NEW ON THE STORE


https://www.tgcstore.net/product/30999 - BSP made a new m9 pistol.  Looks very decent!
https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11002 - Tarkus continues his efforts in the world of audio for Game-Guru.  It's a smart move and he could easily translate it cross platform if he so chose.  I like his work thus far. This 'star cluster music pack' has a really professional feel to it.  The tracks are well done and have a heavy ambient-style synth vibe to them.  It's slower than his other stuff but definitely has a good feel to it for a space-based game that is not fast paced.  The free samples practically sell it for him.  Even though I'm an owner of his previous work(s) I feel this one has a real good flow to it.  I may purchase it myself soon!
https://www.tgcstore.net/product/31002 - Corrosion's 'enhanced AI'.  Probably is enhanced but I'd prefer to see a video if I'm spending that kind of money on an unproven product.  I'm an AI geek myself; I spent several thousand lines of code writing a pretty landmark AI program that went on to be the basis for the Reaper bot code.  Color me hard to impress, if you will.  Without a video to show the differences, it's hard to justify spending 7 dollars on something that could only be marginally better.  Considering how bad the AI is currently, this is significant.  If anyone purchases this, please let me know what your results are!


THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS:


So in more relevant news (to me, that is), there's a lot going on with third party programs.  To me, this and Lua coded items are where the action are at.  Lee simply takes too long to push his updates and as a result, we're forced to do a lot of the heavy lifting if this thing is ever going to be a functional product.

So first off we have OldPMan's excellent "Normalizator" (wow, what a mouthful) tool starting to beta PBR support.  This is a huge boost to people like me who haven't got the time to invest in learning a whole new workflow for PBR assets!

More info here:  https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216095?page=6#msg2594115

Also we've had some lively discussions on voice synthesis (robo-talk) software: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219214

And also we have a great thread on converting assets from Makehuman to Mixamo to 'FBX2GG'.

Lastly, I should also mention my own work here.  I recently created a Notepad++ Lua API for Game-Guru.  It's a simple piece but was a time consuming slog with 2400+ lines of XML code to write up.  It will basically auto-complete, give hints, etc for Game Guru and it's associated Lua functions. You can get more info on that here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219215

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY


https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219234 - Bugsy continues his work on his Wolf's previous FPSC game: Direct Action.  The sequel is called "Direct Action 2" (surprisingly enough) and has some pretty good teaser screenshots:



https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219060 - Duchenkuke has given up on his flagship product 'Cold Contract'; This is unfortunate.  Another high quality potential Game-Guru developer is taking an undefined hiatus from Game-Guru due to production issues.  This is, in my opinion, the biggest plague we have ongoing right now.  We really have a significant hurtle in using Game-Guru with respect to producing titles, primarily our ability to actually 'convert into standalone' and memory issues.  The memory issues, in particular, really cause serious problems in larger projects.  It's a damn shame that yet another great project is being dumped because this issue couldn't get resolved.

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219206 Lastly, while it's not a WIP, Wolf made a pretty great lightmapping tutorial.  This is the type of thing we need more of.

IN MY OWN WORKS


As mentioned, there's my Notepad++ API that is free for download to help developers get the most out of their Lua coding in Game-Guru.  On top of that I've been intermittently working on my upcoming kit(s) for Game-Guru.  They're heady projects though so it's really eating up cycles to do the things I want to do.  I realize that if I was a slightly better programmer in Lua this probably wouldn't be so tremendously difficult.

That said I've made a lot of progress.  I've integrated weapons and healthkits into my system (ammo was the first thing I used) and now need to find a way to get the enemies to do what I want them to do.  All in all, I'm a solid 2-4 months away from being able to release either of them at this pace.  Maybe as things clear up I'll be able to allot more time.  As it is though, it's only a little here and there.

That wraps it up for this week.  Keep an eye out for an update coming down the pike.  We should see some really great stuff soon if Lee ever deems to open the floodgates.



Wednesday, January 3, 2018

This Week in Game-Guru 1/3/2018

Happy New Years, everyone. I hope you all had a great holiday.

I'm super busy getting caught up but I have a few updates to go over.  From my standpoint, I completed several interesting projects in Game-Guru I'll post shortly.  I'd like to wrap up some minor bugs but I am pleased with the results.  That aside, I ran into some serious issues with the engine's ability to make standalone files.  While standalone exports have always been an issue, it seems the latest public preview edition had more and more issues as time went on.  It felt like I was hitting snags on every export, with every third or fourth being the 'good' one.  Really hoping we see an update soon.


ENGINE UPDATE PROGRESS REPORT


No news to report here, sadly.  Holiday usually means Lee disappears off the face of the earth for an inordinate amount of time.  We'll probably hear from him again in march.  :(

NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE









In the store, there were a few new products with only a few notable updates.  Mstockton put up some nice locks and keys, which are always useful. On top of that Mad Lobster put up some interesting medical equipment for download.  They're well priced and look great.



Grobyken's new stuff is starting to pop up on the site as well and I highly recommend giving it a look as his latest models are a massive leap forward over his previous stuff.


FREE STUFF

The past few weeks have been relatively bereft of any real freebies aside from a few nice ones that found their way onto the scene:

First we have Bugsy's free scooter.  I like Bugsy's models and this one is no exception.  Should be a good city prop.


Next we have something a bit more simple that came as a request from a user, a series of 'street party flags'.  The kind of little celebratory banners they post to make a city seem more festive.  Looks like these freebies came out well:

Going back a few more days we find a nice free set of characters from Lafette, who has generously provided something that would normally cost a fair amount on the store for free:

They've got lots of custom animations as well!


THIRD PARTY TOOLS





While not necessarily a third party tool, this thread on PBR workflows is similar in the sense that it provides a good bit of information on using third party tools to create PBR assets within Game-Guru, something I'm still struggling with.  https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219159

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY


Some interesting stuff out there but mostly the same old projects.
I did find a new trailer for Kshatriya by Bugsy though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SnoHh5m7w

I'm looking forward to posting some of my own recent work online so keep an eye out for that in the near future.