This Week in GameGuru - 02/10/2020

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

The huge news this week was the announcement of GameGuru MAX, which is coming along at a preorder price of $25, with an announced 'release price' of $50.
There's an excellent Q&A thread here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221517?page=1#msg2625799

Lee & TGC have gone above and beyond trying to be ahead of this in a very forthcoming way with their communication going as far as releasing teaser videos, doing 2 hour Q&A's on discord and this forum thread.  It's a really positive improvement that I'm hoping to see continue as a trend.

There's a pretty big featureset being added here aside from already in-progress work.  Announcement of a new renderer being investigated, possible 64-bit upgrades, etc really wet the palette for users like me and I can honestly say $25 is an extremely accessible price for what looks like a more advanced iteration of GameGuru.

What's Good in the Store

This week I'm really limited in how far I can deep dive. Near as I can tell there's some interesting packs getting added but honestly I'm going to withhold judgement until a later time due to limited time resources on my part. 

Free Stuff

Mav3r1ck put out a free 'pulley crane'.  Get your copy here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221550

Lafette put together a HUGE medieval pack you absolutely should grab:  https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220474?page=3#msg2626215

Make sure you thank the guy for all his hard work!

OldPMan put out a beautiful Sci-Fi computer/set piece model:

Get your copy here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221548#msg2626328

JPH-Games has been busy producing lots of free models of pretty reasonably good quality for quite a while now:
An electrical panel with buttons: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219734?page=2#msg2625729

Some nice looking old boxes: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219734?page=2#msg2625984

Definitely check out his work.

Third Party Tools and Tutorials

BOTR has announced he'll continue work on his heightmapper for GameGuru Classic.  No word yet on whether it'll be ported to GG MAX.

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

Lots of excellent projects are blossoming out of the woodwork.  Take a gander:

Mav3r1ck's project posted some tantalizing screenshots:

He's also finally posted a title ("Heathen: The Paganacht")  and some information in a thread on the forums for those interested in more: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221486

Trollbae continues his impressive work with the EBE:

Amenmoses made a dart tossing game:

I know someone made the models for him, but I forgot to write their name down.  Whoever you were - thanks!

Teabone has been working on a really excellent water-system graphics refresh which uses water droplets, color matching, and DOF to simulate underwater distortion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75yrK0lybv8&feature=youtu.be

There's plenty more too!  Check out wolf's latest work here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/209529?page=3#msg2625148

Honestly there's too much to cover in one go. I highly recommend you peruse the forums yourself!  There's a lot of really exciting work being done right now.  I'm happy to see the community running with the latest updates to GG.

In My Own Works

In my own works, I'm actually due for my first royalty check from the publisher in Feb.  So.. that's sort of exciting, though honestly I will *NEVER* earn the money worth the time I spent in the book.  It's mostly done as a service to you all at this point, with the little bit of money from the publisher as a means to continue funding my hobby.

Speaking of funding my hobby, last week I got a large enough store payout to upgrade some of my tools and have been diligently working on new space skies (4k of course).  Here's some teasers:

This was a test to see if I could simulate an asteroid surface.

This is a 'white hole' in the middle of a globular cluster.

This is a planetary surface with an aurora, star prominently figured with a nebula behind it.

I *DID* run into some issues with shearing on my skyboxes so I'm trying to sort that out.  In the meantime, expect a new run of 4k skies on the store within a few weeks here.

I may also do a low res version for those who are more economically minded.

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:

           https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWoFImeQK2w

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:

 https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221314?page=1#msg2625068

   

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!

This Week in GameGuru - 05/05/2019

GameGuru News

This week in GameGuru we have several 'info drops' of interest.  Firstly, if you missed it, on youtube was a recent video by Lee with respect to using GG Loader with GameGuru.  This could, perhaps, signal a shift towards a more formal cross platform pipeline between AGK and GG.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcMrV7OqfeQ

Also recently a DLC pack deal was posted with this snippet of information:


"It's been a slow start to the year for official updates, but rest assured a lot of activity is happening in the background which we'll be able to reveal to you in the near future. What we can say for now is that we are working on aspects of the file management system for better compatibility with Windows 10, some multiplayer technology additions, a little code refactoring and upgrading the internal source code to Visual Studio 2017.
May will also see us tackle a few of the points you have posted to our issues tracker, so if you have something you would like to report and it's not yet recorded on GitHub, you can do so here:
https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues"

This lines up from what I've heard unofficially. If you take a look at the 'AlphaSite' code base, you'll notice a lot of recent moves towards adding Photon Multiplayer code and VR support.  While this is all very interesting and potentially game-changing it also is somewhat worrisome as an outside observer as there are nearly 265 outstanding issues on the issues tracker and I truly hope we see more than a 'few' bugfixes.  This engine's incredible potential is being hampered by a backlog of bugs and quality of life improvements for critical features such as a meta-searchable entitybank, better UI controls and improved terrain functionality.

I am, however, extremely hopeful that the new update will include at least a good chunk of fixes for outstanding issues such as the math error for the widget (where it slides exponentially if you are on the 'backside' of it.). Time will tell, but historically it's proven that every major update typically brings back a large number of old users to 'give it a whirl'. 

What's Good in The Store

This week it looks like Valentin321 has continued adding to his repository of Soviet themed assets.

Sula put in some last minute cars, old european cars that are oddly remniscient of the old American Chevy Nova (from the 80's). 

A few packs were added, notables are Graphix's beautiful picket fence kit and BSP's very impressive 2k skies pack volume 2. 

Also my Time of day and Weather kit + Skies pack is on sale this week for 12.95 until the 10th.  Make sure you get your copy if you haven't already gotten one! I will be adding the new 4k Space Skies to this kit shortly and increasing the price to reflect it, so if you want to get those skies for a bargain, this is the best time to do it!

Third Party Tools and Tutorials

BOTR continues to grind out work on his heightmap importation tool for GG.  He's now getting a split-loading system in where you can load multiple terrain types.  It's an interesting experiment, get more details here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219806?page=3#msg2615271

AmenMoses posted a video of his highly impressive physics-based gear library that is a work in progress but will likely see release soon for those who don't mind getting their hands dirty with Lua code: https://vimeo.com/334314785

Wolf did a great write-up on '10 easy tips to make working with GG easier' which has some pretty high quality info in it, like how to make any plant into functional vegetation. Many of the these are covered in my book as well but it's nice to see the information making it's way through the public sphere!

Dvader has been breaking into the map file and digging around.  Interesting stuff, I remember trying the same thing about a year ago and eventually giving up after running out of time. 

Free Stuff

HarryWever(Dagored) put up a free windmill for those interested: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/210761?page=6#msg2615188 - They look great with the dynamically cast shadows from the built-in sun. 

Amenmoses posted a script for Graphix's free piping that allows functional gauges: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217932?page=14#msg2615070

Amenmoses also put together a variation on his vehicle script to make a very cool little boat: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220055?page=1#msg2615182

Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)

Recently Belidos showed a very interesting video of his recent work on an isometric RPG kit which included an inventory system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FslhDHYSwHM

And because I inadvertently missed it, there was a fantastic piece of work demonstrated by Bod and Amenmoses showing multiple vehicles which can be driven via video.  I would recommend this highly as a must-watch: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220598?page=2#msg2614858

Teabone's recent work on his D&D inspired gelatinous cube has come a long way - I'm definitely liking the progress:

He's put a lot of time into trying to size it properly and get the 'jiggle' correct.

Ignite has some new interesting details on it's design philosophy and recent updates: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220722#msg2614998
Notably he's added:
Three light sources, each with different behaviours (actual weapons shown are placeholders atm).

•   Movement penalties based on light choice.
•   Death, respawning, and resetting of light source attributes.
•   Safezones.

Good stuff. I always like to see people thinking outside of the box.

Solar's project, 'Resist: Revolution' is apparently still being worked on and some good screenshots were recently posted:

Not bad at all!  Keep up the good work guys.

In My Own Works

Recently I posted some teasers to Facebook and various areas of Discord of the weapons work I'm having done by an artist via Commission.  It's come along well.  We're about halfway through the list of proposed items and so far I'm really pleased with the results. I've also been working heavily with GameGuru's gunspec file and projectile files to help create some impressive effects for these guns ranging from flamethrowers to plasma launchers. I'd say I feel as if I have full mastery on this and will likely do a write-up on it in the near future or try to get a last-minute inclusion to the book.

In the meantime, enjoy the screenshots of some of the guns that are still works in progress but are nearing completion:

Once we're all done I'll release these for purchase on the TGCstore ahead of the book for those who don't intend to buy the book (which will include free versions with it).

Again, for those who are interested, the book's publication date is AUGUST 19th, 2019.  I hope to see you all soon with details about additional features I will be including with the book!