This Week in Game-Guru - 10/15/2018

This week's update was pre-staged because of some real life work obligations. Apologies for any content which was missed in the lag time between staging and deployment here.

Official Game Guru News

https://steamcommunity.com/app/266310/discussions/0/1730963192547852809/ - Per synchromesh it appears the long standing 'disappearing model' issue may be resolved.  Time will tell!

Also this came out this last week: https://www.thegamecreators.com/post/gameguru-melee-weapons-pack-updated-2
So apparently more updates to the already really decent melee weapons pack were done. They added 6 more melee weapons.  Pretty impressive stuff for those who already own it!

Lastly all of the incremental AI updates are here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220075?page=2#msg2606583

We also have our list of winners from the Survey (all of these people got free DLC!):

• Archor
• Simon Cleaton
• Rogy 

Very cool, congrats all!

What's Good in the Store

The same stuff as last week, sadly.

Free Stuff

Nothing new for free as of this writing.

Third Party Tools and Tutorials

There's some pretty good info in this thread about how to use styleguru, which is a fantastic third party program that can help you customize your Game-Guru menus.
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220056

Random Acts of Creativity

Particle Test by Kevan Hampton - https://youtu.be/08zG7FczACM

Extraction Point X11 https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220128
Now the above should really get your attention.  Someone put a lot of hard work and care into this but used mostly stock game assets.  They have a very good cutscene and HUD, as well as a neatly modified menu.  Sets a good standard Game-Guru game-making attempts.

Environmental Particles in GG Loader: https://youtu.be/ItEVjI0HX9Q

Pirate Mike's walk through of his upcoming game: https://youtu.be/wFLuupCC5A4

Someone made a kindle e-book with Game-Guru graphics... speaking as someone who's made a kindle book before it's no picnic to arrange those things.  I am fairly impressed!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J1VZRYC

In My Own Works:

Recently this week started work on the 'how to make a desert' walkthrough.  It's coming along well though is tricker than I first thought.  Here's a screenshot:

This is far from final and sadly the book will only include B&W stills, but regardless, the basic shape is there. There's more grasses, background materials and the like to add but atmospherically speaking it's what I wanted.
I also have this for the Semi-Arid type of desert, but it needs even more work:

Piece by piece this book is coming along.  Just two more desert types to do for the book and take all the necessary screenshots, do final cleanup, etc.

I also need to rework my 'how to make a city' section as well, which falls into a similar situation.

Free AWK pdf book and personal updates

https://ia802309.us.archive.org/25/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7/The_AWK_Programming_Language.pdf

It's been released for free, so pick up your copy now and immerse yourself in one of the most useful languages ever devised for an operating system! :)

As to other updates:
I'm still waiting for my final sky (savannah sun) to be added to the store so I can give it as a pack freebie.  It's brilliant and gorgeous :).  I still have trouble with my sky rendering tool putting lines on certain types of skies but it's acceptable for me and frankly it's a freebie.  So I think people will live with it.  With the right bloom settings, it doesn't even show up.

Also I made significant progress on my new upcoming project.  I got a vector library (vectorial) for Lua imported into Game-Guru  and began pumping my output to it.  It works well though GG's interpretation of Lua code is quirky at best.  On top of that I have a weird error where Game-Guru will give me exactly ONE Lua error before it stops giving me any error messages at all.  Makes debugging extremely difficult.

On a side note my wife has been delving into the Unreal engine while I finish up this project for Game Guru.  I plan on joining her shortly but I'm encouraged by her work.  She's really done quite a lot for a span of 2-3 days. 

I want to wrap up my work in Game Guru with a module makers can add that will allow a significant amount of control and power to the environment.  Once that's for sale (warning, it's going to be about $15 but will absolutely be worth it) I plan on using those proceeds to buy assets for Unreal as I transition to that engine.

Updates coming in GG 1.33, big stuff

So personally I believe this should be a major version update.  However...

Lee recently did a twitch broadcast going over the changes coming in '1.33'.  There's a lot of things being added.

Here's a summary of relevant things:

• Individual object specularity :O  .. now you can set it on a per-item basis which is a huge boost for maintaining a good looking level while providing 'metallic' entities.
• 5 sounds per dynamic object.  This is pretty huge of a boost from 2.
• A shader for skies!  Wow.. I think this is going to take some work to figure out but that'll really boost sky visuals.
• Lots of LUA commands, including weapon commands- which opens up upgrade-able weapons and variations in stock weaponry without making a whole new weapon.
• Improved pathfinding for AI (this is a big deal).
• Legacy terrain generator.  There was a great RNG terrain maker which was removed.. the new one was trash.  The old one has been re added and is brilliant.  He even lowered the height (a major issue previously) so the water level is right there.  That helps a lot.

Wow.
Looks good.  I'm interested in seeing this finally show up.
You can find the twitch broadcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa01SdlKXho