Welcome to the GameGuru weekly news, we hope that you’re all enjoying the latest update (and of course, looking forward to the next.).

This last week has mainly been about tweaks and fixes to the engine, and you can read all about the work to date below. We also touch a little on our plans for the future as we aim to keep improving GameGuru so you’re games can be top quality.

The Village by Steam user Gazz.

So, let’s see what we’ve been up to since the last news bulletin.

Store News

As always, the store has seen an amazing number of quality uploads, making it harder to know what to showcase! We’re approaching another milestone in the life of GameGuru with nearly 5,000 items available, either for free or for a great price.

Let’s take a look at some of the latest releases.

Store artist BSP has added to his range of excellent weapons with this amazing sci-fi weapons pack. Featuring 5 brand new weapons for all of your futuristic needs.

Another talented store artist Noktavian has uploaded his second skybox pack. The great value pack is not only exceptional quality, but adds six new skyboxes to your collect spanning several genres.

These fun and atmospheric rabbit critters from Dagored are ideal for almost any genre, and add a real sense of life to your games.

DLC News

If you were a purchaser of our Death Valley DLC pack (and if not, we suggest you check it out here), you’ll be pleased to know that as promised, we’ve been working our artist hard for a great new update to the pack. All purchasers of the original Death Valley will be able to download the new assets for free very soon.

Death Valley update teaser

Become a Store Artist!

The Game Creator Store connects creative artists and musicians with enthusiastic GameGuru game developers. Can you create game ready 3D models or themed atmospheric music for the GameGuru community? If so, sign into the GameGuru website and sign up to HERE!

GameGuru update news

It’s been another exciting week internally, we’ve been planning how to move forward and improve GameGuru so you can create awesome games in the easiest way possible!

We’re planning one more release (Version 1.01.003) at the end of this month and then the entire coding team will be focusing their efforts on improving the engine’s performance. We had highlighted a number of optimisations which we know you’ll love. Of course it’s early days yet, and we expect performance work to take several weeks for the first round of improvements, but we feel this is the number one pressing issue for a lot of our users and we’re determined to impress you with future results of this work.

What can you expect for the next immediate release? Well, we’ve been targeting a few of the smaller issues that have been highlighted to us since the last build, and rather than adding too many new features we felt that the community would have us focus on stability before moving forward. One of the main improvements is the new Face Changer feature for the Character Creator! You can now easily import a face image and map it onto any of the character heads. You can then save the new character and it can be an enemy character or you can use it in Multiplayer. We’ve had a lot of fun with this feature and enjoyed using famous faces during testing!

Adding a face is very easy. Select a photo of a face, match the face to the stencil of the face shape, eyes, nose and mouth by using the round icons. The skin colour can be matched by sampling three key points from the original image.

 

Once imported you can then choose the clothing and head gear for the character.

We’re sure you’ll enjoy this new feature and look forward to seeing you in a Multiplayer game soon!

Other fixes in the upcoming build include;

• Fixed all marker entities so they no longer Z clash with terrain & floors
• Removed redundant , and . keys in test game mode as visual adjusted with sliders now
• Fixed code which detects for Entity BIN versions – no more corrupt animations
• Now allows entities as static, even if animates (except character_basic.fx)
• Added new WIZARD EVIL and WIZARD ROYAL to the character assets
• Increased speed of APPLY CHANGES in Entity Properties (activemouse detection)
• If no water exposed in terrain, test game will skip water mask generation
• Fixed issue which ignored ROT values when spraying entities with ‘I’ key
• Re-activated code which XZ rotates entities slightly in spray mode
• F1 Help Page now stays on screen when F1 key held down
• Changed CLIP mode (TAB then CTRL+MouseWheel) to be independent of zoom
• Fixed issue of shotgun loading two shells when only one remained
• Added new STAFF icon and ammo icon (and new HUD mode of 11 to gunspec)
• Ensured all Fantasy Creatures do not ‘repeat-hit’ and only hit once
• Ensured Fantasy Creatures can hurt at double range to make combat tougher
• Moved hardwareflags reset to game init routine, terrain visibility reset
• Created shader instance for TPV characters for zero-depth rendering
• Created shader instance for TPV entity for zero-depth rendering
• Removed clipping cap and ensured Y position value is accurate
• Added new RECENT folder to PURCHASED folder to list all store items

We are also working on a new update to the main store website, we’re hoping to roll this out in early July.

Signing off

As stated, we’ve been busy on stability this last week and we will continue down that road until we and our internal testing team are happy. We will be bringing you the new build at the end of the month, so it’s back into the coding bunker for another round of fixes and tweaks.

Don’t forget Lee’s Blog for daily updates on development and the occasional surprise.

See you all soon.

The GameGuru team