Welcome once again to our weekly news update. We’re very pleased to say that we finally have some real progress to report. Nothing that is going to blow your mind visually, but we’ll be passing a few facts and figures in your direction which we hope will be almost as much fun as some shiny images.
Before we let you in on a little inside information, let’s take our usual look at what our community has been up to.
House on Haunted Hill – by Rolfy
Our delve into the GameGuru gallery this week has uncovered this excellent work from artist and developer Rolfy. As always we aren’t disappointed by his excellent work and hope that it encourages other users to get developing.
Metropolis 2023 by Shadowman
Also from the gallery is this very atmospheric screenshot from Shadowman demonstrating DLC Mega Pack 1 to great effect.
Also from the community this week is this freebie from Store artist Spotaru. You can go to the forum post and download this model for free as well as post your thanks. If you like it why not click on his artists name above and check out his store work.
Ok, now let’s take a look at the latest store news.
Store News
In keeping with our recent tradition of focusing on a media theme, this week we’re going to look at a range of models based on modern warfare.
The models in the screenshot above are from Nomis3D a very talented artist. The two packs features above are his excellent APC pack with the two large combat tanks featured in this pack.
This ruins pack is by Rolfy, his Art of War pack is ideal not just modern war games but also wouldn’t be out of place in a post apocalyptic game or even just as a slum.
Weapons Pack 1
Weapons Pack 2
No modern warfare game would be complete without weapons, and here’s a reminder of BSP’s excellent modern weapons pack and modern weapons pack 2.
And finally this week, here’s Wizard of ID’s very useful Bunker pack. 16 models including over ground bunkers as well as enough segments to build your own underground bunker network.
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 become a store artist!
Twitch News
Lead developer Lee Bamber has returned to his regular Twitch Broadcasts after his well deserved summer vacation. As you can see from our shiny new banner, he’ll be with you every Wednesday at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST and 8am PST. Hopefully as many of you as possible will be able to join us each week to ask your important questions to the man himself and maybe just learn a thing or two about the deeper workings on GameGuru.
For those of you who were unable to be with us last Wednesday you can catch up with the latest broadcast as well as every broadcast we’ve made by simply clicking the image below.
Still Time To Vote
As we’re sure you all know, GameGuru is a community led development and we’re keen to know what you want us to focus on once we’ve completed the performance and visual upgrades. You can click here to add your own vote, this is very important if you’d like to help shape GameGuru and helps us understand what’s important to our great community.
As you can see from the screenshot above, Save & Load Progress and Better AI are pretty much run away winners so far, with an Easy Building Editor hanging on in third, so if you’ve not voted and you want to support these choices, or if you feel you would prefer we focus on something else, head on over and add your vote.
GameGuru News
It’s been well over a month of hard work from the team, but we’re finally able to say we have a working version of GameGuru 100% coded in C++. The last weekend saw the internal team testing every aspect, and although we’ve already found a few bugs and issues, the overall build is very stable – the main issues are fairly minor in the whole scheme of things. Developer Ravey is now working through these issues and by mid week we hope to be passing a new build to the select Beta test team for checking.
We are still cagey about giving full figures on performance increases, as firstly we’ve only tested on a handful of machines at the moment, and this really is just the tip of the iceberg regarding performance enhancements, but we are pleased to report FPS improvements ranging from minor to significant in various areas and early results are better than we expected at this point in the process.
So, while we send half the coding team back to the development cave with a list of fixes, Lee will return to his research and early coding of the DirectX 11 work. He has spent most of the week investigating various options and reading endless tomes and papers on the best approach. He’s now certain how he’s going to move forward and will start prototyping his ideas this week.
We have settled on developing a deferred rendering system and those following Lee’s Blog will have seen these comments from him;
Having spent most of the day studying and coding deferred rendering, one line at a time, I can now confidently state that I completely understand the theory and practice of its implementation. It is indeed true that everything becomes commonplace once explained, and deferred rendering is simply about splitting up the rendering task and then combining what you’ve done at the end. I can also see some great opportunities for vast optimizations such as using instance buffers to render all my lighting into the light buffer in one go (for point lights at least), and use a dynamic vertex buffer to control the contents of that buffer so only relevant lights are ever submitted to the GPU. It’s all very exciting, but first I need to do some basic middle-level code such as loading in X files and get them animating under a new shader system. As I delve deeper into exploring the grey areas of the work ahead, I can see it taking much longer than my initial projections, simply to ensure what gets coded is the best code I can do, rather than the most expedient route to satisfy some invisible deadline.
That’s it for this week. We apologise once more for the lack of pretty pictures, but we are moving out of the media unfriendly phase and hope to have something to show you soon.
Signing Off
Well, we can’t sit on our current successes as we’ve still got lots to do as the current core work really is just the beginning of where we expect to take GameGuru is the weeks, months and years to come.
As always, many, many thanks for you patient support, we hope that we’ve been able to give you a small peek into where we are.
Don’t forget Lee’s regular blogs, and we’ll be back every Monday with more on GameGuru development and our showcase the best from our great community.
The GameGuru team
