Hello again, and welcome to the GameGuru weekly news. We’ve very pleased internally with our recent development progress and thanks go to our beta testing team who have been testing numerous builds of the new C++ based GameGuru engine. You can read all about our progress a little later on, but for now, let’s take our regular look at what our amazing community have been up to!

Another excellent screenshot from Tarkus1971 and a change of pace from him with this excellent medieval castle scene.

Also new this week is this great woodland scene by newcomer TRUE D1S4ST3R. She’s not been around long, but the quality of her work is outstanding.

So, with our weekly look at the community galleries complete, let’s see what else is new in the world of the GameGuru.

Community Work in Progress

In addition to the screenshots above, we couldn’t resist showing you this work in progress from the very talented GameGuru user Rolfy. Although apparently still not quite finished his terrain and skyboxes are truly breath taking. On a recent trip to the Scottish highlands, Rolfy got inspired and recreated these amazing scenes inside GameGuru!

Highlands 1 from Rolfy

Highlands 2 by Rolfy.

All of us here at TheGameCreators are very excited to see how these turn out and we’re sure that you feel the same way. We’ll keep up with the latest developments and let you know.

Store News

The last couple of weeks have seen some new artists joining the store and as well as some uploads from our regular contributors we’re very pleased with the impressive quality. This week we’re taking a look at ruined street media with a focus on post-apocalyptic games. We all love a wasteland/zombie/monster shooter and the store is packed with suitable media.

First off is this excellent rusty letters and numbers pack from Teabone. The pack contains every letter of the alphabet, numbers 0 to 9 and a selection of useful symbols. Ideal for your post apocalyptic games.  (Thanks to Tarkus1971 for the above screenshot which shows off the pack very well.).

Next up this week is this new pack from Valuable Assets combining a mix of his old and new media which provides a great collection of models ideal for your games set in the dark future. In addition to the excellent pack, you can also see media from his Complete Collection’s pack.

No post apocalyptic world would be complete without some monsters to populate it and this new giant spider from Dagored is ideal for just that (as well as some fantasy games). Don’t forget to check out all of this artists other critters!

The last model we are featuring this week is this excellent fuel station from new artist valentin321, it’s ideal for city and townscapes, objectives  or simple set dressing.

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!

SciFi DLC News

We’re developing a new SciFi DLC for GameGuru. Here are some work in progress screens to whet your appetite;

A sneaky preview of the new alien character.

A WIP sci-fi gun to arm yourself or enemy characters with.

Finally, here’s a sample of the new corridor entities to build your very own space station.

Twitch News

Lee Bamber’s Twitch Broadcasts continues this week and you’ll be able to listen to his sage advice every Wednesday at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST and 8am PST.  We always enjoy meeting you online, and don’t forget that  Lee is always willing to answer any questions you have about GameGuru and its current development so don’t miss out.

If you were unlucky enough to miss last week’s broadcast, Lee covered basic questing, a subject that has often been raised by our users. As always  Lee was very happy to help out and you can hear what he had to say by clicking on the image below.

 GameGuru Latest

It has been a very successful week here at GameGuru towers and we’re extremely pleased with our recent development work. We’ve managed to corner Dave “Ravey” Milton for a comment on how he feels things are going:

All the initial crashes have been fixed, resulting in the first beta builds coming back with surprisingly few bugs.

The last build had just 2 minor bugs which have since been fixed. With the bugs out the way I have now begun profiling a busy game, to highlight areas in need of attention. I’m hopeful we will find aread we can optimise to bring even more speed improvements to the engine. While Lee is developing a new DX11 engine, I will be focusing on CPU bottlenecks.

What this means in short, is that the past six weeks of conversion work aimed at preparing the GameGuru engine for some hardcore developments is pretty much over. We now have a stable and somewhat faster core engine to base our future work on.

So, what’s next?

Well, as Ravey has alluded to, we can now start the process of tracking all of those CPU bottlenecks, start opening up other cores on multi-core machines and optimising the existing code in places for extra speed. This is phase two of the performance work, and we have a host of other tricks planned that will improve GameGuru’s performance.

This week Lee will be dabbling this week in Image Based Lighting (which is a fancy way of saying clever cube maps), which when married with the future features of shadows and other fancy tricks should result in a very nice looking scene indeed. You will also be pleased to know the performance of the graphics engine prototype is pretty much 100% (with a thread dedicated to GPU calls and a second one dedicated to queuing the calls ready to hand over the first thread). In all Lee’s demos to date, the GPU is working 100% of the time and is very much a GPU bound activity which is exactly where we need to be throughout this work. He also wanted to make it clear that despite his current affair with DirectX 11 visuals, his priority remains on the performance side to ensure a fast and reliable engine is built. Follow his daily blog if you want his latest findings direct from his desk!

Signing Off

Thank you as always for your patient and continued support, you really all keep us going.

The GameGuru team