Hello and welcome to the first GameGuru news for October. It’s been a very busy time here with some great progress in development land. As always here you can read all about the latest leaps forward and finally start seeing some juicy prototype screenshots.
Before we jump into the rest of the great GameGuru pond, let’s see what’s been going on with our amazing community.
First off this week, is this continuation of E30Legend’s great medieval project. We are very excited to see this develop and it’s looking very realistic and exciting.
Another on going development is Survivor V2.0 from Tarkus1971. We love the grungy atmosphere of this work and are keeping a very close eye on it.
Lastly is a small tribute game from Nuncio. Formicula is a remake of It came from the desert, a game released in 1989 for the Amiga and later the PC.
That’s it from our great community for this week, now let’s take a look at what’s been happening in the Game Guru store.
Store News
The store continues to go from strength to strength. We’ll very soon have more than 6,100 items available and with 20-30 new items being adding almost daily, we’ve never had so much choice for budding developers.
This weeks focus is on the underground, caves, bunkers and all things buried and everything is very new to the store, showing just how much great media is being uploaded by our talented artists.
First off is this mining pack from Tazman. These great looking models are ideal for almost any genre from medieval through modern day to a post apocalyptic scenario – a dark and eerie place perfect for Zombies too!
Secondly, no abandoned cave network would be complete without something nasty hiding in the shadows, and this giant stag beetle from the talented and prolific artist Dagored. Click on the image above to see this great model in action.
Lastly this month is this new pack from Wizard of ID. His bunker pack snaps together nicely and you’ll soon be experiencing life deep underground in a man-made tunnel 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
The GameGuru Twitch Broadcasts continue this week and you’ll be able to listen to some sage advice every Wednesday at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST and 8am PST. We will be available to answer your questions and of course we will be sharing more tidbits of information as well as up to the minute reports about GameGuru and its current development so don’t forget to tune in.
If you missed last week’s broadcast, Lee talked about the process of creating a simple non animated door, something that I’m sure many users will find useful. Lee was very happy to cover this subject and you can replay the session by clicking on the image below.
Development News
Overall we’re very pleased with progress so far with the new C++ based GameGuru. We’re still working on the performance side to ensure we bring you a much faster games engine. Each week we make new strides and see faster frame rates. An area we’re fully immersed in this week is the occlusion system, once this is working well it will cut down the polygon count per frame as it minimises what’s necessary to be drawn to the screen.
Without any of these, we’re already seeing an improvement in performance across the board and we expect to have a new release for our beta testers in the next couple of days.
As exciting as performance is to us, it doesn’t make for great visuals so let’s talk about progress on the other side of the development spectrum and that’s visuals and the DirectX 11 integration. So far everything is working well as a prototype and once everything is functioning as a standalone application, we’ll be moving it into the main engine. Some of this will happen quickly, while other elements will most likely be in the 2nd public release once the bulk of the performance work is completed.
One of the most requested features from our users on the visual side is Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or SSAO for short. SSAO is in layman’s terms a very fast and efficient way of simulating per pixel lighting effects via a shader. The method has the advantage that is can be solely handled by the GPU, freeing up the CPU for all those other things it needs to be doing.
As you can see in the image above, the left hand image is what we have currently in GameGuru, the right hand is the DirectX11 prototype, untilising a number of effects including SSAO. You hopefully can appreciate the differecnes, specific areas to notice are the legs, which appear ‘behind’ the arms and have a subtle shadow separating them in the right SSAO image, whereas the same location in the left image immediately blends from the white sleeve to the blue jeans. creating an unrealistic sharp edge. The head is a great place to see examples of how SSAO can take surfaces heavy in curves and normal mapping and augment those details further with ambient occlusion, even creating shadows that deepen the rendering of the cloth headdress.
Signing Off
That’s all the news for this week, we hope you’re as excited as we are with the progress to date.
As always many thanks for your patient support and we hope that we’ve been able to give you a peek into where we are with the current GameGuru development.
Don’t forget Lee’s regular blogs, and we’ll be back every Monday with more on GameGuru and our showcase of the best that our excellent community has to offer.
The GameGuru Team
