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

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

Hello once again and welcome to the GameGuru weekly update. We had a very successful week here in GameGuru development land and some very useful and positive feedback from our beta testers. You can read all about that and other GameGuru news below.

As usual, let’s see what our community has been up to and take a quick look at the GameGuru galleries first. This very atmospheric screenshot from Valentin321 is not only inspiring but showcases the same artist’s lighthouse model now available in the GameGuru store.

Lighthouse by GameGuru user Valentin321

Also from our excellent community is this great freebie from artist Disturbing13. Start the week by adding these to your game asset collection!

Legacy urban buildings are free to download and match the artists store media perfectly.

That’s it for our quick review of the GameGuru community, now let’s take a look at what else has been happening.

Store News

Another great week on the GameGuru Store with a lot of new uploads from artists new and old. You can browse nearly 6,000 items now and we’re sure you’ll find something to suit your needs regardless of your chosen game genre.

Popular store artist Dagored has continued to add to his amazing collection of critters with this great looking animated fly! Yes, you read correctly, an animated fly – every game should include them!

There’s also another critter pack, this time from Gtox. His range of fish is excellent and builds on his other ranges perfectly. The Alligator Gar shown below is just one of 8 models which also include a longnose gar, a bull shark, a bluegill sunfish, a catfish, a Mayan cichlid, a peacock bass and finally a snook. Virtual aquarium anyone?

Lastly this week is just one of a range of cars from artist Pasquill. This rusty sports car is ideal for modern day and post apocalyptic games.

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

GameGuru lead developer Lee will continue with his regular Twitch Broadcasts this week and you’ll be able to listen to his musing as well as hints, tips and teasers every Wednesday at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST and 8am PST.  It is always great to see you there, and don’t forget that you can ask Lee any questions you have about GameGuru and it’s current development.

For those of you who missed last Wednesday you can catch up with the latest broadcast as well as every broadcast we’ve made by simply clicking the image below.

GameGuru Latest

The very first round of beta testing ended on yesterday. The early results were very encouraging and backed up a lot of the finding of the internal development team. There were a few small bugs reported, but no showstoppers and we don’t anticipate a lengthy bug fixing session will be needed before we can move onwards and upwards. Performance results varied, but every tester reported speed increases, some of which were very impressive considering we’ve not actually started our planned optimisation work. This is of course a great start and we expect to improve massively on this in the weeks to come.

In other GameGuru news, Lee has been delving deeper into the world of DirectX11 and has uncovered some real gems which he’s sure will yield a decent mix of performance and eye candy. Of course this work is still in it’s early phase but he has reported back some very exciting progress. The end of last week saw him getting his head around dual quaternion a mathematical process that could soon lead to some excellent performance increases. Already on Lee’s planned work list is Deferred Rendering,  FXAA post processing (for much smoother visuals) and Instance Buffers (A trick where the same models can be drawn in a single draw called – so if you have 25 characters, they would all be drawn in 1 draw call rather than 25). We’re sure that you can all see the massive advantages of such a technique and we’re all very excited about seeing it in action.

We’re still a little limited in the way of eye candy, but we can share this image from Lee’s blog demonstrating the beginnings of the improved rendering process.

Signing Off

We have a lot of work to do this week if we’re going to bring you more exciting news, so that’s everything for now.

Thank you once again for your patient and continued support, we really couldn’t do it without you!

Don’t forget Lee’s regular blogs, the weekly Twitch sessions, and we’ll be back every Monday with more on GameGuru development news and hopefully some mind blowing facts and figures.

The GameGuru team

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

The very enthusiastic title of this weeks GameGuru news gleans it origins from an email we all received from one of our developers and refers to his amazing successes in the last week. You can read more of this a little later, but we’re pleased to say that phase one of our massive GameGuru update is moving forward at a rapid rate now.

We’ll leave you on a baited hook for a few more minutes, while we take a look at some of the other things that has been going on in GameGuru land.

In keeping with the last few weeks, we’ll start once more with a quick look at the gallery and the amazing work of our community.

This weeks masterpiece is from user Getsfile and is a very impressive piece of work, showing what a little custom media can do for a scene.

Store News

There’s been lots of new uploads to the store in the last week, with the total number of store media exceeding 5,800 items, both available for sale or for free by our very generous and creative community. The quality is constantly rising, so now your games can look better then ever!

First off this week is another excellent contribution from prolific and very talented store artist Dagored. He has continued with the amazing range of critters with this beautiful crocodile. Click on the image above to view the monster in action!

Next up for a closer look this week is a set of giant fungi by artist Kasseyus, not only are these models a great addition to anyone’s collection, but they are free to download. Click here to download these as well as check out his other work.

Last up this week is another contribution from Lafette, this time a great looking shantytown, ideal for modern day or post apocalyptic genres.

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!

GameGuru Latest

As we eluded to in our introduction, we’ve made a lot of progress in the last week, with a massive number of small issues resulting from the conversion work being fixed.

We’re extremely pleased to say that the editor, all of it’s features and the test game process are now working as expected, which is the core part of phase one out of the way. We still need to run some tests and check the Model Importer, Character Creator and Multiplayer are working as they used to, but progress is very good, and seeing everything running as expected has been a great experience.

Once we’ve run our in house tests, it’s over to the beta testing team. These guys will be asked to pull, push and poke the engine to ensure that we’ve not missed anything and that when we’re ready for a public release it’s as stable as we can make it.

We can report however, that the very first functioning build has produced a significant increase in performance, this is without any of the additional optimisations we have in the pipeline, such as full occlusion, hardware instancing, multicore support and of course, we imagine, hundreds of internal tweaks.

Of course, this work is really just the beginning and the real magic begins when we integrate our new DirectX 11 rendering engine. This opens the door to even more performance, faster and much better looking shaders as well as all of the latest visual treats you’ve been asking for.

Sadly, despite this excellent step forward, we’ve still no eye candy to show you, but we’re getting closer, so watch this space and both the Steam and GameGuru forums for the latest news.

Signing Off

This week will be very much one of tidying up the code, and preparing the first build for our internal testing team. The upside of this, is it’s likely we’ll be able to start showing off some small sneak peeks of the fruits of our labours.

Many thanks as always for your patience and support, we’re sure that come update date, you’ll all be very happy we took the time.

Don’t forget our Twitch broadcast every Wednesday. Lee is now back with his regular blogs, and we’ll be back every Monday with more GameGuru news.

The GameGuru team

Hello again! We’ve just enjoyed the last Bank Holiday of the summer here in the UK, so the development team took a well earned rest, refreshing themselves for another round of performance tweaks and visual wonders. This doesn’t of course mean that they haven’t been working hard last week – far from it,  we’ve made great strides and have GameGuru C++ version almost up and running fully. We also welcome Lee back from his summer vacation and he’s very motivated to take GameGuru to the next level!

Let’s take a look at what else has been going on within the community.

A couple of new screenshots from the Gallery really stood out this week and just shows that even before the Directx11 upgrade, GameGuru can produce some impressive visuals.

Forest Flames by geistschatten which also features decals by DevCore35 which you can download for free here.

Also, this week, here’s another screenshot from Sergay Cherevin from his continued development Cordon 2016. This is a very exciting looking project and as always, we’re keeping a close eye on how his game develops.

So, now we’ve whetted your appetite for some great media, let’s take a look at the store.

Store News

It’s come to our attention that a small number of our users feel that the media that comes with GameGuru doesn’t always cover the genres that they would like, so this week, as well as looking at some great value media, we’re going to take a look at one of the excellent free media packs that can be quickly downloaded from our store.

Demolition by KenCharlsesLong gives your 24 totally free items for virtually any modern day and post apocalyptic scenario.

Some new skyboxes went on sale this week from talented artist Rolfy. These 13 skyboxes are of exceptional quality and are ideal for your scifi games, but we’re sure you can find other genres that they will suit.

From the same artist is a set of scifi / fantasy rocks fully complementing the skyboxes and include a great terrain. In total these complete the set by bringing the pieces together seamlessly and all are an excellent addition to anyone’s media collection. Click on the image above to see this quality pack in action.

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!

From the forums

This entertaining little level for Lafette shows that GameGuru can make some very fun and entertaining little games as well as the huge undertaking that many of our develops strive towards. Click on the image above to take a look at this great work.

Twitch News

As many of you will know Dave “Ravey” Milton has been filling in for lead developer Lee Bamber for the last couple of Wednesdays at 4pm GMT, to deliver another Twitch Broadcast. Last week we held a short Q & A session giving you all a change to talk directly with the development team.

Click on the image below to watch last weeks broadcast. Lee is back this week and will be broadcasting at the usual time, 4pm GMT on Wednesday.

GameGuru News

The last week has seen us complete the first phase of our C++ conversion and we’re very pleased to see virtually a fully functioning engine from the first compile. We have of course had a few conversion bugs which was to be expected, but we can happily report a fully running engine with a functioning editor and test game. We’ve still got a little way to go, and we want to run a full gambit of tests internal, after which we hope that we can bring a version to our beta testers soon afterwards.

While they are testing the first build we’ll begin work on the DirectX11 conversion, something that we’re very excited about due to the many possibilities. As we work through this process, we’ll pass a progressive number of builds to our testers. Once they give the okay that we are at a point where our community will be thrilled, we’ll release the next public build.

All of this work is of course just the beginning and as always we thank you for your patience during this long but vitally important phase in GameGuru development.

Signing Off

We’ll get back to the C++ work and hope to bring you some insights into what this new version can offer soon.

Don’t forget our Twitch broadcast every Wednesday. Lee should be back this week after a much need break with his regular blogs, and we’ll be back next Monday with more GameGuru news.

The GameGuru team

Welcome to another week here at the GameGuru towers! There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes and we’ve been making great strides forward. You can read all about our progress below, but for now, let’s take our regular look at what’s been going on in the galleries.

Snowy Mountain by Steven stood out this week, and we were impressed by the striking simplicity that still delivers a very realistic scene. We now hope he can evolve the scene into an interesting game and look forward to seeing more from this game designer.

Also this week, we were very pleased to find this screenshot from GDNomad, by using decal effects and the depth of field shader option, his game’s environment has a great rainy atmosphere.

Store News

The store continues to grow daily and we are rapidly approaching a new milestone of nearly 6,000 items available either for free or at great value prices. This week we’re going to take a look back at some of our older but still great quality media from a selection of our talented artists.

These excellent canal walls (shown with a selection of buildings from other artists) are by popular and talented store artist Dagored   and are a must have for almost all modern day or urban games.

This SciFi tunnels set from Kasseyus is another great pack that you might have missed, this crosses a number of genres and is great value.

If you’re looking for some new World War 2 media, you can’t go far wrong with this pack of vehicles from prolific artist BSP.

We actually featured this alley pack from KenCharlesLong a couple of weeks ago, but the artist has since returned to it and added a set of re-textures as well as some additional media doubling the size of the pack. If you’ve already purchased this don’t forget to grab these updates and if you’ve been wondering if you should buy, now is the time.

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!

Twitch News

Dave “Ravey” Milton returns on Wednesday at 4pm GMT, to deliver another Twitch Broadcast  helping you to get the best out of GameGuru. This week he will be expanding on his series of LUA scripting tutorials, and will be explaining how to go about creating a 2D compass for your games.

Click on the image below to watch last weeks broadcast.

GameGuru News

After last weeks announcement that we will be upgrading GameGuru to DirectX11,  work has continued behind the scenes at a fast rate to complete the performance work and lay the ground work to make this a reality.

We’ve still not got any amazing figures to wow you with, or any eye candy to show off, but what we do have is about 70% of the core work complete and we hope to have a rebuilt version of the engine by the end of this week. Once we have it running within the office we will then be passing copies to our beta testers who have been patiently waiting behind the scenes and if they give our work the thumbs up, we’ll be able to move forward into the exciting world of DirectX11 and it is then that we expect to be able to start showing off all of our hard work.

There’s still plenty for us to get on with but we’re sure that you’ll love the results and thanks to you all for your amazing support during the long haul.

Signing Off

Well, it’s back to coding for us.  Hopefully next week we’ll be able to offer you some facts and figures as a result of all of our hard work.

Don’t forget our Twitch broadcast every Wednesday and we’ll be back next Monday with more GameGuru news.

The GameGuru team

Welcome to the GameGuru weekly news. It’s been quite awhile coming but we’re finally able to reveal some more information. Still no amazing screenshots, but lots of good things to tease you all with. You can read all of the latest developments as well as catch up on all other things GameGuru below:

Firstly though, let’s take a look at a couple of Gallery WIP’s that have caught our eye this week. We’ve featured this developers work before, but Sergay Cherevin continues to impress with his work on CORDON 2016, and we are really looking forward to seeing where this one goes.

Store News

This week we’re going to focus on some of the work from our longer standing artists, taking a look at some of the great outdoor media we’ve got on the store.

Rocks by Rolfy features 10 great looking rocks for any genres. Shown in the screenshot above blending well with default terrain, grass and media.

Next on the list is an excellent set of 41 summer and winter trees from artist BSP. Ideal for all games and a great choice if you’re looking to expand your foliage collection. Shown here in snow covered glory, the pack has a matching set of trees in green to cover all seasons.

Last on the walk down memory lane this week is this set of exterior industrial or chemical plant models from popular and talented artist Lafette. The pack is great value and contains 47 high quality industrial assets for a range of genres.

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!

Twitching continues

As many of our avid followers are aware, one of the core development team aims to run a regular Twitch Broadcast revealing tips, tricks and some of the little hidden gems of information helping you to get the best out of GameGuru. We’ve covered lots of areas so far and are on target for another useful live broadcast for next Wednesday.

Click on the image below to watch Dave “Ravey” Milton’s guide to scripting.

 GameGuru News

Lots of great progress in the last week. We’re very pleased to announce that the first round of performance work is nearing completion. We are expecting to have a full build for our beta testing team very soon. We want them all to thoroughly test everything as the engine has in effect undergone a complete rewrite and while we don’t think we’ve broken anything, we will want to be certain.

The second piece of exciting news for us, is the decision to take advantage of the optimization work to update the engine to support DirectX 11. This opens up so much that it’s hard to know where to start, but in short this will allow us to add such wonders as  tessellation,  hardware instancing, much faster and more realistic lighting and shadowing and a host of other great features in the future.

Of course, we won’t promise that all of these will become available with the next build, but without this step, the above would be impossible, so we’re sure you’ll join us in agreeing that this is a major step forward for the development and one that will help secure GameGuru for the future.

Work begins on this stage of the development straight after the first round of performance work and as always we’ll keep you all up to date as soon as we have any news, or even better, some juicy screenshots.

Signing Off

Thanks once again for your patience during this phase of development, we feel that there are some very exciting times ahead and that this small lull in updates will yield some magnificent results.

We will also be live with new Twitch broadcast every Wednesday and we’ll be back next week to update you with more GameGuru news.

The GameGuru team

Welcome to another GameGuru news update. We’ve got a little more to report this week. Progress has been good and while we’re still not able to give you any eye watering screenshots we are happy with the way things are moving forward.

You can read all the details below as well as catching up on what else is new in the world of GameGuru.

Our regular glance at the galleries has uncovered this gem by GDNomad. It’s great to see users covering different genres and creating such impressive screenshots.

In other news…

Store News

Another great week for the store with more than 5400 entities, sounds, music and scripts now available for download with many more being uploaded and approved daily.

This excellent Alleyways pack from KenCharlesLong

is ideal for almost any modern day game. Designed with background use in mind, the screenshot above shows the pack in action along with some default assets as well as a couple of items from MegaPack 3.

Also on the buildings front is this new pack from Oldpman combines some new entities from the artist as well as some of his older work to make a very useful pack with a modern day feel.

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!

Keep Voting

The votes are still coming in for which feature you all want to see us work on after the performance work. If you want to see something new added to GameGuru this is the best way of getting your voice heard, and if you’ve not already done so or you want to change your mind, now is the time to vote

So we can be sure we’re developing the features that matter the most to our community your opinion is important.

When voting, don’t forget:

• Features voted towards the “Urgent” right side will score higher marks.
• The more features you mark as “Really need” and “Urgent”, the less these scores will be worth.
• It’s therefore best to choose just a few items that are important to you and score those highly.
• The scoring is live and you can change your votes at any time.
• Your changes are updated immediately so no need to save.

Cast your Votes HERE

The progressive save and load system is still way in lead with AI navigation improvements following close behind. There have been some small changes further down the voting list, but it seems clear so far what you’d like us to work on next.

GameGuru update

Signing Off

Firstly, a big thank you to all of our loyal users for bearing with us during this time, we’re sure you won’t be disappointed when we have something to show you.

Don’t forget Lee’s Blog for daily updates on development and of course the occasional Twitch Stream. You can keep up to date with all development news virtually as it happens, and I’m sure some small teasers on a few other things.

The GameGuru team