This week, I've really been through quite a lot of components to help put this weeks report together.
Thankfully there's a surplus of really great stuff that I can't wait to show you.
Official Game-Guru News
As Game-Guru continues it's march towards modernization, there's a continual series of updates that address two separate facets of Game-Guru production. First, there's the constant GitHub updates, which resulted in things such as the 'monster update' of 7/30/2018. Secondly there are the asset updates, which are numerous and significant.Most recently, the 'Death Valley Pack', which many of us old-timers received for free with Game-Guru's release as a thank you, had a significant number of assets updated to PBR.
Now these PBR updates are welcome and interesting, but seem to be a mixed bag, in my experience. As you may not be aware, the DLCs are generally the work of an artist commissioned by TGC for a product they then resell. I don't know the specific terms of the arrangement.
As such, artistic skills vary. Personally I found a few were of 'mediocre' quality with the PBR update. Yes, the additional detail brought an improvement in some but not enough to measure. For what it's worth - the Death Valley Pack is one of the better ones. Still not the best, I'll reserve that for the updates done to the Sci-Fi pack, but very good nonetheless - especially for people who already own it.
Third Party Utilities and Tutorials
This week we have several updates, mostly from my own personal backlog of getting the past month caught up. Of note, Flatlander has generously picked up where my original project left off and added all the new functions to the Notepad++ Lua API I originally built. This is a very welcome weight off my shoulders and I just wanted to really thank him for that. You can get the update here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219215#msg2605239
Also there was a fairly lively discussion on discord the other day regarding the creation of local cube mapping for mirror effects. This is primarily because cube mapping won't take into account a specific room so we discussed a way of dealing with this. Graphix came up with a solid method of that worth looking at including a custom tool on his site.
There's also more here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220031
Next we have a very interesting update to Game-Guru loader which *MAY* make it's way into Game-Guru (this is Preben's work, after all). It is essentially a dynamic light setup with castable shadows! This would be an enormous change to Game-Guru. Just check it out:
| This kind of lighting effect would really modernize the engine! |
That's impressive quality for dynamic lights, especially out of Game-Guru using stock assets.
There's also a few other interesting things I found. It appears Cybernescence (The creator of the Cogwheel Chronicles) has been doing some really crazy things with shaders. Notably this:
That's... really good looking. It still doesn't modify the existing water, but it does a huge amount of work towards getting the ocean to be a living, interesting creature. His ocean shader isn't for sale yet but should be soon, from the sound of it.
There's also this gem, also by Cybernescence, a PBR heightmap shader. All I can say is WOW. I mean this is an enormously powerful shader that will totally destroy lesser CPUs, but yeah. If you are trying to make something that is on peer with modern high end engines, this is a hell of a start!
| There's more info at the link, but this will be a huge boost to certain scenes! |
This shader was released for free and obviously is far from complete but is definitely worth tooling around with! You can find the info on the original link above, along with installation instructions.
What's Good in the Store
Not a lot of new things in the store lately. Things ebb and flow there. Right now we're definitely in an 'ebbing' phase.That said, Gtox's new creation - a creepy mutant - did catch my eye. His animations are getting a lot better, that used to be my only real complaint about his products. I obviously own a few, in spite of my minor complaints because they're generally pretty good and often downright creepy, like this new guy:
| I imagine this reminds people of their mothers-in-law! |
Random Acts of Creativity
Some really good stuff this week. Dvader/Retrogamebloke (on youtube) created a spy-hunter style minigame in Game-Guru. I'm currently trying to get the juicy details but on the face it's got a randomizer for terrain and vehicles and a scrolling isometric view that infinitely loops. Really cool stuff. I should mention Spy Hunter was legitimately my favorite game when I was 8 years old so this was pretty cool to see!
Spy hunter Game-Guru- spy hunter
Next, Slaur3n used a pretty awesome 'retro style' shader to give his current project a very unique look. This one is another YT video you can find here: https://youtu.be/JyWnDqMoIx0
One more major update was DuchenKuke's 'post apocalyptic game' is out for testing. Definitely check it out and see if you can't learn a few things in the process!
| He says he's going for a Metro: Last light look - I'd say he found it! |
In My Own Works
Writing is a disciplined activity. If you don't discipline yourself, you stop writing. It's why I write this blog, to help assist in that. It's also important to take time, every day, to write. I really can't stress this enough. Even a paragraph of work on a book you're working on keeps the mind active and prevents you from falling into stasis. In my case, I'm focusing on getting 5000 words a week out. That's a hefty amount of work, thankfully there's plenty to do so I can always find something to write about.
Personally I work in a very structured way. I'm an 'outline writer'. This makes things easier than I think for others, but it also comes with it's own set of complications - like seeing that outline can be rather overwhelming. For now though, work on chapter 18 is coming along nicely. That's my 'how to add detail' chapter, broken out piece by piece and starting with vegetation.
