That made me feel a little uncomfortable as well. I realize FPSC and the Dark Basic line are pretty much obsolete, so going open source on them makes sense, (although I would have liked to have seen DBPro be developed further) but in my opinion, GG is just starting! I knew he was contemplating opening the whole of the engine to Lua, but I had no idea he would open source the entire engine! Sounded to me like a "hands up". I have been hoping my impression was wrong. Obviously I'm not alone. If it's to get the features added faster, that's fine, Lee is the real "Guru", so he knows what's best for his product. Time will tell, I guess.

[comment removed by author, because I complain too much]

I liked your post! I agreed with it absolutely! You, like me, have been around here for many years, just wanting to be able to do the things we want to do. (I'm really not even sure what it is I want to do anymore ) It just gets old and everyone gets anxious in the lull between updates, anticipating the next one, wondering what it will enable us to do. The forums seem to get riddled with trolls, flamers, etc. around these times (more so than usual), and that sucks. I get impatient with them, personally, but you sir, have a legitimate gripe. I didn't even use FPSC until just before I pledged the Kickstarter for Reloaded. I voted to start from scratch, btw, and I hope you don't hold it against me! I was just beginning to see what FPSC could do, and I thought that surely a "rebuilt from scratch" engine would not only be what it once was, but even better! I knew it would take some time, 5 years was my guess, but those 5 years sure seem like a long time!

lol .... Now if I could just edit the Mrs as easy as that

Hi all,

Lee is away this week on vacation, so I'll post a reply in his absence.

As a small Indie company, we've chosen to focus on two key game making tools moving forward, GameGuru and AppGameKit. Our older products are now being put out to pasture and being open sourced so that we can give our focus to these two brands. Developing GameGuru has been very challenging for all involved and we appreciate all the early backers which kickstarted the project and got it onto it's legs. 2015 was all about fixing the engine, 2016 will be about making the tool open and expandable by our users.

We're not "there" yet with GameGuru, the journey continues with lots more to do. We do feel that we have sorted a lot of the core issues that held us back previously. So we're super positive about the future and we're here for the long term.

I'll tell Lee about this thread so he can have his say when he's back and locked into his Game Guru Coding Cave!

Update;
Just to also clarify Lee's comment about open sourcing GameGuru. He's not saying he's open sourcing it and leaving it up to the community, he means he would like to work towards opening up areas of the code that may benefit from other developers submitting their own code and mods. This is blue sky thinking from Lee and not an immediate plan. I'll let him explain his wild comments when he returns!

Rick

Well, it was supposed to be the successor for FPS Creator and planned to be a 50-100$ software - at least if you ask the FPS Reloaded backers. So some of the old bunch probably still expect the features of a 50-100$ engine.

Hi All, just finishing off Monday (been a long day this one) and going through emails my team has marked for my immediate attention, once of them being a link to this forum post. As Rick states, Lee will not be open-sourcing GameGuru, just opening up the engine so less of it is hard coded. This means you can take control of the whole player management system in LUA, rewrite the entire weapon system in LUA and totally replace the TAB screens with your own LUA scripts. By moving hard coded hidden C++ into LUA scripts anyone can access via something like NOTEPAD, it opens up the engine allowing more customization without waiting for me to add the feature you're sorely waiting for. Just that.

I am still warming to January and have lots of 'bits of paper' to sort through, but one update is already being tested (the Christmas build) and providing no horror stories surface, this should become the official public release in a week or three. Keep an eye on my dev blog for more news on what I am getting up to with GameGuru, and specifically with respect to the community voting board which will be getting a lot of attention from me in 2016.

If I have missed any burning questions from this thread, please post again and I will see if my brain has any answers. In answer to the last question that stuck out, I can confidently deny I did not sell the franchise for a juicy steak

WOW ! this is a colosal job.
I wonder if LUA already have all the necessary commands, to do so.

GG should be most friendly with the error handle, since bunch error will comes, at least for me, playing with that toy.

3com

Well why not take GameGuru off Steam (instant revenue rise for TGC - from the product itself and the store). And all those who love the product pay a subscription.

We all want GameGuru, but I doubt if it would harm GameGuru if it was outside of Steam..

There are many game engines out there that charge you more for the source code. Call it a developer package. Lee is doing the right thing by giving access to some of the source code. I bought quite a few great mods for FPSC classic and didn't mind. S4real and Nomad Soul are making an incredible mod for classic right now.

We have tried subscriptions on and off over the last 15 years and it was not a business model that really worked for us. It also feels a little like 'paying for bug fixes' (personal opinion only). My hope is users see that GameGuru costs less than most first month subscriptions (except for all the lovely free stuff out there), and then they get fixes rightly for free until the version they have becomes solid. We often mess this simple process up by continually adding new features (and introducing the occasional bug back into the bag), but in general, the evolving nature of our software is preferred I think (personal opinion) to a stagnant build that focuses entirely on the perfection of features frozen in time and set in stone. Perhaps when GameGuru grows into a larger stronger entity, it will be able to accomplish both with more synergy and speed than was managed in the past, with perhaps a leaning towards adding less and fixing more until the community vote that stability is achieved. Something to remain vigilant about for sure.

As Lee says he's been there and done that. AGK went that way at one point with Freedom, causing severe criticism from the original backers. Not a good idea to sell the product one way, get buyers then switch to a subscription based system. That is just looking for trouble and in honesty would spell the end for GG. It would for me anyway, I've already spent quite enough on it thank you. I'll pay for extra content, but not a bean for the product again. I also note I have not paid for a subscription for any software since WOW, a long time ago and I just won't do that again for any game or software. If you think all the users will be happy with a sub system then think again. There will be only a few who are willing to pay for the software again.

I'm also not sure why everyone seems to think TGC are brassic all of a sudden. Nothing has changed that I am aware of. Also, why would taking it off Steam be an instant revenue booster? Surely it would be exactly the opposite!

Hmmm for me i think soon the stability of gameguru has been achieved. Of course there can always be smaller stuff made but i'm not having problems However i would like some better hitboxes for melee combat but i think this is included under the "advanced melee fighting" in the voting And then obviously multiplayer standalone, melee weapons for character creator, more medieval/fantasy options for them and factions for the AI But yeah i know this is not a high priority since most here make shooters and that's understandable ^^

Yh I feel like we have a good build right now (bug-wise) and its time to start adding new features again.
Agreed that melee is pretty bad right now, its very clearly just the shooting system with different animations... Which really isn't good enough when you build a game with only melee fighting.

I will agree about the stability that Game-Guru is at now; is pretty satisfactory for me so far. We've taken a huge leap since FPSC Reloaded.

Indeed. I once released a game with FPSC to a wider audience and had to change E-mail adress due to the flood of crash reports coming in. It was also common to remove levels or rearrange them for FPSC to even load them in the final built. And sometimes, the build would just crash and all your work was in vain. Its the reason why I quit FPSC for guru as early in development and guru games have not yet crashed on me.



-Wolf

Going back to this quote. People always like to make things there own, and what the team are doing here is going to make a lot of people want GG. Some of them won't be able to do it themselves but I am sure that there will be plenty of people out there who will put out mods so that they can change the original system to there own preferences.

I think that this is one of TGC's beter ideas as far as making GG more attractive to buyers. I know I am looking forward to it for myself and to see what other people manage to do with the system. There will be plenty of users now, I know will be gnashing at the bit to get a hold of such a system.

The Save/Load and multiple-layer tasks on the voting board will both require some LUA overhaul, and I will be using that opportunity to start the process of externalising the hard coded mechanisms and letting anyone change this core layer of the engine. It was an interesting move to see the Building Editor claim top spot but I have a few solid ideas that will not take me to the ends of the earth to implement, and once we get some basic community feedback on the design (more on this in Feb), we can get it coded, tested and released so we can move full speed into the LUA script universe

Opening up the engine with some form of LUA API does sound promising, but at the same time it also sounds as if this may just be a way to let users do all the work of implementing the missing features. I guess, after so much time, I am a little jaded by the whole GameGuru experience.

A fair point, but there is 'plenty' of hard coded stuff still in the engine that can only be a good thing to externalize, such as the player control system and the weapon system, both of which will be able to be customized to suit your game project. It also means that by using script instead of hard coding, I don't have to recompile the entire engine to test a feature, I can just refresh the script even as the engine is running which will accelerate my productivity. It also means that as I re-write elements of the engine in LUA, I can take the opportunity to improve some things for free. One example is the new title page system I created on Tuesday, with a new backdrop that moves every so slightly to create a 'living backdrop' feel without it actually appear to be moving. For this I added support in the engine for sub-pixel placement of all 2D sprites, which means using floats instead of integers for smoother sprite movement overall. As can see, the process of moving to LUA drags chunks of the engine kicking and screaming into a better place, and my hope is that these cumulative efforts will combine into something more tangible for users. As I start 2016, I see no downside to making the built-in LUA system more powerful, as it will help me complete the items from the voting board and remove the limitations currently imposed by the 'black box' functionality that currently hides inside GameGuru. I certainly don't see the LUA work as an excuse to skip implementing the items of the voting board with the line "you can do it in script now". In fact, I want to move GameGuru away from this need for constant scripting, and provide UI solutions that bolster the 'no coding required' message.