How much scripting is on your part to get all that working?

Very cool,nice animations too.

Dave

Not a lot of scripting on my part for the horse so far, this is from the asset store, the real struggle has been making it work with my custom character and I suspect it is to do with the character avatar. The standard free orbit camera gets all funky with this, it works fine when mounted but grounded locomotion controls are inverted, if I use the camera I did myself for the TPV then it works fine but stops free orbit when mounted. I need to compare my own more closely to the store assets and see where it gets broken as I don't think this is a scripting issue since both cameras work fine with Unity store characters grounded or mounted. It may also be down to the key input manager and I am still getting to know my way around Unity so may take a while, just an aside but that horse lays down and goes to sleep if you leave it too long, even with you sitting on it and I am sure you noticed it swims.

The thing about Unity is the assets and the use of c# to create menus for these right in the editor to tweak values, the assets if done well mean 'ease of use' (relatively speaking as it still requires a fair bit of user set up and additional coding to make it work the way you want in your game).
GG's assets are drag and drop made by Artists and this is where 'easy' for the user is noticeable. But with not enough functions openly available then 'ease of use' assets for GG are going to be thin on the ground for a long time to come. An example is characters where the better ones in the GG store have custom scripts, it is a good combination of Artist and Scripter that equates to 'easy' and with too much of it hard coded in GG then it becomes a drag and I have no idea why TGC decided to go that route in the first place as it has meant additional work to open the fpe anim settings to custom animations since then. This has meant more work for Artists too, in Unity you can swap out existing animations for humanoids easily with your own. One step forward and two back seems to be the order of the day with GG.


If it were more open then more interesting content and those 'features' everyone wants could be created by users themselves, that is how it is in an engine like Unity, ease of use ironically hasn't been the developers priority, but the user base and Artists have made plenty that makes it so.

Just to be clear about what I am saying here, if you are new to it all then GG is perfect, if you have a clue then Unity is actually 'easier to use' since it has more functionality and whether buying assets or creating your own you can be a lot more diverse. It just takes a little more work and this is down to being less restricted so you can do more, but results are superior.

Edit* Fixed the camera orbit issue, was a small thing causing me a huge problem but an easy fix in the end....that's how it goes

Looks like you're having fun and it looks really good - but all your work always does

Haven't tried unity because I know I won't like C but I started using unreal engine and have to say I'm super impressed by how easy it all is, drag and drop importing in real time as well as texture swaps etc.
The preset level starts are great and save loads of time but give full freedom to edit want side scrolling platformer? No problem, just select it and it builds most of the character controls for you like the jumping and limited movement range (minus firing), want FPS? It builds a character HUD with working gun that actually knocks stuff around when hit by your bullets...

The blueprint system for coding is weird at first (especially as I'm used to coding myself) but its so powerful and you can search commands so even just guessing the name of something you might want to do its pretty easy to get working.

BUT the biggest thing is that you don't even really need it for most of the game... Unlike GG where we have to script everything, in unreal animations are all done in a kind of movie maker type interface (like an actual model making program I guess) where you move the entity on screen and record its position, angle etc and store key frames... Super easy and much quicker as you can get it perfect because its all shown on screen in real time...
And other animations can still play on top of that for the same object.. I.e. I have your wraith animating his standard loop while also flying around the scene following set paths - all without looking at any AI logic (because I'm just playing with sidescroller for learning).

AI logic is all controlled by navmesh though and looks very powerful with the actual mesh and then the chaacter's sight and hearing etc all allowing to be edited visually.

P.s. I have literally been using it for 2 days so its really not that hard to use (in general game making stuff at least, no idea about final game creation side of it).

I thought i would be the same, but i've been trying C# in unity lately (following a training course) and it's pretty good, it's not really that far off LUA in the way it's structured, there's quite a lot of similarities.

amazing great work.

This is true for Unity as well where folks complain about having to dig in and remove unused code when using templates, GG is worse to be honest in my opinion where a lot of resources being used unnecessarily and no way for the user to trim down. For example default characters have unused animations and it may explain why they haven't been implemented when you consider the extra code needed to run them. it may be that performance will never be optimal if everything is drag and drop.
As Belidos says C# is very similar to LUA and as I said above if you are new to it all then GG is the perfect starter platform and once you are ready to move on it is very easy to get into another engine.

You can also import and trigger embedded animations or move objects around from script, in a best case scenario this would be the way to do it in any game design for performance purposes and Unreal/ Unity though they have editor functions to animate are just the same. The thing with .x characters is all animations embedded in the file while with .fbx they can be separate and only those you want to use are added.

Currently at the stage i'm at on my unity course, i'm making a block breaker game, it consists of little more than sprites, music, and 6 scripts, those 6 scripts are only about 9 lines of code each. Compared to the 2000+ lines of code i wrote i basic many years ago making the same game, it's so simple

Do you find the unity community to be really helpful? Like the TGC community?

I haven't joined their forums as yet, only time I have been there is when I have searched and a link took me there. I find most questions answered on You Tube tutorial videos or blogs outside of their community. Mostly I know what I want to achieve for my game mechanics and once it is all working then I will look at designing some complete environmental levels for it all. I have noticed that you can break things in standard asset scripts etc and have conflicts in your project file structure when you add anything new, so once I have a nice clean project with everything working then that is when I will get serious with it. Meantime I don't really care what I break and simply experimenting.

It is those little details that really count for player immersion in your game. I noticed the horse had grounded IK on slopes etc and it then became glaringly obvious the player character didn't. Soooo! I splurged on an IK system which does so much more than grounded foot and I will get a lot of use out of it. Foot rotation and planting is just about perfect using this system and an added bonus is when climbing or jumping over objects hands plant perfectly on surfaces too. It uses full body IK, humanoid or generic, so will be awesome for non human characters too such as spiders, mechs etc.

Took a fair bit of tweaking parameters to get if working properly with the custom character but reckon I have it pretty good for now with the player character firmly embedded into the scene.

Another thing done was to work on footfall sounds, footprint and particle effects. You will notice that the footfall sounds are assigned to materials or in the case of terrain with multi textures. You can even assign to individual textures within the material. Only the default and gravel textures are assigned for footprint and particle dust for now since grass wouldn't use these, but you get the idea of how you can have characters play different sounds and have different effects on surfaces like snow etc.
This is all something Lee should consider when he works some more on third person for GG as that is where all this becomes really obvious if missing. Particularly since GG has a terrain editor of it's own and it's a highly touted feature.

Comparing this to previous videos everything looks and feels so much more robust now.
Now I just need to get the footfall and print working with that horse and look at sheathing the weapon when not in use..

Funky!! I love those derelict buildings by the way!



A feature that wowed me in "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic" a decade ago

May I suggest immediately adding weight to dat weapon? I mean, this kinda feature will be so cool if you are making this a full blown project and adding different kinds of weapons.

What you do is quite encouraging by how awesome it is!
I notice signs of degradation on my trusty laptop and am currently doing backups of all my stuff.
Pretty held up by archiving all of my models and media from all those years and finishing my GG mini project, however, next year I fully intend on crashing the unity party going on here with my recreation of Shavra's "Island Abbey" in UE4. (I fully mean this...in jest of course )

I also join rolfy and will keep making media for GG but providing them in universal formats as well.

Please keep us posted!



-Wolf

I would love for others to post up their work in any other engine here to let us see how they are getting along. This is an 'off topic' thread after all. Particularly anything that shows (old or new) features you feel GG should ultimately have. Not a feature request thread but an ideas thread as example is better than description.

Many AAA games miss this even today and many have glaring errors that you just wouldn't expect to see in a pro produced game. I believe it is that polish along with the freedom of independent creativity that would make an Indie game stand out.
I wouldn't bother with applying grounded IK to all npc's as these wouldn't be as noticeable, maybe a boss character where only the player and enemy are present. But for sure the third person player character needs it, it could also be removed per level if depending on the design if you didn't need it.


Those are free assets given out with their complete level of 'The Blacksmith' for tests I tend to merely throw a couple of props into a level without any thought and just for kicks, this is in no way meant to be an example of level designs for my game.

Some folks might not notice these things in games but I am really into fine detail like this and my eye is always drawn to 'errors' which kill the immersion more than the things they got 'right'.

@ rolfy
Well now you've some new toys to play with GG, I don't want you in Unity, but in GG, even if you are doing wonderfull things, like above vids shown.

3com

Some real nice demos coming from you rolfy, thanks for sharing. Do you know much about the terrain yet - can you get a seamless look from terrain to skybox. I need the world to look consistent from up high (flying).

I haven't took the plunge yet with another engine. I'm wondering about Lumberyard - I downloaded it a while back and I think the scripting is in lua and there seems to be a lot of tutorials for it.

Cheers.

Pretty much.....I have spent a little time on terrain and once I finish up all my player character functions I will be diving into environments again. I will take a closer look at infinite terrain while I am on that, going by what I found on it so far there a lot of different ways to do it and I suspect if your always high up any LOD and chunk loading would balance out pretty well for performance.

Hitman, Sapienza - Glacier Engine.

But that's a team effort, not a single man vs. an engine vs. the world

Having said that, some of your assets, Rolfy, very few of course, can look better in GG than unity, when the situation is right and you spend LOTS of time crating this special situation.

That sure is nice ertlov, I was immediately impressed when I heard you were working on the latest Hitman episodes, it is one of my favourite game series. Curious to know what your input was on these.

To me Unity can do everything I require graphically as an Indie developer, I really don't need all the extra graphic fanciness in UE4, and like any engine it's what you do with it that counts.

I took the screenshot below from much the same angle as yours and mostly the differences are in the Artistic taste/Texture quality and not the engine capabilities, although I have still to put any light scattering, bloom, anti aliasing, ambient occlusion, DOF and all the other post processing effects in. Just an aside but it is said that Unity's post processing shaders are the fastest in the industry. Whether true or not I couldn't say but for all intents and purposes it is a good engine. Once I apply some GI I reckon it would be pretty close to the quality in your own screenshot.

It is nice to see some other work from other engines, as someone else said around here it makes a change from the usual Unity parade, even though I really don't see much from others, just little old me. I must be a one man band. I know there are some around here say they have been using UE4 or swear by it but yet to see any work displayed, it isn't a competition and I would love to see some

Once I get around to post processing I will put another comparison screenshot to show the differences (or similarities) to the engine capabilities you showed above. There are a lot more graphically horrible games released using Unity than Unreal but perhaps that is more down to Indie developers with more AAA companies using Unreal than it is the engine itself.



Perhaps since they were created specifically for GameGuru which has some odd requirements for shader maps etc which wouldn't sit well in another engine.

i will still follow GG as it can be use to prototype levels.
but still looking at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZKEo028T9s&feature=em-uploademail
as i still like the underdog engines sort of gives me a buzz.
but going to put some serious time into unity and unreal engine.

i've found getting objects into unreal to be fairly simple (though you have to create textures separately by combining to a material and then applying to your models in game, which is weird but also makes it easier to use the same texture for many different objects i guess), it's the collision for the AI that is time consuming (for indoor levels).
there's a lot of cool features but i do miss the ease of GG, even moving the editor and objects around feels easier/nicer in GG and i noticed their widget doesn't always appear on screen when you select an object but seems to be linked to the origin of the object - something small but really is annoying when it's not where you need it, and GG handles the widget very well indeed.

don't have any nice screenshots to show because i've mostly been looking at the AI there - which is far better - in the very limited time i've had in it.

it's hard to give a fair comparison as i've used GG for a lot longer so of course it feels more normal for me but i think GG is easier to use and that's good - that is after all what it's supposed to be aiming for.

@rolfy first off. Welcome to Unity! Your game or test videos are looking fantastic. What kind of an idea do you have for game play? Anyways, I've been saying for an age that there are certain simple features which can be implemented in the UI for GG that it will infact make it the "easy game creator". I must say, when I tried out Unity back when FPSC was still a thing I kind of said "meh". After finishing a game in FPSC and then GG(FPSR) was announced. I gave full faith that GG would evolve into the brilliant engine. I patiently waited for it to evolve before sharing anymore of my game. While waiting for this evolution to take place, I went back to Unity.... then bought PlayMaker which is a visual scripting engine. For the past 11 months I've been working on an open world horror FPS. An idea that was meant for GG. In our present point in time my Unity game is about 85% complete. Progress is steady, I can design, create art and develop. It features nav mesh path finding AI that will retreat when overwhelmed or attack when grouped together, scripted events, an inventory etc. All created through Unity and Playmaker with little to no help. The asset pipeline is excellent in Unity!

BUT while this process is happening, I see GG still evolving and it's getting better and better with each update. Quite often it appears that TGC puts GG on the back burner. It's demotivating, but I know there will be a point in time where I shall come back to GG to attempt to create a grand master piece (it's not really a master piece).

Keep popping by and I'm sure you'll be back with this rad community.

Hey Landman, I hear you and likely will at some future point give GG another crack of the whip. At this point it is disappointing though, and I would have expected it to be further than it is now, particularly after a Steam release and all the complaints about it being EA and for sure not ready as a final product.

There have been delays in production and sometimes developer input has been thin on the ground and this isn't the time for that at all, I would have expected a higher profile with more updates on progress if not actual updates being put out there, or as you are seeing, many users like myself abandon ship when it appears the developers themselves have done so.

Lee stated above that if you want to create your own engine from scratch then set aside a decade or two, I have no intention of waiting around for twenty years, not to mention the disappearances and halts to production which means an eternal wait to finally have a product that creates games. Not when there are some already out there and they are still progressing themselves so in that context I reckon GG might end up being 'good enough' and I will at least build something someday in it if only to get my 'moneys worth'..

I have been eyeing Playmaker and if you recommend it will likely get it

Meanwhile some post-processing as promised.
DOF
Eye adaptation
Bloom
Colour grading/tonemapping
Vignette



I try not use any extreme settings for post-processing effects and a little goes a long way. Vignette for example is on but not noticeable in the screenshot though it hints in-game, I could fine tune those effects all day and never be entirely happy but I don't believe the player should have them in their face

Producer of the Vienna Unit, however the credits show me as "Project Manager". Fine with that.

Reckon I have lighting and Post Effects the way I want them and the game now has a style and presentation which will carry throughout. As I said above it depends on your preferences and taste and the game itself will dictate an atmosphere you try to create accordingly. The quality is fine as far as I can tell but pretty sure I can still make some small tweaks as it goes along

Created a more suiting environment for the character to live in and this will develop further for exterior and indoor scenes as well as a day/night cycle.
Inventory done with items and weapons selection equip/unequip.


I have been importing custom npc characters and started with winged demons since I was lucky enough to still have the Max files for these so export/import was easy enough, it is assigning animations and setting up triggers for these that has been the difficult part. I see a lot of folks complain how difficult it is to get characters working in GG, but tbh it isn't easy in any engine and there will never be an easy way to do this as you can't predict a characters requirements. Lee tried this with the early method of hard coded animation trigger sets but this proved to be limiting.



And of course you need the mighty Elhumongo for a game like this, I reckon it won't be difficult to place a couple of colliders on his hands to raise some dust when he pounds the ground. I do notice all the same that he has lost smoothing groups on import from .x so will fix that Pretty much think bond1 made this character, it has his style and animation flow about it. It is the best character GG has to offer right now without those waddling walks and stiffness to the upper torso others have. There are a couple of Jon Fletcher characters in GG now as well so might snag those too as well as creating a few all new ones of my own.

Looking really good, the landscape is very well done but the general dark and moody feel just really makes it feel more impressive.
did you have to script your own inventory or is it an edit of an existing script?
Looking forward to seeing this in video

Modified an existing script, their store has been around long enough to have everything you require. Scripters do well on the store with functions being written and accessed right in the inspector, some are relatively expensive but for what you get it is worth it to the end user. They really got it together with some really talented folks, both Artists and Scripters providing the extra eye candy and features you see some folks wanting around here, Unity dev's seem to have used their time providing a core engine that works as it should and the rest is user input.
I believe you will see this happen with GameGuru once Lee concentrates on opening up all the Lua functions and stops trying to provide users with all features out of the box and drops the belief that providing Gig's of assets will placate the user base, this is where the voting board has failed and held back what could be an awesome product.
It is all well and good providing kids with a 20 dollar game suite that has everything including assets and ease of use, but this is being done at a cost to both Developer time and those of us who pledged. It hasn't helped the image of GameGuru either with games being released which are easily thrown together but don't have much in the way of input from the designer or the expected features and functionality that just about every other game engine out there has. It is easy to blame the engine but in reality anyone who has tried to create a working game with GG would admit it is a real chore at this point and they aren't happy with the result. I could create an awesome looking game with GG but it would be rubbish to play, no matter how much work I put into it and therefore a waste of my time.

The same goes for creating assets, I would rather 'think out of the box' for something that does more than trying to create workaround effects that are already present in other engines.

It is those users who think to make a quick and easy buck out of GG that have been shouting loudly on the Steam forum reviews about a lack of assets that have driven the ethos of more media and less core functionality more than even votes have and it is those same users that put out crap games that give the product a bad image. Stop pandering to these people and things will move forward much more easily.

I expect to spend a few hundred bucks in that store before I am done but to me it is worth it, or I may just learn enough as I go along to not need anything more and simply create all scripts myself, there is nothing like picking apart an existing script to get a handle on how it all works

I may have gone on a little and more than answered a question but I can see how it works for them and I can see how it is falling apart here, TGC should never have dropped the store and stopped providing DLC as this where the bread and butter will be in the future, none of the development road map or the marketing is making any sense to me.

That person who whines about purchasing DLC is the same person who expects to make a lot of money out of 'free' media used in their game. Tell 'em to get stuffed.

I have been using Unity for about 9 Months now and found it easy to use and get an FPS up and running.

I spent a few quid or more than a few to get what I needed to help from the asset store.

Apart from being relatively easy to use it at least offers almost unlimited features and potential for those that want to call upon them with few limitations and restrictions. One could potentially make anything you want with it given the resources, will and dedication that many at these forums have shown.

Personally I have spent most of my time working on many small mini games that I string together that test the stuff I need to have in my game and learn as I go to get the things working I need. Mostly concentrating on game dynamics. e.g. AI, Characters, Enemies, Flying Things, events handling and so on.

Thus far I have not failed in achieving the things I want.

As I have an old and not very powerful computer by today's standards Unity has allowed me to do what I want and still maintain good performance....

I can actually make good, playable games with it whereas I could not with GG.

Unity is a pro tool and ideally suited to small teams or bigger to take full advantage of all of its potential perhaps, but even an individual can make really good games with it fairly easily with time and effort. If you have spent 10 years or more with any engine like I have with TGC engines and not got a result then it may be worth a try. However for some it may just not be suitable and GG is always an option. Maybe it will get better one day.

Happy Christmas Everyone and Happy Game Making 2017,

Elhumongo melee combat and motion test.

Using animation layer masks to blend upper and lower body anims.
Lock on target which puts the player in strafe mode.

This is incredible , wish i could do the same :/

Parallax Occlusion Mapping.

A primitive cube with no additional geometry, all details provided by the shaders. This is the kind of graphic features missing in GameGuru that gives some of those jumping into it the impression that the graphics are dated. All the same even if they were I suspect that many of those who complain they don't see this 'out of the box' wouldn't have a clue how to set it up anyway. There is no automagical button for this and it requires a certain amount of knowledge to make it look right. You don't just drop a shader on an object and it works, you wont see these kind of effects when you open a blank level in Unity or Unreal and throw in some models either, seems to me that demo's are first impressions for most of these people and not something they created themselves when it comes to comparisons.






It should be considered that introducing DX11 will improve GG massively all the same, some seem to think that it will improve performance immediately (which it wouldn't in itself) the real gains are in shader use for details saving poly counts and texture resolutions. It is the primary reason you get 'My rig can run GTA5 on high settings" whining.

It is possible to write POM shaders for DX9/10 but these fall short due to self shadowing and 'detail geometry' warping issues.

FPSC Medieval ruins in Unity with layered snow shader effect.

Wow! You really found your tool here, rolfy!

Loving the rain effect.



-Wolf

Everything you have done so far looks amazing! Very impressive. This is AAA quality - especially the scene with Elhumongo.

Looking great ,

Voxel terrain, forest with cave systems,

I like the look of the walkway leading to the cave.

Dave

Caves, volume light floods into the interior.




Someone asked what kind of frame rates I get with this, all built scenes shown average 70-80fps. Even with a 1km x 1km terrain and trees/grass etc, with a lot of building assets including a good few AI thrown in, all running at highest graphic settings. I haven't even looked at properly optimising these levels yet so expect gains when I do. All the same I tend to build a lot of detail into it all using shaders and you can batch assets in the pro version to reduce draw calls so you could throw in the kitchen sink if you wanted to and had the cash and a good idea of what your doing.
I think I will give it a break for a few and come back when I have something truly awesome to show here. I could do this all day every day but reckon folks around here might get bored with it, thanks for all the fish

noooo, keep us updated if you get time, it's nice seeing your world there expand and grow

Parallax Occlusion Mapping can and should be implemented in GG. I got it to work in DBPro.
The high poly detail is a textured created using a free program called XNormal.
The process is quite simple create a low and high poly version of your model then load both in XNormal
and pick the textures you want created. You use the low poly model in your game engine and the detail is
added by the shader. I have attached 2 images to show the difference between the low poly model and the
finished result in DBPro. Rolfy are you using XNormal separately or is it built in to Unity?

I always bake normals spec and height in zbrush (much same as doing it with high/low poly in xnormal but with better control over results) as I find that converting from texture never gives me the results I want which is what most users would do, this is down to a texture having a lot of detail you really don't want to have in the normal or height maps but which will be included in any conversion from texture. Such as darker/lighter areas which may simply be a texture detail but not a raised or lowered surface detail. Creating the shader maps was easy enough but I find it takes a lot of tweaking the shader parameters to get the look you really want is the difficult part, maybe not so difficult but certainly a fair bit of work and it is easy to make it look bad as it is to look great.
The shaders used are an asset store purchase I made and a really good investment as they are well written and have editor parameter functions so you can tweak 'em in real time

For example the water effects are a part of the core shader which can be used or disabled as you wish, you can add other shaders to the core as well, and water can be raised or lowered at a level you set within the parallax height mapping almost as if it were following geometry it also runs in the direction of inclines etc.

These shaders aren't included by default in Unity and nor I suspect in UE4 which is my point about the average user who complains about GG graphics out the box and probably never even attempted it in other engines but have seen it in demo's or games for these engines, of course some will have a clue but mostly wouldn't be the ones including such comments in review without stating more than a sentence explaining what they feel is missing.

GG really needs far better demo's (and shaders) than they currently have to negate these comments, even the demo map for Galaxy Seed was ruined by them changing it and not improving it in any way and I have no idea why they made any changes in the first place as it didn't add anything at all, I reckon Lee wanted to add some AI or whatever removing entites and moving others around and then never found time so it was left as incomplete and the shader for the skydome wasn't implemented at the time so he likely changed the graphic settings to suit the skybox he used. For example baking those large terrain entity's wouldn't work well without a high res setting for the shadow maps and they are set as dynamic for bake then changed back to static after so both baked and real time lighting is used, I spent a lot of time tweaking lighting and other graphic settings to get it just right but if you mess with all this then as said above it is as easy to make it look bad.

Okay as long as folks want to see the progress on the environment designs I am happy to oblige
Trying to keep a consistent design throughout so any additional shaders or environmental effects will have to be added to already created levels but that's fine. Going for a pure fantasy look and currently creating climbable rocks and platforms for the player to navigate and reach inaccessible areas.

Just showing the player character in the voxel terrain environment. Once I have a few playable levels I will release a built standalone demo to get some feedback.

Just to show "another" Unity dev if you can call it that. I have attached a screen shot of one of the game levels I am working on. Mostly these are used as test pieces for testing things. e.g. game dynamics mostly as I go. This level shows some things that GG could use and some that you cant really see from this one shot. Space craft flies in and drops off enemies and others come through the gate (xX10 Raknos Character). Two allies fight here so I am standing off and watching.

Note : no post processing turned on here while I develop and try maintaining fps at around 60 in the highest Unity Fantastic quality mode. This is managed by an fps manager so that the quality on screen auto adjusts to maintain the highest possible fps to maintain good gameplay speeds. If fps falls then the fps manager may adjust to a lower quality until it recovers back to 60 fps given it can of course which it can in this instance.

I know how you struggled with Classic and GG to create your levels and understand how frustrating it was for you. Must be refreshing to finally find you can build and test your game mechanics without messing around with graphic settings and all the other tweaks and workarounds you had to employ just to keep up fps, find bugs and constant crashes unrelated to your tests getting in the way. Must be the first time I have seen you post a screenshot where you actually sound happy with results you are getting
I am not certain GG will ever be stable enough for you to build the kind of games you want to create with the promised ease of use that would make it all faster for you as I feel this focus on 'ease of use' is actually hindering the development. Let's face it the extra work does pay off whereas in the past you would run into problems which required a crap load of workarounds without any pay off of any sort. Kind of satisfying to spend the time figuring out your mechanics rather than figuring what is wrong with the engine isn't it ?

All us oldies around here believed that 'Reloaded' would be an improved FPSC and things that worked would be left to continue working and things that were broken or missing would be fixed and added, somewhere along the way it was decided to start from scratch and the market target changed and it became one step forward and three back as TGC try to satisfy and placate their new marketing demographic.

Here's the most irritating thing for me, Lee can be seen to jump into every single Steam review asking the poster what they think he could do to improve the product where there are older users venting right here on the GameGuru forums answering exactly what he appears to be asking for but no real response or proper interaction. When he does appear around here you get oohs and aaahs and it is like some kind of Adulatory placating with no real substance, 'The King has no clothes' .The guy that posts a bad review isn't going to change his mind because you pretend to care about his opinion and rating, you already lost him.Listen to your diehards and more importantly actually take the time to work with them or leave it to the quick buck brigade to throw out trashy games that do your product image no good, it is very simple really.

Thanks for that.

I am happy and not at the same time

The difference to GG is that I can already relatively easily build playable games that are enjoyable to play. (much easier than GG).

It's I suppose a good thing and a good position to be in to find the only things making forward development difficult are not engine related in the main but time and resources being a single one man band. It takes a lot of both to make a large complex game and I am impatient having been at this for 25 years almost, most of which seems to have been you could say wasted or learning how not to do it

Now that i can make a game I find it hard to muster the will to spend more years albeit in a forward direction of progress.

Truth be told both me and my computer are getting too old for this and both need an upgrade but I can only upgrade one of them

I have already done a lot of stuff on the game dynamics side of things (gameplay interaction and dynamic objects : platforms, lifts, doors, enterable drop ship carries player around and so on) . I have a lot more to do as well as building levels which themselves are a big job. Some advanced things I would like to do eventually : Drvieable vehicles (attack or not - player and enemies). Drivable aircraft (attack or not - air battles). Add more advanced AI system to improve character behaviours. Add Lip Scync - talking characters and more. All of these things can be done in Unity. They should be available in GG but never will be I don't think and I need them ideally.

Peter

Working a little more on this level environment, I wasn't sure about the colour palette and decided on a more natural look for it, volumetric lighting really does pull it together and creates a denser atmosphere.



Intend to make the caves as detailed as possible, voxel terrain editing is a pretty good start and adding actual rock models into this for ledge climbing and hopping will take it that step forward. Just considering what type of enemy to put down there and it is an opportunity to try out the IK solution for a multiple limbed beastie which can crawl over a surface with diverse heights and proper foot planting.

the new shot looks much nicer than the green tinge god ray ones but it's all AAA quality.
maybe some nice crawling goblin or spiders, can't beat the classics

I find it a bit strange that GG doesn't support all of the FPSC shaders. For example there is an animated shader for the Medusa character in the Viral Outbreak Pack for FPSC of which does not work in GG. Why is that?

Those screenshots are amazing by the way

This is how it feels using GG when you have used Unity before, there is many htings that needs improvments.
Also there is lot of hard coded stuff that could have been modifiable instead.

I don't expect GG to become Unity, but workflow could have been more flexible and faster.
Importing assets, adjusting collisions, making new materials or editing animations is long and tedious , you must find the good files, understand what is going on before modify text files, and there is too much hard coded stuff in it not easy modifiable. It looks like how we worked 10 years ago.

I know the majority of people using GG mainly need ready to use assets, characters and code , and won't mess with assets import workflow, but i think with some improvments GG would also fit better for people that import their content.

Exactly! GG wouldn't be in a state of disarray if there had been proper communication and progress shown with the community. It really does feel like GG has been abandoned by TGC, it's only a matter of time until the community dies out... to the current state of FPSC.

Exploration will play a large part, with the ability to climb and jump plus strong puzzle elements it may sound a bit 'Tomb Raider', but that's ok I am not reinventing the wheel with this but trying to create an interesting environment for the player to wander around in.




Without a decent pipeline for getting assets into GG there won't be many good quality Artists willing to put in extra work to create these ready to use assets. This will be the tipping point when it comes to available media for GG users who don't want to model or code, and the ratio of decent Artists will decline along with the user base as more and more of the 'same looking games' get released. It might seem okay to ignore the creators whining about difficulties to concentrate on 'easy to use' but really your product is going to depend on variety and quality when it comes to users requirements and needs. Personally I probably won't be doing anything much for GG myself till it becomes more Artist friendly since I get all the hard work so others get it easy.