Agreed. That would have been the thing to do

Well, I haven't played this game. It does look though, like someone has plonked as many AI down as possible, with a couple of buildings and a incredibly poor terrain. Unless I am mistaken (judging from the screenshots) I wouldn't even release this for free.

Edit - I forgot this is free apparently, but regardless, even for free, it's a waste of HDD space. Anyone could make something like this. I've been messing about with GG since it was first released and I can safely say I have made a lot of stuff, none of which I would release, some I have and wish I hadn't. Nearly all of which has a lot more effort involved than what I see here. When people release something that looks like it took 30 minutes to make, then they can't complain if people do not like it.

I'm definitely one of the straight talkers here. I often do not say anything rather than state my opinion these days.

Another GameGuru game went up on steam last month, i'll leave you to decide on its merits (or lack of), but one thing i will say "will you come alive, or will you dead?" LOL!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/799530/Psychopathics/

LOL - Love the warning!

Reliquia....

based on the review i think this guy is also the developer

Oh awesome .. Its out ..

I keep failing to find the Face Palm emoji here.

...



AE

Yep perfect response AE

Was nearly gonna buy it but reading the warning freaked me out a little bit, but then seeing the guy in the pink pants scared the pants off me, I was shaking so much I couldn't press the buy button!

Reliquia....

Obviously this game sucks but what FPSC or Game Guru game doesn't suck? Even the "best" games from this community are pretty [MOD EDIT] when compared to other indie games. The guy who is publishing these games on Steam is obviously just doing it for fun and it seems like the people who have played it are having a good time posting funny reviews and playing it for the humor. This is pretty much like those "grass simulator" clones that were popping up everywhere and people seemed to love it because it was funny. If this guy wants to pay the Steam fee and upload his stuff, then I don't see what the problem is. Especially since it's free. Yeah it might give Game-Guru a bad rep, but lets be honest, every game made with Game-Guru is going to give the engine a bad reputation.

Me and my fellow Homegrown maniacs won a total of 12 Game of the Year awards with games made in either FPSC or Gameguru, including IndieDB, Gamestar and IGN awards.

"Into the Dark" might have been the shittiest in terms of objective quality, but it sold more units than 90% of all Indie games, more than some bombing AAA games, it was featured on TV by major broadcasters on three continents and it has a cameo in 2 feature films, one of them on Netflix.

So, in a nutshell, I beg to differ.

Yeah I remember Into the Dark. I bought it on Desura and even voted for it during the IndieDB awards. But wasn't the entire point of Into the Dark that it was so bad that it was good? Obviously, players are going to overlook a lot of the issues since the game was marketed as a playable B-Movie. Even with that said, the reviews on Steam tell a different story.



This isn't too surprising since most indie games are asset flips like the zombie game posted a few messages back and most devs don't know how to market their game.

It's great how well your game(s) have done. It really is. Now, I'm not trying to bash your game and I'm not trying to bash FPSC or Game-Guru because I genuinely enjoyed playing your game and I genuinely enjoy using FPSC and Game-Guru. However, considering your game was probably one of the best games ever made with FPSC, it just shows that's pretty much all FPSC had to offer. It's the same story with Game-Guru. Game-Guru is a great piece of software for those who like making some games as a hobby or for beginners just starting out, but, it isn't really the ideal engine when it comes to making a serious game. (Not that your games aren't serious or anything).

That`s a misunderstanding. It was always marketed as "Trash", true, but in the sense of an art form. Like Iron Sky or Sharknado. Of course, people are more forgiving when you walk down this road. Editors not so much. And still the Steam version was one of the "Game of the Year 2014" winners in Gamestar, the most-selling European PC games magazine.



It rests above 50% positive, what quite some A or even AAA games (in terms of budget) dont achieve. And that despite two review-bombing sessions, one from homophobes because our rainbow flag achievement and one organized by a Polish game blog because we had originally a Polish flag with a thief as achievement for stealing.
Dude, that`s overall a full-blown victory.



Well, there were many years, in which you were perfectly able to make a commercially successful game with FPSC. I give you that those times are over, but with creativity you were always able to dodge or mask the shortcomings.

Anderson & The Legacy of Cthulhu was made in 2006-2007 on a shoestring budget of 44.000 Euro, and both Gamestar and Shooterplanet rated it only 1% lower than Bethesdas Call of Cthulhu with a base budget of over 5 mio $. Ok, granted, that was DESPITE its FPSC core and because of the live action cutscenes and their B-Lovecraft-Movie-flair, but still, in some countries Distributors sold the games together as bundle because Anderson did better there.



That`s where I disagree. For a beginner, I would say stick to Unity. If you use Gameguru just for quickly prototyping game ideas, it`s also ok. But to make something decent in Gameguru, you need hell of artistic skills and creativity because it`s a partially broken, technically limited environment. It`s a challenge for pros to make something halfway good with it, beginners without talent are doomed to fail.

$team care about quality when free, now this change who knows why.

Have to agree on that point above, making a game with this engine, knuckle down. It's vital to learn methods of preserving memory or its 2-3 lvls max or cap earlier and the AI goes cactus.

On topic, not really going to comment either, I'm sure it may have been the same if steam was around in the fpsc days. Back then you had to prove yourself to get any traction on the forums. Now I can't tell what's going on with reviews on steam.

@DVader, well said.

This is what I mean. Game-Guru is broken and limited and devs need to work extra hard on issues that shouldn't even exist in the first place. Every engine has it's issues and I'm not trying to compare Unity to Game-Guru, but, games that come out of GG are buggy, un-optimized, ugly and clunky. If a serious dev wants to utilize GG as their weapon of choice in developing their project, then that's their problem. To each their own I guess.

But...but...isn't this supposed to be the 'eaziest game maker'....just give me da codez and off I go. GamezGuruz the eaziest game creator....but soundz like it's not for pro's or beginnerz....I am neither so doez that mean it would be perfect for me? Answers on the back of a postage stamp please.

Forty Two?

@Amanmozez, is that codez to create my game, where do i put it in the gAMEZgURUZ? The Galaxy is such a big place and am spaghettified from years of light speed travel so sorriez if I seem stupified.

Lol - I still like AE's response

Reliquia....

LOL Ye I swear they pulled that guy right out of the comics

LOL

You gave me some good chuckles here. Right now I would say the use case for GG is rapid prototyping of basic layout and game design ideas, no matter in which engine you work afterwards. Before I have an Unreal project ready to work in or a Unity scene properly set up, I can already run around in my basic vision when I use GG. But that's as far as I get without wrestling the zombie bear GG currently is.

IF (a big IF) the basic memory issues are sorted out and the two major light issues (Lightmapping causing memory to go mayhem, Dynamic Lights not casting shadows) are solved, the use case would advance to "Experienced single Dev who doesn`t like or doesn`t have time to go the Unity / Unreal asset pipeline".

...a serious video game you say? That is such an adorable sentiment.

So much is just different now from when I started making my own video games. I mean in many ways its great that we have easy access to all these powerful engines, and all this content to use but the magic of "I am making my own 3d world" has been largely diluted. If you start out now without any skills you either put in an ungodly amount of time learning or you just rely on "modules" and store media as a hobbyist. Is that why so many indie games look alike now? Especially this offensively ugly lowpoly toon look? IDK, just reassembling premade stuff like this seems more like playing with lego to me than the ...err... carving out of wood feeling I get from modifying and making things in my own style. (I apologise for the tortured metaphor) The alternative is of course really doing your own thing but falling way back on what is currently considered standard.

Not too long ago when you amassed some freebies from carefully scouring the webs and learned some basic skills you could start out making your little game in somethig like the irrlicht engine, Dark basic or genesis 3d. Lets say something looking like Tomb Raider. You could show it to people and offer it for download and people would respond to it with some respect and look at it with a more open mind.
Now the response would be "lol, lame, buy better assets! Why don't you use unity?"

You can really just buy things now that are amazing and work out of the box. This is free by the time I am writing this. So people ask me what if I put all the time I "wasted" on messing with community made content, lowpoly modeling and releasing small [MOD EDIT] games in GG or FPSC into unity. Well, I think I'd be very bored and had to compete with a standard I could never reach.



Yeah. You are putting this in quite juvenile language but your sentiment rings true. Especially considering that indie games nowadays are developed by teams and even some studio output is considered indie now. (something by frictional games for example.)

I think compared to other small mods and hobbyist efforts our community has decent works to offer. A lot of it quite intricate and enjoyable. At least that is what I got from my player base so far.
Game Guru and FPSC might be flawed but at least I can make my own functional 3d games with them. I think the ones I released wheren't half bad within the context of some guy making them having very little time on his hands. Something else I do is paint, I'm not very good at it but I put in an effort... so while its certainly not on the level of what some people can do, its also not on the same spectrum as a kids drawing.

Yeah we all make terrible games, but some of them are great too.

I like terrible games.

@Wolf,

I don't think you understand what I am trying to say. I'm basically trying to defend the guy's game that many people here in this thread are complaining about. You're preaching to the choir, I too make "[MOD EDIT]" games with Game-Guru and FPSC. And I have been doing so for over a decade.



Yeah this is what I have pretty much said in my previous comments.

This is one of the unfortunate realities with using GG. For the first time I decided to go full force with completing a project with but 1 single enemy/character. And I still occationally find the NPC frozen like a catus... the memory issues are an unfortunate one.

I'm kind of at a stand still yet again with GG as I'm unable to complete even the most simple concept..

The big gg word pops up again (Memory ),
Should be a priority fix

Dave

@PixelF: I've been through your post again. Yeah. I agree with you, its just that the way you said it really rustled my jimmies

So essentially what i gather from Defy's tests is that GG can support 3 levels with AI and 10 level without AI? I guess that's a step up from FPSC. I had a 5 map game with no NPC's and it wouldnt go above 5 maps - in FPSCx9.

So is that gospel or does it depend on size ?

Which tests?

Its kinda why I've been punting for the multiplayer.exe thing
1/ wouldn't affect the memory issues as you only use 1 map at a time.
2/ reduced AI as pvp requires less AI
3/ while playing multiplayer levels people don't tend to pay so much attention to detail reducing the fps hit.
a lot of people have been saying that it isn't needed, core fixes first etc etc
But! if it was in place I recon at the very least we could build really nice levels with half the problems GG has at the moment purely because we don't need half the content/scripting etc in the beginning stages.
Don't get me wrong I see some and have played some imho some really good single player GG games Ertlovs being one of them but imagine his fathers island map multiplayer …… mayhem .eg mass lemming style suicides off the cliff lol and believe me people would do it they are that mental
people will always make crappy silly games using any engine maybe just for a quick buck or maybe just to take the pee and laugh about it cos they can. I just think GG needs that extra avenue to get the interest back and as i'm not really a big graphics guy im old and like a proper gameplay (still playing swgemu) lol just think it would boost rather than hinder ok punt end :

I was a bit surprised I admit … Pretty sure I have seen work on GG games near on 15 levels ?

well i need to test this out because i plan to have more than 3 levels,
The good thing though is you can have more than one win zone in your maps that means one can go lets say from level one to either level 2 or 3 , and once you are at level 3 you can go back to level 1 or 2 again. that i like.

Correction, Defy's tests.

I've not stress tested GG personally enough but i am finding some issues with memory while doing test plays over and over on my single map. I plan to see how it fairs in standalone after saving and loading several times over.

Repeat test plays from the editor will cause problems with memory as everything is not cleaned up between runs.

Standalone should not have this problem.

Got some early changes that look promising, in that can now get GG to restart completely between levels and as such is resetting video and system memory as a clean start for each level in standalone.

Clearly this is wiping out carry overs such as acquired guns and will need further work to re-establish these. Also there is an annoying stutter when first getting the level loaded until player moves, but will likely be able to find/resolve that issue.

So with this enabled standaloneresetallbetweenlevels=1 in setup.ini the levels will load as required after a full restart of GG - it looks OK, relatively seamless except of course it adds time to (each) new level load as is restarting GG behind the scenes also. So another option where it will depend on the type of game and size and number of levels as to if this should be used.

It's not in any formal GG builds yet, but thought I'd let you know that the concept is doable and seems to work OK. I'll keep testing and refining.

More info here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/213870?page=5#msg2615007

Cheers.

@cybernescence
How many levels does Cogwheel have at the moment ?

Ive started adding command lines to delete sprites (PNG) and audio files upon map loads right from the start and this seems to have helped some bit.

I think for completely reloading the games assets per map load wont be very helpful for global variables not carrying over? given that weapons and such won't? Maybe there could be some way around that.

I've not tried this yet, but we could write all variables to an external file at the WINZONE event and then read that file upon map loads and set the variables accordingly. This could be done all in LUA i believe.

Another thing is avoiding the Save / Load function in game and replace it with some sort of in game mechanic that doesnt take the user to the loading screen. But instead rebuilds the level by resetting everything completely off of variable references. This would also require hiding enemies instead of "destroying them" when they are killed.

@synchromesh - it has one - however it loads upto 8 different terrains during game play and procedurally creates (and deletes) entities as needed. So not a good comparison to the usual approach.

I am noticing some stuttering after many hours of game play so think I’m reaching the limits of this approach, which is why started experimenting with ‘full reset’. I am unable to find any way to do easy memory management for this in c++ itself but there may be ways perhaps. If I can get this reset working properly I could split Cogwheel into two large levels with an appropriate game transition point (airship through portal perhaps) to shield the loading process a little. This I think will give me a lot of headroom to continue to build out the world and also has the benefit of resetting alll memory when player moves through (back and forward) these levels (though would try and adjust game play to minimise this).

@Teabone - yes the off load and reload of data needed to transcend levels can be done relatively easily with lua (kind of what the save/load scripts do now). So for linear level progresssion reasonably straight forward. For games where can leave and re-enter levels at random takes a bit more thinking about as you say.

Sorry this way off topic of OP.

Cheers.

About Psychopathics: I didn't play that game, but from video and screenshots, I think its overated. I released my game last month on steam, and it's pretty hard to have positive reviews on start, here I'll post why:

- Some curators and reviewers tends to criticize the engine "Gameguru", by almost all* the releases it had on steam (*some games are really good, dont take it at all projects please);
- Some people ask refunds because "gameguru mapeditor" crashs requently or don't load 1st level on some machines or crash between level changes;
- Common use of assets (I had this problem in my game, I needed to rework and make it with uncommon assets, it was my fault, I worked and released a new patch to make game design better. So if you plan to make a game, use the less possible common assets or some from those packs, some don't even have lightmap working);
- AI bugs, this one is hard because you have to work hard on scripting and test one by one to keep sure every mob, inclusing trash to boss, will do what you want, and there's no 100% warranty it'll work (I thought I solved AI problem, but still some little issues);

Some customers don't put loading time and lack of keymapcontrol as enough to negativate your game, but that comes in the pack.

Regarding memory issues. As far as I know GG has always suffered from it. Just testing levels out lots of times in editor and then saving the map used to cause weird memory leaks. My defence against it was to do all my tests, exit GG without saving. Reload then change once at that point anything I noticed needed changing then save, Then reload and test all over again. It's a pain, it removes the WISIWIG aspect that makes GG so nice.

If you have issues with memory leaks then this may help you.

Make your terrain as complete as you can before adding anything.
Once you have it pretty close to complete save it and get started on scenery. Try to avoid game-play elements here.
Once you are happy with your map save it again and then start adding your game-play elements.
Keep liberal copies of each stage.
Once at the game-play stage make sure if you do heavy testing of things, to avoid saving afterwards if possible. DO your tests get it working, remember the settings or write them down. Exit GG. Reload up and make your changes. Then save.
If possible test stuff on a different map to save time, then move to the real one and add in one fell swoop!

This could be completely over the top and unnecessary, but I always found it seemed to keep speed reasonable (to a point). It was as if GG save files were more and more fragmented with each deleted object. I had this in my Xmas demo which was working great until I started deleting stuff I just got frustrated at the above method and just started changing things as they cropped up. My fame rate dropped a good 10 fps or so, even with some serious optimising to recover it. I did add some averagely big scripts in, but even removing them later speed still appeared low

Ultimately its pretty difficult to test this sort of thing out, but from my many years of using GG way too much I found I always had issues at some point after deleting stuff. I never seemed to have any when I managed to make a level without deleting anything. The C++ coders may be able to see why this occurs, or indeed that it does not and is merely people seeing things that aren't there. I do remember though that the original FPSC had some sort of de-frag tool for this very sort of thing. Perhaps it is a similar thing in GG? I mentioned this ages ago I believe but no idea if it was sorted or even applicable still at the time.

DVader, I noticed that when deleting an object from a level map, it does not delete the object from the ".fpm" project file. I learned about this when I dealt with GGLoader for AGK and GameGuru, scrolling through the file "map.ele" I saw that there are descriptions of objects that I removed from the project a few weeks ago. For me, this is not critical (for now) since I use GameGuru at this time only for level assembly, and I do the whole game process in AGK via GGLoader (which sorts for me non-existent objects from the ".fpm" file).
But it is rather strange that the objects that I delete from my GameGuru project are still in the ".fpm" file. Maybe there this is a memory leak, but I can’t argue because I don’t know the internal structure of GameGuru and I can’t use C ++ (I always hated it as a programming language, I find it easier to understand the assembler since I studied it at 13, now I’m 41 but damn it I still understand him).

@ OldPman. Ah that explains it then the save file must be a very simple sequential save and when an object is deleted it is just marked as deleted in the file, with new ones added at the end each time. A proper save would re-position all the items correctly as you delete and change stuff, so everything that is in the save file is used and there is no wasted space. At least when saved it should. That explains the save problem and why it seems it is still around. I can understand Lee doing this, as I hate this sort of thing myself, but I am not a Professional Programmer!

I was very curious if this was actually the case as I had one map that i wiped clean and it was much larger than it should have been.

Since FPM files can be opened up, can we remove unused elements that might still be inside?

EDIT: Okay I renamed a test map of .FPM to .ZIP and then opened the file, but everything inside appears to be encrypted. Additionally its not showing me the separate entities. This might be a question for Lee



In much older DOS game engines, I used to do this method. With writing to a txt file i called a dat file. Keeping all position variables there and globals. Believe this is possible with GG and its something I hope to try out to avoid memory issues and load screens.

@ Teabone. Yeah never really used DOS much beyond navigating around and copying files as when I got round to owning a PC, Windows 95 was out. But I worked in a computer shop and hence used it for basic stuff in the Win 3.11 days, installing windows for one and backups etc. I found for programming back then, an Amiga with AMOS or BLITZ was pretty awesome and closer to my ZX Spectrum roots. But the basic principals in DOS would be the same as anywhere

I think you would have to actually unzip it as is and use a password to get the un-encypted files out. Can't remember the password off the top of my head, but it was something simple like letmein. Not an issue as it is only really holding your map data and can't see anyone hacking your game much with that.

Not sure if you could just remove blanked or flagged parts of the file though. It could be an easy fix or the data may also contain the total number of objects which would probably have to be changed to suit. Knowing exactly how the data is arranged and for what of course would help immensely. If all this is true and GG does just keep adding data onto the end of the file rather than replacing a prior blank (deleted item) then it must be possible to remove the blanks and tidy it up I would think.

the fpm password (after renaming to .zip) is "mypassword". I automated this process and zipping back up and renaming for my HM2GG app.

@ Bored of the Rings. Yeah I remembered it a little later on I posted about it in a new thread, but my tests indicated it worked okay, with a couple of default buildings that is. I'm still in pain typing is even painful on the back at the min, so haven't spent any time since my initial post as yet though. Also not sure if the problem (if there is one) is in the part I checked, or another less obvious file in the map zip. I was hoping my back would be fine and dandy by now

The objects consist of a set of variables of various types, such as integers, floats, strings, and the variables' contents of each object are written into the file simply one value after the other in their binary form, and one object after the other, so, that's the reason why looking at the file with a text editor won't help.
To examine the values, you'll have to exactly mimic the structure and sequence of those variables in a program and read the bare binary values into corresponding variables. It doesn't really help that string variables are interspersed with numeric variables, since strings have arbitrary and different lengths for the same variable in different objects, thus all bytes of all variables following a string variable move up; thus, you cannot use a fixed structure to read in the objects from the file. Additionally, every internal or external attribute added to the object definition enlarges the total scope of bytes of the objects and forces you to adapt/extend your set of program variables, and you have to ask Lee every time of what type the variable(s) for the new attribute are and what they are supposed to represent, semantically.
That's the main reason why I discarded any plans to further develop any tools for that area, years ago, after having had to adapt "D.E.E.R Hunter" for three or four changes of this type within a (very) few months .

yes, agree with yrkoon, I have programs that read this type of data following the original source code for data structure and types of data and the ordering of the data. I did this a lot for grabbing dynamic entity info from the map.ele files for FPSC levels to GameGuru so I could place the entities correctly on the map relevant to the main FPSC level. I would do the same with GG using the source code.