Hey guys,

so far I fixed these issues:
#110, #487, #475, #376, #474, #352, #413

Can you please tell me the most needed fix for yourself! The bugs list is big and I just want to know your biggest problem. No enhancements like lightmapper broken, or add dynamic shadows, only bugs. The best is when you have or create a issue and post the number here.

Maybe Bored of the Rings can check out the list too and we fix bugs together

It just helps me to find out what is really needed!
I do not know if I can fix it, so do not expect too much. I am not even a C++ developer

Memory issues..
seems to be one of the bigger things
holding most people back for being able to
have a multi-level game working properly without
crashing.

UNIRD12B

YES!! Memory -- and speed -- so make GG 64 bit pronto!
Well, shucks, wish that where possible pretty soon!
Nice that you will help Corno_1. I'll leave it in yours
and BOTR good hands.

I will start looking into memory issues and also widget, I also would like to add in a numeric way of entering position, scale, rotation.

@Teabone. Isn't this already possible by breaking the text up into the parts you need coloured differently? Never known any language not to support this, but you always have to print letter by letter, or at minimum each chunk of text separately in my experience. I haven't really played much with string parsing and such in lua, but I can almost guarantee it will be possible I'd be very surprised if not. The easiest way of course is to simply break your text statements into the parts you want of each colour and print them separately.

@GubbyBlips. 64-bit would certainly make memory issues far less of a thing. End users would need to have lots of memory to take advantage of course (no help if they still have bare minimum). I would however prefer the memory leaks to be fixed. Going 64-bit although nice, would be like having a leak in your petrol tank and just getting a much bigger one to compensate Speed would not really improve as far as I am aware. Unfortunately, 64-bit does not equate to 2x faster or even close Also, the large wait of late for an update would be at least twice as long to convert it over from all accounts. Not to mention new bugs in the process...

Bored of the Rings. Any work in sorting that pesky memory leak would make GG a far more stable and reliable product Please add in a numeric way of entering position etc as that is a huge bugbear of mine for ever The data should be there already, just needs an input routine to be able to access it as well.

That said, didn't Lee mention a new GUI he wanted to work on which would add these sort of things in. Like a properties panel for objects as well as being able to input your objects position, scale etc? Of course that may be delayed or forgotten now, so adding in the object position stuff would be a useful addition to anyone.

As for issues I have. The only one that stands out currently is that terrain painting has never really worked well for me since it was updated to 16 textures. It's not a bug, but it has been one of the reasons I don't use GG that much anymore. Oh and objects that vanish in a finalised game, but work fine in editor. Oddly animating objects on occasion (doors as an example). Mostly annoying bugs that only pop up when you start pushing GG a little. There are more, but it's been awhile and I forget most now.

From a scripting pov, I'd like to see a way to make sure games run the same speed on different spec systems more easily. In my Xmas game I have a balloon ride you need to take to find and shoot presents off trees. Took ages for me to code the movement and pattern only to find on different machines the turns and swoops were at different points. This as you can imagine rather ruined the entire part. There may be a way to get some sort of timer code already, but I have not managed to fix this issue. That and vanishing objects put a halt to my WIP as I was getting a bit tired of tweaking the balloon ride to work Pity, as it was quite close to finished game play wise and I was in the process of tarting and tying up loose ends when I found the balloon ride issue, or rather a player tester did.

@GubbyBlips

64bit would not solve any problems, it will only create new and delay existing. And that for the cost of half a year of development time.
It is on my list for "not worth the work"

@BOTR
I found a pretty cool lib: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
Do you think we could replace the current slider system with this, so we could add stuff more easily?

@Corno. Sorry for my wall of text above, I can sometimes go a bit far when I post!


I agree about 64 bit. It would be nice to lift the 4 gig limit of course, but for now getting GG stable and as bug free as is possible is more important.

It would be nice to see animated objects select-able again by clicking rather than having to box select them If that hasn't already been fixed.

Preben has made a fix for this - I've tested on a few items and the change seems to work great.

Cheers.

I managed to work out specifically when this happens, it's animated objects that are made up of multiple objects in a single mesh without using bones, if you add a single bone to the model it fixes the issue.

Cool thread guys

Issues reported many moons ago:
Not show stoppers of course just annoying to me. In order of report not preference for fixing
#231 Custom Hud - Fonts display poorly
#308 Grass - Draw Issue
#314 Shadows - Draw Issue
#446 Bloom - Sky Wash Out - this doesn't just affect the sky, but also objects with lights near them or sun shining on them (interior levels)

This one is in the realms of enhancement but I think should have been added ages ago and maybe it is easy if you know how (@BOR)
#319 Explosions - Enhancement Suggestion
I know GraPhix and Amen Moses created a cool work-around but it we would be way cooler if we could assign explosions and audio for individual objects in the editor. That way we don't have to assign the explosion script to the object, which would make it possible for moving objects like cars, planes, creatures etc, to have an explosion decal of choice assigned to them.

One I noticed lately but havn't reported:
Put a light near an animated door. When the door opens it will go a shaded darker, when it closes it will go back to the original shade.

Reliquia....

- Light appears to pass through EBE walls #118

This one really sucks, but especially if you have a flashing/flickering light in or near your ebe structure. Place a flashing light in 1 room of a multi room EBE structure... it will light up every room.
--
My standalone games seem to have pretty long load times and will constantly crash if I alt-tab or do anything on my other monitor. Which for a new player, they may ALT-TAB to see if the game has frozen on the loading screen as the loading bar takes a while to begin to move. In turn, crashing the whole game.
--
Not sure if it's exactly a "bug" but melee enemies will constantly get stuck on / try to walk through just about anything. Walls, chairs, small rock on the ground.
For example I have an electricity pole in a level, and near this pole the player is attacked by 2-3 enemies. They will get caught on the pole, attempt to run through the pole or do some weird thing where they appear to run 50 feet around the pole while still facing the player. I have tested every forceobstacle setting and it didn't really help. Not sure if this is something that can be bug fixed but I thought i'd just throw it out there.

@ Corno - thanks again for tackling bugs, however I don't think this one https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/commit/08e5e5fcc66acf3b1cfb0e8b90f1479d33f623ba is working. Characters are sinking into entities that they traverse (like bridges). When I back out the change they don't.

Cheers.

Nothing from me,I think you have enough to get on with , many thanks for jumping in with bug fixing

Dave

I also think you has enough to get on with, maybe soldiers shooting through the walls.
I know it is not a bug and ignore if this is easy to feature, but alt texture would be a cool addiction, and it might help a lot.
Thanks a lot to both (Corno_1 and BOTR) to face these issues, if you do what you can, it's enough 4 me.

The bug in the issue described, was created by the scale command. If you set in an character fpe "scale=80" the character will sink into the terrain. So does this really not work, or did you find another bug?

I'll have a look at that, although if Lee is/was looking into a new GUI it would be great to know what plans TGC have so I don't tread on anyones toes/duplicate work.

now I wish I had found that earlier, I might rewrite some of my old progs with this (IMGUI).
thanks again Corno_1 for the link. examples work great. it should be easy enough to implement into the GameGuru source code. Will have a play more after work.

Be great to see the Prompt, PromptLocal to be able to use windows .ttf fonts instead of the really bad standard GG text fonts.

Better terrain painting and grass painting, more reliable and not so twitchy widget.

Road, path and fence painting systems. (so we can place a fence which follows the contours of the terrain!!!)

Better standalone creation. It seems to still miss out copying over entities etc.

Lua script priority settings maybe, for example like a sort of layer system to run scripts. if a script is assigned a 0 it is executed every frame, if assigned 60 it is called once every 60 frames, 120 once every 120 frames etc. I think there is a way to do this anyway but i dont know how.
Be great to have a Priority command in the Init section of the script. Priority (e,60)

and of course........ better lighting.

@ Corno_1 - the two characters I tried aren't stock but they also aren't scaled either - I guess we need more testing to be done by others, but for my build I've reverted the change for now.

Cheers.

You reverted a bug fix, because it not fixes all bugs which have the same result but a different cause? Characters without the scale statement in the fpe are not affected by my bug fix! Also it does not help against characters sinking in entites!
Just add a scale =80 to a character and test it with and without my fix with a character on terrain and if it still not work we can talk further. Characters which sink in entites a completely a different bug, but I can look at this too, if you mean that

@Cybernescence- in the FPE, what is collisionmode parameter set to? is it 0?

What I'm telling you is that the change is affecting characters without a scale statement. The fix causes characters to sink into entities when they move across them when they weren't doing this before the change. I'm not talking about terrain. If you don't want to talk further fine, I'm simply reporting a test of the change.

Cheers.

@Cybernescence, sorry I didn't mean to offend, I just wanted to know if the collisionmode was set to 0 in the Fpe(s)?

@BOTR - you didn't I was replying to Corno - must have posted at similar time. There is no collisonmode set, so will default to zero I guess - could this be the issue? If so this behavior didn't happen before though.

Cheers.

Ah I see, I would definitely recommend setting collisionmode. If that doesn't work, I'm not sure.

@Corno_1: Yes there is some problems with some of the changes , im working on something else today but will commit the changes tomorrow, and let you know what dont work.

Thanks for helping with bug fixes, the more we are the better

cybernescence: the current master have some shader/ code problems , i will update it tomorrow.

BOTR: AppGameKit Studio is using ImGui , its great , and yes perhaps we can do a DX11 version would make everything (GUI) way more easy.

You are right. I will look into it

@Preben-That makes sense, I wondered why I saw similarities between AGK Studio/IMGUI. I will be working with IMGUI from now on, a mass update on all my apps using DX11 version most likely, Vulkan doesn't run on my PC even though IMGUI supports it.

@ Corno_1 & Bored of the Rings - sorry for being harsh (stupid diabetes gives low mood sometimes, I usually recognize it and don't post then).

@ Preben - thanks, yes I figured some of that was still WIP I haven't adopted all of the updates yet.

It's nice to have lots of folks on GG for a bit

Cheers.

@Cybernescence-no worries I totally understand I work in the Pharma industry working with clinical trials and a lot of the trials I work on are Diabetes, Multiple Sclerosis, Oncology and lots of other therapeutic areas. So no worries.

Well i am going to talk about features because they are quite important in my view.
For the fortified town i need the lightmapper to be able to handle multiple textured assets so that i can make use of several 512x512 or even smaller size textures to tile on large assets.
A texture atlas would be quite big and quality poor due to the size of the ship.
I've tried it and was able to import it with the new importer without problems but than i can't use the lightmapper because some layers ( if i remember well, metalness and roughness?) are lost after lightmapping.

The second need is to have the possibility to group/merge entities in order to reduce draw calls and thus improve performance.

I know that Lee has said that it will be a performance hit if we had a different way of blending terrain textures, so we need to organize it from bottom to top but it would be helpful if we had 2 or three different slots like slot 0 which can be used to create paths without banding occuring.
It gives the needed variation and the possibility to add patches, mud or so to the terrain.

Than there is of course the hope that parallax occlusion will be properly inserted and lighting system improved.

@cybernescence no problem. I saw my fault now and that is all what counts.

@cybernescence. Cool. I thought it may have been tackled by now.

@Belidos. That would explain it. I never use bones and rely on traditional means for animating stuff. Hopefully, the above fix will sort it without the need to add an unwanted bone If not, then I know how to sort it now.

Does anyone know if the vanishing objects issue in standalone is still a thing? I never found out why some objects vanished.

@cybernescence can you test it again?
I hope I fixed it this time
It is just one line:
https://github.com/HierToo/GameGuruRepo/commit/de54ce8bb38e48d8fb53ebe24ceb34419a403e25

@Dvader yes objects still vanish in standalone and I think I may have solved why that happens with some entities. (Although this def doesn't solve problem for all.)
Two main reasons
1) Some entities will have a texture correctly assigned to their FPE file but if your open the entities .X file you will see that it has a texture name assigned to it that is incorrect. Changing this name to the correct texture name will make the model not go invisable in standalone. Although you may find some entities have incorrect texture name in .X file but they don't become invisable in standalone. I have no clue why. But if you have an entity that is invisable in standalone definitely check this.
Also if you have a custom entity you made and had exported it ever as an obj file make sure the texture name is the same that the .mtl file used.

2) Many of the model packs do not have he correct texturepath set. For example in the construction site pack, almost every entity has its for texture end in .png when it should be .dds
This doesn't cause problems in test game mode but causes them to become invisable in standalone.

Hope this helps but like I said there is definitely still some that become invisable for no apparent reason.

Unless you are talking about when objects pop in and out of existence like they are being occluded.. if so then sorry for the wall of text.

I've experienced something similar

I think I agree with the votes. If just one thing could happen soon,
standalone on par with the editor would be a big moral boost.
Then at least whatever amount of work (or work-arounds) one puts into it,
if standalone was WUSIWUG @ editor, then viola!
This is sounding like a model/ files upgrade perhaps more than the engine
upgrade? Okay, maybe when everything is discovered, a tutorial is in order.

Glad to see the activity on here-- for whatever is goin on!

@Corno_1:

Yes this one dont work:
https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/pull/527/commits/98f0771111fbb9b44868cfbef0320a2ceace76de
(did not test your latest change).

SurfaceSunFactor is used to even out directional light. not for intensity, mainly used for lightmapped objects but can also be used for other objects so:
https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/pull/527/commits/aab11a6d9a2f5fe6f10ef4760877e1cdb6a7c114

If you tried "forceloadtestgameshaders=1" you would have seen your changes made the editor nearly "black" so:
https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/pull/527/commits/9c4902daa36d893db1d52594562c55938f970ecd

The other fixes seams to work fine , thanks

@Preben
Thanks for fixing my overambitious tries

@Earthling45 : I think the 'new' terrain painting system has been almost universally condemned by the community It was a 'clever little trick' to grab performance at the cost of convenience, but I don't think anyone really likes it. Once bugs are out the way and the community agrees they've had enough of bug fixes (or there are none left - hah), I have a few ideas how to make terrain painting better (layers in any order) and faster (using real-time GPU splatting). It's still in theory (and in my head), but it could work out to be a simpler shader (thus faster) with fewer texture reads and the work passed to the renderer as a batch.

@LeeBamber - now you just get that idea right outa your head and into GameGuru

The main problem with the current Terrain Painting is banding and blending - the old system was much easier to work with, and looked more natural in my opinion.

Another problem is the way the textures are shown in Windows Explorer, pretty hard to tell what some textures look like due to alpha, so you can only really choose by name or trial and error.

I tend to think the old 5 textures with a slot for the variation maps Preben added would look just fine, with a lot less overhead for the engine to deal with.

Looking forward to see what you come up with on this

Reliquia....

Thanks for your reply Lee.

I would not condemn it, with the use of Preben's variation map it certainly produces some nice results.
It's just that i'm using slot 0 for sandy paths around the town on the dykes and would love to be able to use muddy and gravel on the lower parts of the map and within the town.

I'll be patient

Hi all, ok this isn't a bug but it is annoying so I thought i'd try to get some input on it. Can we extend the water plain? if so how please? reason for this usually I try to wall off the map using hills but found if you wall it off with water with the right skybox it really does look far better. Problem is when you do it like this you can see the edges of the water plain, especially in at the corners. which made me think if there was a way to stretch it out maybe these horrible edges could be then out of view or maybe even a way to fade them out so they don't look so in your face :/ cheers

Ok i just have to ask, if it is the wrong place then im sorry, but what really bugs me is the fact that the stock Characters is on the level they are, they can be so much better,
my biggest wish is if we can have some talk animation , please Lee or any talented animation guy , please give us the talking animation.
Thank you.
I will stop now because if not i will take up all the space here. lol

Finally, we've only been complaining about it since it was released

It's one of the things that has really stopped me from doing any projects that use terrain, that and the lack of sculpting tools, we need more choice of shapes for the terrain brush for sure.

Edit...
Yes... well I duplicated my post again... phssst..!

"we need more choice of shapes for the terrain brush for sure."

Agreed Belidos. It seems it would be pretty easy to add a random terrain
brush (even modifiable to some degree)-- especially seeing as there is a
random option to make maps. If I could help get some of these things in
there, I would. No C++ experience (except one semester in college about
23? years ago.)

But wasn't someone working or finding another option to make terrain
maps from? --- I'm looking for that thread now...
Seems BOTR, cybernescence, maybe PirateMyke was involved??
So far haven't found anything but broken links, abandoned threads...

Yes I have tried a few things.
Cybernescenes has a working solution in his github branch also.
BOTR has HM2GG which is a treat to use. only need the height map of what you want.
I see his links are gone again.

I have also made terrains in a model program and used them in GG. I have use a terrain 4 times as big as the normal GG map and at 200,000 polys and have gotten good results from it.

The bugs that hold me back:
- The temperamental widget
- Sprites don't scale nicely so present lots of artefacts on anything other than native resolution (needs more sub-pixel accuracy)
- Global sounds often don't copy into standalone
- The SetFont command...never managed to get that one working myself, the description in global.lua is confusing.
- The way transparency is handled looks awful. There seems to be a lot of what I can only describe as 'alpha clipping' going on.
- Banding/compression artefacts in lightmaps
- PBR objects that use illumination maps can't be lightmapped

While we're on the subject of PBR...
Feels like there's a lot of scope for optimisation of PBR at the moment. Since metalness, AO, and roughness are all greyscale images, they could be combined into a single RGB image (e.g. R = roughness, sorry 'gloss', G = AO, B = metalness...an ARM map if you will!) to lower the number of drawcalls. I remember being very interested to read a thread about it a while back in the forums, seemed like a no-brainer. You could even use the alpha channel of an image like that for another typically greyscale map, like displacement, height map. I recently bought some assets from CGTrader that used a similar method, felt very counter-intuitive splitting the 'SRM' map up into separate images for Game Guru.

- Reflections. PBR assets currently only reflect the skybox, not their environment. Not great when indoors...

Everything else I want to see would be classed as an enhancement

AE

As far as I’m concerned, the only problem is that the AI (AI Soldier) seems to stop working after about defeating 3 or 4 enemies.

It works fine for the first group of enemies (3 or 4), but then there is a high chance that the rest of the enemies on the level just freezes up and just stand there like a buncha toolbags.

Now don't get me wrong, when the AI works, it is highly impressive. I love the way that they can and mostly will take different paths and techniques to hunt you down like a dog, but it stops working after a while.

Now I gotta say that I'm still developing my project on teh ol' DX9 engine, so I dunno if that is maybe part of the problem.

Also, why is it that the DX9 AI Soldier seems to react and move quicker than the DXA11 AI?

*Sigh*