Hi All,

I have released the latest update as a PublicPreview build which you can access from your Steam properties BETA tab options. Here is a quick summary of what is in the update. Feel free to check it out and let us know if it causes issues for you compared to the current public build of GameGuru, thanks:

The core of the performance improvement, aside from shader tweaks, is the batching of similar entities just before the game starts. The draw call optimization only takes a few seconds during the level load phase but you get back so much more in terms of flat out frame rate. On a typical i7 quad-core system running a GTX 1080 graphics card, the Big Escape level went from 99fps to 195fps with VSYNC switched off in the SETUP settings. That's almost a 100% improvement in game speed! We are eager to learn what kind of performance improvements you see in your own games with this latest update!

This magic can be seen in action by using the F11 key when in Test Game. Just run any unlightmapped level you have made in test game mode, press F11 and then press [9]. This will switch off all regular entities from the scene, leaving only the batched entities rendering. You can use this to see how much of your scene has been optimized, and if you also hide terrain, water, sky and other elements you can then press TAB TAB to see how many draw calls are being used to render the batched entities.  The trick to good batching is to ensure the entities use the same textures and shaders and are grouped together so they can be converted to a single conglomerate object behind the scenes.

In addition to performance, this update contains the following fixes and tweaks:

* F11 in Standalone no longer causes PBR debug layers to be rendered
* New DOCDOC system added to code allowing a new 'Docs\SETUP INI Description.txt' doc to be auto-created
* Improved MIXAMO FBX Importing (2-chain-finger in T-POSE), simply select 'Uber' in 'Is Character Field'
* Added Convex Hull collision shape to the physics system, use by setting COLLISIONMODE in FPE to 9
* Fixed EXPORTASSETS flag in SETUP.INI to correctly export unencrypted full entities with standalone 

At this stage we are only looking for showstoppers that will prevent us releasing this same update as the new official public release. As usual, if you have a bug that is in both the current public release and this one, you can report it on our GitHub issues tracker here: https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues

Hi lee, well thats good news, escpecially the Draw call optimizer which could be the solution 4 one of the biggest"imperfections" of GG, the FPS drops.Seems like u concentrated more on fix the existing bugs instead of add some new gameplay features, honestly its not 100% what i personaly expected but iam 4 sure not gonna be dissapointed or something like that.Iam not gonna testing myself the beta cuz i wanna avoid bugs but from what i can read iam happy so far.
Thank u

I have a lot of entities in my level and with this new update my level is seeing on average a 15 to 20 point increase in my frame rate .

Thank you so much !!!

LOL.. no many peole have a 1080 gpu LOL

can wait ot test new beta this night on my rig ..

@ osiem80 see you tonight ..my friend LOL(thanks mate)

Last update non installed yet, working with July update.
Firts at all, thanks Lee and all those invoded for your hard work.


Grouped? are you referring to in a modeling stage?
In anothers words, if I'm modeling a tree, should I group all their parts into one named, let's say , "mytree" ?

I know the main goal here is about Drawcall reducer to improve perfomance.

@ lee
An internal poly count decimator, like mixamo ran before, it's possible incorporate an algorithm like that to GG, so that it could work at fly like LOD does actually?

EHI guys i want to thanks all of you involed for the great job you are done with this great engine.. thanks to poeple liek you that GG i'm sure will be a great engine in future... but please (Lee) dont abandon it...please.. never do like fpsc.

Rant mode on
but now please add new feeatures engine needs, integrate and expand the great for of Teabone and Preben with the swimming/water/underwater system, and please add full screen shaders effect to be managed on runtime so we can add water ripples, blood effect,

ranf mode off

LOL

thanks guys

Not for me .. happy to crack down these bugs as planned, optimisation being one of those that was listed
No more features yet please … Just as well finish this year getting a stable Product , Still a big list up there

Yes first things first, it will be worth it

Dave

Am I the only one that noticed all the new Breakables and explosions, Barrels, Boxes or is that just a Me thing ?
I had to ramp up the anims to 1000 but it looks pretty cool
You have I think 10 style explosions to play with ..

Pretty happy with this build - great work people

_ _ _ _
FYI:
1) For those using snowbox in their levels, if you have shadows following you, setting castshadows = -1 in the fpe fixed it form me.

2) Stand-alone build:
All seems to work fine for me, except now there is a black screen and the endless windows busy icon for 20-30 seconds when loading any level. This issue wasn't there in the July Beta - and sorta detracts from the experience.

Didn't try save\load since this is reported by others as fraught with issues since inception - will experiment later with that.
- - -

Overall great performance build tho.

Reliquia....

Awesome update indeed, getting great framerates now. Seems much more sleek. A good 20-25 fps increase here. Amazing.

are the cool thins in the engine as default or did oyu managed to add by yourself?

Have you checked your Barrels and Boxes assuming your on the PP ..

yes i'm non pp on one of my work pc but didnt checked box and barrles yet lol.. so i didnt see this great and cool addon.. many thanks for pointing it

You do need to adjust the animation speed on the objects though from 100 to at least 1000
Or they blow up in slow motion ( which could be handy for cutscenes )

I am excited to see those new explosions and breakables. Breaking glass would be a great addition.

I'm all for bug fixes but it does seem we haven't seen any big new features (on the scale of the EBE and the character creator) for quite some time.

That also needs fixing first
I cant think of any actual features I would want or need at this moment as fixes cover a lot of these like, Swimming, even better AI, a complete third person etc .. These are all broken or unfinished things that while were on a roll here should be addressed …
I can wait for furry Dices

Well I did breaking glass yonks ago and I don't just mean with decals, I mean with fracturing glass using the "greasy pencil" method in blender. Worked quite well but not 100% perfect. Fun though at the time. Of course there are other ways..

also would be a good idea to make them not get occluded via the fpe as if you look up to watch the explosion they get removed as they're not counted as "on screen" anymore

What frames do you get smallg?
I loaded up an old script testing level with probably 40-50 scripted objects
I got 32 fps steady at the very beginning, and the computer kicked into
very high fan noise. And the fps dropped steadily down to 15 fps in about ~?
5 minutes or less.... So this upgrade is only good for the upgraded machines-
obviously? Sounds and feels like political promises!
No-one with my funds will be getting higher fps!

I have an AMD 3 GHz 8 ram, integrated...

Discovered a mixup in the boxes "breakables" folder.

*Attention*
I was going to check further and give more details-- if required
so I put all of the breakables into one empty level (actually chose to have
the random terrain), but besides that empty...
Went to save level *SAVE* only, not test, and GG is locked up now...
wait... okay it took, no exaggeration 5 minutes just to save the level...
Testing it now and see if it will go through with that. So hold on for further
analysis, I'll report back or verify yourself.

and you cant pretend an 3d engine to run well on that machine... I'm sorry but even more optimized engine than GG like unity and Unreal would be capped on your rig

quad core cpu is the minimum these days to have decent fps on nowdays engines.. and a discrete vga card too.. IGP card are not siuited for this type of use

on the rig in my signature I hve about 100 fps in an empy scene but the shortly go down after I add some elements..the same in unity...

I'm goging to upgrade my rig with and Ryzen 2600x, 64gb ram and a new m.2 ssd disk

AMAZING WORK , thanks Lee and PREBEN for the draw call optimizer !!

I cant wait to see the difference!

The optimizer is for static entities - it looks like you are running tests on map with all dynamic (running scripts)



5 seconds for me.

Cheers.

Thanks all who work on this, will be trying it all soon!

On TOP PC's it could be up to 200% incrase while on low and avarage equipment 50%

LMAO ..

I'm going to update next weekend, not time left now to deal with possible issues.

It appears that when in test game mode and pressing <F9>, painting grass does not work. Whether I press the LMB or the LMB along with shift it deletes the grass. However, it does not really delete the grass. Pressing the LMB does not add grass either.

In the edit mode clicking on the grass icon and pressing the LMB will add grass and pressing LMB while pressing shift will delete the grass but I would like to be able to add and delete grass while in test game mode.

Adding terrain textures works as well as removing the terrain textures. For some reason, the grass texture when pressing <0> does not work.

Yeah, I used to do all terrain\grass painting in test game.

Terrain and grass are no longer fun to work with Functionality wise the old system was way better imo.

When 16 texture pallet was added, painting became a chore in the editor, and a right pain in test mode.
Grass never seams to go where I want to any more.

Hopefully it will get a looksee in this bug bash....

Reliquia....

Bod the test with arms are great. well done.

@Flatlander: Just tried and grass painting seams to work fine here ? , do it say your in grass painting mode when you try ? , i can see that its a little hard when your brush is to small perhaps try to make the brush larger and try again

@Bod: I tried the drive-able script from AmenMoses and yes there was a problem , this has been fixed and will be in the next update ( draw call optimized objects are now added to the IntersectAll object list ).

About the flickering , this is caused by the update of the shadows , i have added a new option speedshadows=2 , that will update the shadows that are closest to the player at 60 fps , the next at 30 fps and the shadows that are must far away will be updated at 15 fps , i have tested this and it fix the flickering when you have fast moving objects.

Ready from the next update.

Great work Preben, thank you

Dave

Thanks, this is a very good update.
Though i spotted a problem with spraying entities, in my case the animated spruce 03.
When spraying, the sprayed entities are outside the collision shape.
I have not tried it with other entities but i think the same problem will occur.

Lee and Preben, thanks for this performance update.

Thanks guy's, BIG improvement. I made a map just to test. And no show stoppers for me. Oh and keep smashing them bugs.

You da man!!! Thanks for responding. There seems to be a misunderstanding. I have no problems with growing grass (painting) as well as killing the grass (in the editor). What I am having problems with is editing the grass while in real-time mode (testing the game). There is a tutorial named "Game Guru - how to paint and edit grass". While running the test game I do exactly as the tutorial instructs. I press the F9 key to get into the real-time editor, then select "0" which puts me into the "grass" mode. Pressing the "left mouse button" is supposed to add new grass. Pressing "shift and left mouse button" is supposed to delete the grass within the brush area. The only thing that happens is pressing the LMB or shift-LMB is deleting a huge chunk of grass no matter the size of the brush. This is not a game stopper but it is annoying and limits my desire to paint 3D grass.

I went on Steam and did a file verification. Only three files were invalid and they were downloaded. I still have the same issues. Thanks for looking further into this.

This update is amazing... WOW the performance boost is incredible !! THANK YOU

Has anyone noticed when you create a new standalone it creates a new setup.ini
And in that new setup.ini is this command " flashlightshadows=0 " It doesnt work if set to =1 but gives a clue to something that maybe going on

Standalone has always had a setup.ini, it copies it from the one from the gameguru base directory, so if it's in there it should be in our base directory one too.

No it always copied the exact one in GG across ..
It now generates a totally new one and " flashlightshadows=0 " is not in your GG setup.ini

No matter just something I noticed .. Try it .

This would be good news indeed. I'm not seeing the "flashlightshadows=0" in the setup.ini in the gameguru folder, is this only when a standalone is created.

Yep as I said above ..

ATTN Preben :SMILE:

Here is the video I created showing grass edit in real time. For me anyway.

Since I did not have a vocal explanation in the recording. The very first deletion of grass is done with only the LMB. The second deletion of grass is done with SHIFT plus LMB. As you can see both deletes. Also, it does not matter how small or large the brush is it deletes the same amount of grass.

One more thing to add to this craziness is that it only deletes it in real-time. When you return to the map editor all the grass is still there. Of course, that's a good thing as you can still edit it in the map editor. Especially, if you want to add grass.

@Flatlander

This is how it works here:



Is anyone else able to reproduce the issues Flatlander is having ?

Sorry was not meant to be there , i was not happy with the first build , so going to start all over with this when time allow , now that its out here is my failed attempt.









Anyway im moving in a few hours so not sure when i have internet again ?

Ha I was right on the nail
@Preben
Failed attempt ?
Really … I would say that's a successful failure
Looks amazing !!

@Preben

With a large circle it does exactly as your video shows for me which is perfect.
But if I use a smaller circle for fine tuning then I get the same problem as Flatlander.

I assume Flatlander is referring to tweaking small areas rather than large ones ?

I dunno, they get multiple shadows at the footy on friday nights

Great start I reckon....

Thanks for your hard work Preben.

OldFlak....

It does not matter the size of the brush. Since there have been two very reliable developers ( :SMILE: ) confirming that it works, I believe what I must do now is back up my assets, uninstall (delete) GG and then reinstall GG on another drive.

It looks good. But should the shadow not move away from the light source? In your video he moves left if your player moves left.
But a really good start