Is there no support for Height Maps? Most game engines that start you off with a terrain plane and a water plane beneath it have height map support. Is it possible to import a height map?

I saw a height map in an old version of Reloaded. What was it there for? Was it referenced in away?

Sorry to say, there is not. Height Maps are the mainstay of most (if not nearly all) modern game engines, but I suspect that this feature will never make it into GameGuru. This is a great pity as GameGuru could definitely benefit from third party tools such as World Machine.

Random maps can be generated when you click New Random Map but what are they referencing from? Just mathematically calculations or actual stored images?

That should be the point I think it will randomly place a point relevant to his neighbors.


Could you tell me why? There should not be a big problem to read in a picture, get the color, and set the point on the map correct. Maybe not in near future but I think this will be implemented.

Hi Corno.

Having read the forum posts by Lee over the past few months, I do not think this is a direction that TGC want to take GameGuru in. I very much get the impression that TGC do not want to add complexity to GameGuru, lest it steer too far away from "The Easy Game Maker" mantra.

Comment removed.

We work very hard indeed to make sure we create a good game maker From time to time, we do get requests for features and are added to our growing list of items, and it's simply not possible to implement them all right away, it's often a careful choice about which feature benefits the most users. For example, if it was a choice between a heightmap importer or more textures to paint the ground with, and you HAD to select ONE to do FIRST which one would you choose? We face this decision five times a day with an entire games engine worth of features. Not an easy thing. To resolve this, and to make the process as transparent as possible, we will be creating a voting board which will allow everyone in the community to weight the things they want to see coded sooner and relegate those items they are not interested in. This way we should get a good idea what the community want to see next, and if that happens to be a terrain system overhaul with more professional pipeline systems for connecting with other tools, then that is exactly what we will do. Right now we are working on the much asked for performance enhancements which will accelerate the frame rate of every game made in Game Guru so far, which I feel is a great base onto which more features can be added.

Now there IS a way in which you can get your heightmap into GameGuru, but it's a dark art and not for the faint hearted. You would need to rename a typical FPM level file as a ZIP, then extract it to a folder (password is 'mypassword') and then replace the M.DAT file with an identical structured file that contains your heightmap data, which would consist of 32 bit float values arranged as 512x512 proceeding horizontally in sequence. if you require the source code for this, please let me know and with this info you should be able to convert your own heightmap data into something GameGuru can load, and of course you must reverse the process of zipping up the new files and giving it a password of 'mypassword', then renaming the ZIP back to an FPM so you can load it in. Please let me know how you get on.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Watch a game being made and ask GameGuru questions live on WED 8TH JULY at 6PM BST on Twitch at: http://www.twitch.tv/gamegurulee

That is wonderful news, Lee. Yes I would like the source code please.

Thank you.

@LeeBamber Hi Lee, and thank you for your reply. Apologies for not responding sooner but I have been away from GameGuru for a while. The idea of importing my L3DT heightmaps into GameGuru is intriguing, specially since I am working on these terrains in another engine now. Unfortunately it is not something I have the time for though, sorry. Thank you for the script offer though, it is very much appreciated

I'd like to take a crack at creating some procedural maps if the source code for this part is available to get some insight into the file structure

@Myke and cybernescence

Hi there. I was wondering if Lee ever made available the source code for this. I have just finished creating terrains for a Unity project, but it would be great to try and get these into GameGuru too.

Lee, I tried my hand at it and it is actually quite easy and straightforward thing to do, only, how complete and lasting is this information ?
Example: the file m.dat is actually 4 times the size necessary to hold 512x512 floats. Can we safely use the empty space ? (i suppose so)

Is it safe to exchange the heightmap of an existing map, when entities have already been placed on the "native" map ? (probably not)

@Polaraul - I didn't get any source code, but started investigating (like yrkoon has) with the map files (got huge pits and large mountains), so it does look feasible as Lee indicated. I haven't spent too much more time on it though as I'd much prefer to have some solid clues from the source code rather than guess/change/test/repeat - I do enough of that already with GG

Cheers.

@cybernescence Many thanks for your reply.

Like you and yrkoon, I investigated the file structure but decided to hold off until maybe the source code Lee mentioned was available. I was just really curious to see how heightmaps produced in other applications looked in GameGuru

Maybe try emailing Lee directly and kindly ask for the source code.

@Polaraul & @cybernescence
I'm more or less glad to see that everybody who tried the matter is having the same reservations about going too far onto the ice at this moment as myself.

Actually, fetching an external height map into GG is an ancilliary target for me, maybe, this also the case with you guys?
What program languages are you using ?
Maybe, we can exchange ideas or even some code between us ?

@Bored of the Rings
We don't actually need Lee's code, unless it is heavily commented why certain things are as they are and what Lee's - at least mid-term - plans for the format are. The latter is what we really Need. Look here .

Hi yrkoon.

Fetching and external heightmap, either in RAW format or as a PNG was the primary goal for me. I was going to keep it within the TGC family and use AGK. It looks as though you managed to make some progress though

Try DB pro.

Hi, Polaraul

Uhmmm.... I see.... Although I own it, I wouldn't know how to do that in AGK.
What I have is done in PureBasic, because that Basic has (amongst many other things) built-in ZIP Support (so I do not have to rename and decompress files manually), and it lets me do all that fancy window and gadgets stuff easily. FreeBasic my be another alternative, and it is free; there seem to be user-driven initiatives in the old TGC Forums to port things to FreeBasic.

That picture is almost 2 weeks old, and, although being short of free time, I have done more in terms of concept (such as doing automatic backups of files accessed with my program, just to be safe) and adding buttons for certain functionality I want to create in the empty space left of the map picture, etc. But it is still mostly a proof that if one interprets Lee's words correctly, it can be done as he told us.

Once it is "finished" (if such a state exists at all for a piece of software) , I think, it should be re-created in C++, so it may even be possible to issue a plugin for GG and keep it maintained in accordance with the compiler used to create GG - if TGC liked it.

But: it was quite worrying to read that there are complaints that (too?) many users are aware of the required password and, thus, TGC may adopt a more "secure" protection, making such operations as reading in the files probably impossible for non-TGC associates. That kinda curbed my eagerness to proceed.

@ Pirate Myke

Man!
Are we not just being told that GG is leaving DBP behind in favour of C++ ?
Which in turn means to me that DBPro is doomed more than ever.
Sorry, DBPro is not an option to me.

Best regards

the core will be programmed in C++. Lua will be the coding language.

But right now GG uses the DBpro blitzterrain.dll to make the terrain.
So it just might be what we all are looking for to get the height maps into GG.

Might this change in the future. It may or it may not. There is a lot of functionality in the DBPro code still.

I beg to differ, Myke.
The way I see it - and we're following Lee's advice - : we basically exchange one complete m.dat file for another, as a whole thing (maybe effecting more or less minor changes on the fly to the target m.dat file to replace the native m.dat). We're not working on any m.dat files in use at the same time by the GG Editor.

Other than the mere possibility that the blitzterrain.dll may have some built-in option to import certain "alien" height maps, I can't see what that dll has to do with what we want to do .

Since the (current) format of m.dat is really simple, a converter built to spit out something in that format is easy to write - and we're talking file conversions only, here, why on earth would I choose a language with practically no official support and forseeable any future ? Even if it weren't for the latter two points, I personally would prefer practically any programming language over DBPro to accomplish the task. DBPro may have been good at producing DirectX9 graphics but else ....

ok.

Thanks for the info Myke.

I had no idea that GameGuru used Blitzwerks Terrain to generate landscapes, but looking at how it works, and back over Lee's blog posts, I can now understand better how GameGuru internally generates its terrains.

Your welcome.