The first thing I have to say "the update works great"
What now? do you continue to work on the Feature Vote (I believe so of course) My question relates more to updates that require little work and updates that require a lot of work. do we wait again so long for update or we have a chance to get number of small updates from the list soon?

Hi,

Our next big step will be integrating DirectX11. We won't know for sure how long this will take until we start the process. We don't estimate many issues, but they can crop up.

We do expect a number of smaller releases, and are trying to avoid such a long wait, but it was required to prepare the engine for the future.

SC

The speed update was worth to wait.

Thanks for the comments. We are planning a series of smaller updates to (a) fix anything that comes up as a direct result of the V1.1 release and (b) take some time to deal with the smaller issues currently in the GameGuru community that ultimately lead to frustration and annoyance, whether that be through giving advice, demonstrating a technique and of course fixing bugs and releasing tested builds. They will be more fixes and tweaks than new features, but extending existing feature will fall under 'tweak' so we have a lot of wiggle room. I plan to be around up to Christmas in this mode, and only really dive back into my cave to finish the DX11 integration in 2016. I think we can get a lot done in the next five weeks. if you have a pebble in your shoe, let me know about it at lee@thegamecreators.com

Now we have reasonable speed, I think AI should be looked at for GG to start making good FPS games as it was originally intended. Navigating stairs and slopes at the minimum, but being able to climb ladders and such would be welcome as well of course. For me my votes are on bot navigation and lua commands. Having all current features controlled with lua, plus a few extra commands would turn GG into a truly capable game maker. Look at what's possible now with limited commands, there are plenty of examples, my recent Shenmue video being one. I also have another project under way which pushes GG into a completely new direction, and with a few extra lua commands available would be even better.

I tried the cartoon game demo, a quick level of my own, and some level called Devil's something or other. The cartoon game ran at 60 fps, the test level was in the 80s, but that Devil's level was an abysmal 11-12 fps. Something serious needs to be done still if that's supposed to be any kind of example. Aside from lots of vegetation, it didn't have much else of anything going on. So perhaps the vegetation system needs a complete re-think.

Just tried "Devils Hill" as you got me curious and found it was running at about 46 to 50 fps which is about the speed its always been for me
Then realised everything is set on highest on default with Sunrays , bloom etc ......
A few slight alterations to what I usually run it at and now getting from 90 to 116 fps ...that's double speed for me now

Nice ...

You get 46-50 fps on default settings? Must be some video card you have there. My card isn't uber great, but it's not bad either. I'll certainly try again with lower settings to see what I get. Eventually I want to try to load up my old Rescue the Princess game and see just what improvements I can get.

I get 70-80 fps, with everything set on the highest settings (default) in that level as well. I'm running a GTX 770, that I bought about 2 years ago now, I believe. Speeds for me have doubled, and then some; with this new update.

Well, I guess a GT640 with 2GB RAM is just too weak to run this particular demo.

Hmmm I have similar specs with windows 10 and it runs fine on Hightest over 30-40 FPS. Maybe it is windows 7....

Or perhaps it's the screen resolution. I have my screen set to 1920x1080. What is yours?

I took off the bloom ( I just don't like it ) put the settings to medium as its an MP map really so no time to look at pretty things and adjusted the occlusion to my preference, adjusted the sunrays slightly ...that's when I topped the 100 fps .... if you turn off the physics on the trees at the top it gets nearer to 200 fps

I'm using a GTX 750 TI ...I have an i3 and 6 gig of ram ....
Not really what I call a huge gaming machine considering gamers have up to 16 gig of ram
i7 processors and a £295 GFX Card ...Mines only an £80 odd quid card but does the job very well for me

I'd say that's actually quite powerful. 6GB of RAM is not so big, but video card is certainly high-end.

750Ti is hardly highend it is a mid range card upto 760 is classed mid range, 770GTX and 780GTX is highend, below 750 is entry cards.

64bit ~ 128Bit entry
192bit ~ 256bit midrange
320bit ~ 768bit highend.


I have two graphics cards 570GTX and 660GTX, 570GTX is a high end card, and the 660GTX a mid range even thought the 660GTX gives better performance as the 570GTX in many instances beats the 570GTX hands down. 570GTX is still a high end card and 660GTX is still a mid range card regardless of it beating it by a decent margin.

ye like I said ...about an £80 card .... nothing amazing really.
My son keeps trying to sell me his £275 card so he can upgrade !! can you believe ..
but I have no probs with mine

Well, I guess my card is just super low end then nowadays.

Was always an entry card still hasn't changed, the lower bus speed, and raster units is what gives it weaker performance, unlike the old days of geforce 3,4,5 and 6 AGP series you could unlock the extra raster units on the card and get a good boost. From the 7 series upwards those raster units where cut with a laser and you were unable to enable those extra raster units, there were some exceptions of course.

The two most important aspect is bandwidth and raster units the more the better the card will perform, memory speed and amount is secondary.

Still, I think a similar scene in a different engine would run smooth as silk on my low-end card. So, I still think there's something here to be improved upon optimization wise.

I think it should be added, game guru doesn't use primitive geometry, and only relies entities to create a scene.It is the most negative point of gameguru, it is in no way the ideal method to go about things.

That said it is hard to accurately recreate any gameguru scene in another engine without doing some custom work, the terrain for one would be out of the question, as a default in gameguru every thing has a shader, per object to full screens shaders, so you definitely need to add those shaders or like shaders that have similar per frame render cycle, to accurately reproduce conditions in general.

I take a great deal of issue with the claims with another engine running the same scene better, while the conditions are hardly being matched or exceeded in many instances, while they may run it better, it can be said without doubt it isn't 100% possible to match conditions in these engines and is in no way an accurate performance indication, so saying the same 100 trees is running better in X, Y or Z engine, but doesn't have any applied shaders or full screen shader or a terrain matching the same size and detail as an accurate or fair statement.

My Devil's Hill (default settings) results are 50-60 FPS with a rig that I built almost 5 years ago.

My specs are:
Win7 x64, i5 @3.3GHz, 4 GB RAM, GTX 580 1.5 GB

Good job on the 1.1 update, Lee & company!

Rick

I'm the same as tomjscott-Devils Hill runs at 12-14 fps. I have Radeon AMD HD 7570 graphics card, Win7(64 bit) 12GB/Win10 32 bit.

[update-I had to turn everything down to lowest and set vegetation, water and reflection, shadows, camera distance, bloom etc to 0 to get 50 fps]

Not really. All that is needed is to make a similar terrain segment, water, trees, grass, and same/similar effects such as bloom, sun shafts, etc. The method by which the engine performs its task is irrelevant. In fact, those very methods may be the reason for the difference. Hence, it is completely valid to compare. Lee put out challenges before to re-create same/similar scenes in other engines so he could compare look and performance. I see no reason why we need to stop optimizing if there is more that can be done in specific areas.

@LeeBamber - The update has gone well. However, there is one glaring problem that really should be addressed before DX11 (unless DX11 is required to fix this) - and that's lighting; specifically indoor lighting.
There's a glaring problem of being unable to place shadows without using static decals (hardly an ideal solution) if there's no sunlight involved; it makes for an extremely difficult problem of pretty much HAVING to do an outdoor game or being very tricky just to get a modicum of functional detail out of it.

At bare minimum, allow static/dynamic lights to cast shadows via simple raycasting.
Considering games have been doing this for a very long time (doom 1, quake, etc) it'd be really fantastic to see something functional here.

Just my 2c.

@tomjscott sorry but I looked in detail at your card and it is worse than my card. We just share the 2GB, all other things are under my specs(Speed processor and so on). Sorry for my mistake

And yes I ran under 1980x1080

@DVader : Fortunately the two top requested features on the voting board are precisely what you need. We will be writing the LUA Architecture system to externalise the hard coded elements of the engine (protecting the performance of course) in order to implement a long lasting save/load feature. At the same time, this overhaul allows us to add more LUA commands as requested, and included as part of the same update, so that should come first. The second voted feature will then deal with the AI, replacing the rather limited 2D-esk pathfinding with proper 3D nav meshes so characters understand the concept of floors, stairs and ramps from any available geometry. Ladders throw up a number of issues in terms of animation syncing, but we would have better luck with characters on boats, lifts and conveyors. During my tenure over the next few weeks I will be compiling a list of 'nice to have' LUA commands, so please rack your brains and make up lots of LUA commands and I will invent them for you in 2016 when we release the next major build (as voted by you).

@tomjscott : Yes you should be getting a lot more than 12fps on the Devil's Hill level. If you have time, try disabling elements one by one to see which one contributes most to the slowdown. You can press F11 when in Test Level mode to toggle each major element, including the grass system which you suspect is the cause.

@Wizard : It would be great if someone could produce a side by side demo of GG vs one of the other engines but no one has taken up my challenge so far. It's something I might attempt myself over Christmas for fun, and also to learn what tricks we are missing in terms of rendering shortcuts.

@Bolt Action Gaming : When you say 'static decals' I am assuming you mean the lightmapper, which can produce an infinite number of indoor shadows when you use static lights (red) instead of dynamic ones (green). Most games back in the day used raycasting to pre-render scenes like Resident Evil but most games used baked lighting (lightmaps). More recently modern games have started using real time raycasting but they are pretty heavy in terms of performance and there in lies the trade off. When we do the DX11 graphics update, we will be creating a shadow system which can transition from sun light shadows to local dynamic light shadows to flash light shadows. I am also curious if you can dig up any modern games that cast multiple dynamic shadows using the raycasting technique as I would imagine this would be an intense shader at the cost of frame rate.

This all sounds like great news to me

@leebamber - thanks for the reply, though now I'm a little confused. When I said static decals, I've actually been using physical objects that look like shadows (i.e - shadow decals). Admittedly, I just got back into the game engine thing a little while ago so I'm not familiar with the lightmapper.
So if I set the lights to static and run the lightmapper (any specific level in question here?) it will cast shadows off objects?
I could have sworn I tried this and it didn't work but now I want to go home and check lol.

I might be able to do one that mimics the Devil's Hill level. If nothing else just for my own curiosity. If it turns out that I'm wrong and this other engine doesn't run so good either then I will retract my statement. In either case I will report my findings.

Regarding the indoor lighting thing:
The baking of lights only seems to affect the object itself, not the floor or nearby objects. For instance, if I set a static light in 1.1. some strange behaviors occur:
1) the light disappears utterly until 'bake time'. No previewing beforehand it seems.
2) the shadows 'bake' onto the objects as expected - but ONLY the objects. At no point do they bake onto floors or ceilings or walls.
3) I forgot my third point.



Thanks

I have made a short video showing how the lightmapping works on a simple building and light. I have asked Rick to make it a little prettier, and will post it here when it's done. Maybe send me an email reminder in 24 hours if I forget at lee@thegamecreators.com