Game Guru is probably the best game creator on the market at the moment that gives complete novices the ease and accessibility of fulfilling their dreams of creating games and becoming an indie game developer for a decent price. I am currently developing a Sci-Fi themed game of my own and decided to take a break and see what the rest of the Game Guru community has being making, mainly t get some inspiration and to see what kind of standard to strive to.

I played a couple of standalone games and one of the best so far that I played being 'Curse of the Draugr' by Slaur3n, which involves finding notes while being chased by a monster a la the 'Slender man' games. It was a really decently made game with full voice acting and a moody ambient atmosphere, however the one thing that ruined the whole experience for me was the awful framerate issues that made the game grind to a crawl at times, which made the experience frustrating. Even resorting to turning down settings to low in the3 in game menu still game me issues, even though it made it at least playable.

Now my computer is not a top of the line gaming PC, but it is a mid range machine suitable for gaming and is barely a year old. It will run the new Star Wars Battlefront game on mid-high settings and still keep a decent framerate. I don't understand how these standalone games would be able to run at such a low framerate when they simply don't have the same graphical sophistication as Battlefront does.

I have also tested the standalone creator for myself and there seems to be a drastic difference in framerate from running in editor and then running in a standalone. For example, the demo game 'Get to the River' seems to have significantly higher framerate when running in editor than it does as a standalone. Why is this?

I just tried Big Escape ingame and standalone ..... both were pretty much the same for me ...
Not saying that's what your seeing though ..... what are your specs ....especially GFX card

I think Curse of the Draugr was made with the pre- C++ version of GameGuru. Games made with the newer version should be significantly faster.

Of course
Processor: AMD fx 6300 six core processor 3.5GHz
Ram: 8G
Graphics card: AMD Radeon R7 200
OS: Windows 10

But that's not the point... surely if my computer has no problems running a recent AAA game at mid/high settings surely it should be able to run a game made with Game Guru. I have no problems with the Big Escape either, but that uses a relatively small map compared to Get to the River.

I suggest that you play Cure of the Draugr, it taxes my system really bad.

Here's a link if you haven't seen it https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no3wxlcqeq7094/Curse%20of%20the%20Draugr.rar?dl=0

[quote=]I think Curse of the Draugr was made with the pre- C++ version of GameGuru. Games made with the newer version should be significantly faster.

Maybe, its just a shame because it is a good game

I think we will be adding another performance round onto the voting board once we've cleared a few higher items, and will include more focus on using additional cores to run better on lower-end CPUs. Battlefront will have been highly optimized by a small army of coders throughout the development of the title, employing the very latest and greatest n-core techniques to balance engine workload to a level that could almost be described as high art. GameGuru is developed by two doddering old school coders, and being such a small team, forced to wear many hats (including the job title of forum reply executive). It is also worth noting that one advantage of most shipped AAA game is that they know that the levels won't change, so they can precalculate things like occlusion. With GameGuru and other game makers, we don't know the scene layout until the user creates it, and we cannot ask the user to wait two hours while we calculate visibility sets, so more things have to be done in real-time, which has an unavoidable performance hit. That's not to say we're doomed, we just take a bit longer and our solutions need to be more creative, but we'll get there

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I understand that you don't have a large team to rely on and that you have a high workload and I'm not trying to take a dig at you or anyone, but there are a few really good games that showcase what people are capable of doing with Game Guru. It's just a shame they seem to suffer from framerates that see-saw all over the place. Thanks for taking things into consideration and any improvements you could make would obviously be greatly appreciated! Since I bought Game Guru in November I have kept my votes left in 'Performance' category because I believe performance to be the most important thing in my opinion, other people clearly disagree with me according to the voting results, but I will stick to my guns anyway and hope they will make there way to the top of your 'to do list'.

Thanks again!

I think many votes have moved to features, as the wait for the C++ conversion and speed boost was a long one. I agree speed could do with improving and I am sure that if users were offered an option to pre-calculate their levels to run butter smooth, they would probably be in favour. I thought Baking would sort out low end systems, but generally I don't see much difference of late (speed-wise). It certainly can take a lot of time to complete though!

At the minute most people seem to want the building editor. I can see why, but I can also see why others think performance is still top priority. I think it is too, but if all TGC do is speed it up, people will complain of lack of new features. Probably best to have a bit of both each update if possible. I think the building creator needs doing and it may be beneficial to get this done in readiness for an AI update

Speed SHOULD be better than it is now, if occlusion was working properly. I am hopeful this will be addressed and then we can actually use it with large outdoor scenes on full and hopefully see out frame rates start to even out a little. At the moment it is causing too much pop in and out and actually slows the system down more.

Of course new features are nice, but I have played a few of the games the community have made and to tell the truth some of the games are pretty well done considering the 'features' Game Guru lacks. 'Curse of the Draugr' is a good example of what someone can do right now, as well some of the other games that are in the 'showcase' section in the forum. Besides, lack of 'features' only encourages people to come up with creatives ways to overcome those shortcommings. I do agree Game Guru needs more features, but personally I want to be run the game properly, I don't really care about save/load. Most of the games I have played created in Game Guru are short anyway, even multi level ones don't take a lot of time to play. The Devs are doing there best with the time they have, I appricate that and I'm sorry to sound like I'm complaining.

I think most of the community are voting for these features because they want it fast and they want it now. I'm happy to take my time making something and figure things out for myself and experiment, that's what makes it fun.

In the Days of Radiant when I was mapping for Ravens Elite Force you had options of "quick vis" and "High vis"
I kid you not that a map would take around 2 days to complete using High Vis
Needless to say you only did it when your map was finished and ready for release ...

http://www.synchromesh.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/EDPics.html

So even an hour for me is a good thing

I totally agree, if you have spent a long time making a game and putting a lot of effort into it then waiting a few hours seems like a small price to pay. I think when it comes to LUA scripting it should be left to the community to come up with solutions and share those solutions with other community members and let them edit them to suit their own needs. The store, a long with the script forum has tons of scripts that people can use. If the the Steam Workshop was opened up as well it would also allow users to post their scripts etc and it the Devs extra time to work on other stuff.