7th March 2017
Having given the 2017.02.28 update a chance to settle down and really get a thrashing, I now have a number of fixes to make to improve and restore the AI system to where you need it to be, so thanks to those that produced videos, steps and levels for me to test and reproduce with. Here are my tasks so far, but expect plenty more during the rest of this week:

* Fixed melee punch condition to revert to recover and prevent startidle movement
* NOTE: Noticed MoveForward creates physics inertia and slides AI object WAY ahead of final pos when FAST
* Increased timing of path regeneration to avoid fast AI bots stop/start effect
* Improved COMBATCORE script for better classic Zombie and melee AI behavior
* Zombies (combat melee script) now remain idle until player detected
* Critically halved motion multiplayer to stop zombie/legacy character sliding
* Fixed soldier AI so those who patrol paths can continue doing so, even after stopping

8th March 2017
Work continued on the AI improvements, and I also found time to get the voting board updated and a thread started to collect final tweaks before we press the big red reset button on the old votes. Here are my tasks from today (which includes an update to the beta and public preview builds):

* Updated the legacy character movement to include the new character avoidance logic
* Restored AI bot speed system and readjusted Zombie characters to correct issues
* Reduced turn speed so characters no longer turn instantly to their new direction
* Ensured when high-speed AI reaches very last node, stop movement flag sooner (stop move spin)
* Replaced code which contains AI within their designated floor zones
* Increased frequency of path generation from 1 second down to 0.75 seconds

9th March 2017
More AI improvements and Building Editor fixes to get the most common reports sorted sooner. I had hoped to start some new cool things for the March update but it makes perfect sense to sort AI and Building Editor while the iron is hot:

* Removed forced animation speed from new AI behaviors to allow entity property control
* Removed forced turn speed from new AI behaviors to change it via entity SPEED property control
* Improved stair climbing detection for faster AI bots and characters in general
* Removed TEXTUREPATH from saved EBE entities to prevent use of temp ebebank\default caches
* Increased speed of all soldier characters to match legacy tweaks and AI back-end movers
* Stopped duplicate EBE thumbs being created in local library entitybank list
* Any EBE temp files and EBE texture files are removed from testmap folder on NEW level
* NOTE: It is normal for EBE items to disappear from local library, only their copies are used
* NOTE: To treat an EBE as a normal entity, simply delete the EBE file associated with it
* Building Editor textures recovered after texture cache clearance deletes them on session exit

10th March 2017
In addition to some essential fixes, I took a small break to drag some new assets kicking and screaming into the SCIFI DLC. They had been lying around for a while now, and I also made a commitment to improving the DLCs we offer from time to time with new content. Thanks to the new AI system, and the foresight of my artist to create cool stuff, for those lucky enough to own the SCIFI DLC you will soon be able to drop scout, security and self-exploding drones into your futuristic game level and watch them patrol paths, and go nutsoid when they see you. I have also dragged across the Futuretek Shotgun into the DLC as well, as I needed a back-end weapon for the security drone and it fitted well. Anyhoo, as part of this asset collection, scripting and testing, you also get some new features a la gratis:

* Fixed issue of multi material models with short texture names corrupting model data
* Corrected multi material object rendering to once again populate first slot with diffuse texture
* NOTE: The above fixes ensures the Galaxy Seed sky scrolling effect is restored
* The ENDCOLLISION property no longer sends ragdolls through floor and entities
* Added 'forceobstaclesliceheight' to FPE fields to allow AI obstacle plane height to be set
* Added 'notanoccludee' to FPE so entities can be designed to never get occluded by occluder
* Adjusted blood splat decal effect so only used if NO 'materialindex' specified in FPE
* Added 'explodedamage' to FPE to specify the default explosion yield of specific entities
* Added 'hoverfactor' to FPE to give hovering capability to 'flying' entities (drones)
* New SCIFI DLC Assets (Mission To Mars) and all new DRONES - Definitely Check It Out!

Onto some good news for me, not so much for you guys, I will be away next week to celebrate St Patricks Day in the United States and doing a few touristy things to chill my brain including some skiing at Lake Tahoe. I promise to be careful and not break my fingers off, and will resume my coding when I return on the 20th. After some evening testing, I will be releasing the above updates as the official build so everyone can enjoy the critical fixes to the AI and the extra boon from the other features. It's been great fun developing at this pace and quantity, and I hope you're seeing the benefit of this blitz through 2017. Hopefully the voting board reset will yield even more goodies for everyone too, so exciting times all round.

If you subscribe to my Twitter feed (@leebambertgc) I might even post a few photos of my antics next week and for those steadfastly waiting for the next GameGuru update, my plan is to get stuck into some water related issues you have been reporting for a while now. As you can see so far this month, AI has remained my top priority until it gets you where you want to go, and will remain so given the importance of it, and my return will resume this work to ensure it does the job. If I can return to some simple step by step bug reports to reproduce the issue quickly, I can guarantee quick fixes and turnarounds for you, but until that intensity returns, let me thank you for your help during these updates, and wish you the best for your game projects in the coming week.

Just a few things left to do now, some more testing, final release, build a replacement PC as my role of hardware guy, pack suitcase, check documents, crack open a bottle of Jack and catch-up on my boring but essential non-development emails I reserve for when I wear my CEO hat. Hopefully, TGC still exists when I return in 10 days Until then, happy game making!

22nd March 2017
Well, I've had my nice holiday for the year, and now I'm back in the hot seat ready to continue coding. Spent most of Tuesday sorting out backlog (a lot of backlog) and then Wednesday stuck into fixes and new features for March update. As you can see from my last entry, you might get a clue which one of the top items I have chosen as my pet project. The top vote by the end of April will be the one I will code in May, but terrain textures have been requested for well over a year and I had some ideas on the plane back to the UK how it could be done, and so this will be my own selection from the list. Progress is going very swift, which often happens when you spend more time thinking than coding, and performance so far is higher than the current terrain renderer, so that's good news. Thursday I plan to re-use some of the UI and custom texture techniques borrowed from the Building Editor to allow the texture atlas palette to be altered to whatever you want, so that's 16 textures in any order and ones chosen by you. I will also write something to convert the old terrain texture system so older projects will continue as though nothing has changed, so this should be fully backwards compatible Also thanks for the videos of the remaining AI issues, I will be checking those out as part of this update too. Here is my list from today:

* Added new switches in fixtures folder with new scripts to control doors remotely
* Breaks association from linked parent when EXTRACT used on an entity
* Improved accuracy of texture paint cursor at lowest brush radius
* Prototyped a new terrain shader to allow 16 textures to be painted instead of 4 (half way through)

24th March 2017
I was intending to finish off the terrain texture stuff, but decided to tackle the EBE issues reported from the previous update and found enough to keep me busy there, but the good news is that the issues I was able to reproduce are now solved. I did not get a chance to upload an internal beta this evening, but I have the weekend and don't intend to sit on my hands, so I hope to bring good news of fixes in a day or three. Here is my task list so far:

* Fixed AI_WANDERER script to use correct internal function names
* EBE structures loaded into level now carry the correct textures into level
* EBE structures being edited now use their own correct textures previously stored
* When save EBE structure, it now uses unique texture in ebebank, not current one

27th March 2017
This update has taken me right to the wire, and perhaps a shade over it to eat into some of my testing time. I had to use a lot of the weekend to chase an extremely annoying texture artifact problem which turned out to be related to the strange way in which GPU hardware renders to the screen. Some of you might know that all modern GPU's render to the screen in quad batches (2x2) for performance reasons, and this process when drilled down into the pixel shader can throw up some interesting pixel errors when you take FULL control of where the pixels come from. After 20+ hours of essentially scratching my head, and rewriting the terrain texture technique using volume textures and even cube textures, I finally understood the nature of the original issue and reverted to the original 16 textures per terrain approach and solved 90% of the issues. The last 10% threatened to delay my scheduled update so I have left it in for you to discover, and to put out the challenge to the community to see if someone can solve it before I do.

The issue comes down to a single question, "what are the correct partial derivative values for the tex2Dgrad commands that are used to fetch the texture atlas texels allowing for both mipmapping and texture filtering?". I believe I have solved the mipmapping issue, but I suspect the min/mag filter requirements are not being met by the current DDX and DDY values currently passed into the texture fetch command. Naturally, I will continue learning about this strange GPU art form, but I am also opening it up to brain box shader experts who might throw me the answer as an afterthought.

Anyhoo, it's been a 16 hour day but I have added all the code I had hoped to add today, and tomorrow is my big testing day to make sure the other 98% of GameGuru functions normally, and also to allow my internal beta testers to thrash the version too. So more testing on Tuesday, but for now here is my current completed task list:

* Prevented rogue 'loaded' temp EBE items being added to local library list
* Stopped crash when an EBE that shares a texture is edited to customize the texture
* Created new terrain texture system which uses a single atlas texture inc 16 textures
* Terrain texture system scans for old terrain bank folders and creates new atlas
* Add new UI for terrain texture painter to select and customize up to 16 textures
* Grass no longer overwrites underlying terrain paint for more grassy options
* Corrected several AI_*.LUA scripts which used incorrect MAIN and INIT names
* Created new terrainbuild\texturesource folder to store new terrain texture choices
* Now only shows grass paint in grass painting mode for better texture editing
* Updated super texture to handle new 16 texture terrain (instead of previous 4)
* Trigger super texture to recalculate if terrain texture change detected
* Added new 'default.fpm' which loads automatically when welcome splash present
* NOTE: Above helps show new users GameGuru is more than just a green flat landscape

28th March 2017
Another long day, another internal beta update and this one comes with a host of fixes, plus some 'usability improvements' suggested by Ricky baby who felt the experience could be improved somewhat. The big news is the help everyone provided on the strange GPU issue that had me stumped, and finally Preben who weighed in with the actual shader code fixes to solve the problem completely. What a guy! The last hour I have been testing and all my tweaks are holding up, so time for another internal beta update very soon, but I intent to continue testing to ensure some other areas are in check. I suspect a memory leak, but have no proof yet, so going to break out the Visual Studio memory monitor and see if it helps the cause. Here are my fixes from today so far:

* Moved super terrain texture palette generation until leave texture selector panel
* Resets terrain texture painting mode when start new map to remove unwanted panel
* When start new level, texture terrain panel instantly removed if was open
* When change levels in editor, terrain texture panel now reflects latest texture
* Removed redundant terrain texture toolbar icons, replaced with single button
* Terrain textuer selector custom requester now points to PNG initially
* NOTE: Above coupled with Diffuse Only PNGs screens out accompanying Normal files
* Fixed small seam effect between texture choices (thanks to the mighty Preben!!)
* Now removes the terrain texture panel quicker when have it open and load FPM
* When enter F9 mode, no longer brings up terrain texture panel in-game
* Entirely moved terrain texture palette generation to test/game process
* Empties custom terrain texture files from testmap when start new level map
* When start new level, terrain texture panel selection image restored to default

29th March 2017
We have now narrowed in on a good version, and the few minor tweaks below get it to where a first version needs to be. Going to spend a few more hours on testing the overall software (not just terrain texturing) and then go live so we can catch anything not found during beta and preview tests. I am sure one or two things will pop up but I have Thursday and Friday to resolve any last minute issues quickly so by the end of the week we should have a lovely enhanced terrain texturing system for everyone to play with. A question has been raised about the 'banding' effect from the internal team but without a radical re-write of the terrain system in general, the existing rules apply and if in any doubt I have made a video showing the correct way to make your terrains without banding. I do feel the issue should not go away however, and I will be looking to use my freed up GREEN and ALPHA channels of the paint map to come up with a cool solution that keeps what we have but gives users the extra ease they require (my first 'quick' thought was a simple second layer that can paint independently over the first, which offers plenty of solutions, but would be a performance hit so want to leave that experiment until after release). For now, here are my final tweaks before I send up the final public preview build prior to going live:

* Moved terrain texture paint toolbar icons to join other terrain button tools
* The IMPROVEDDISTANCE setting is now set to ON by default, improving distant textures
* Small corrections to terrain rock ratio and normal mapping for improved visuals
* Fixed issue causing all specular to be dropped from textures, now restored
* Ensured terrain texture panel texture selection does not render its alpha elements
* Switched the new terrain texture diffuse plate to use DXT5 which preserves specular
* The black terrain issue may be solved - the new DXT5 memory size is 16MB vs 64MB

No new screenshot to accompany this update, but I can send you a nice link to the new Voting Board layout: https://www.game-guru.com/feature-vote

No fancy fangled screenshot, but a nice video which shows you how to create layers for your AI characters using the Floor Zone:

Again, no new screenshot, but as an aside, how about a lot of new assets for the SCIFI DLC. If you don't already have it, you are really going to need it if you are making a futuristic game that needs Drones:

I created a quick video yesterday to answer a question about adding stock enemies to a roof-top (in my attempt to reproduce a reported issue), but valuable nonetheless for those who did not know about the Floor Zone marker and a nice little post to keep the progress thread alive:

Your next update is right around the corner, the long awaited 16 texture terrain system, allowing much more interesting terrains to be crafted, though you might find yourself spending a lot more time in your creation (so sorry about that).



I also wanted to announce that if you don't own the SCIFI DLC pack (the one with the crashed moon ship, aliens and the newly added Drones) then it's just gone on sale last night so currently represents a real bargain if one of your next projects is set in space: http://store.steampowered.com/app/404570/

And finally, for those not on my internal beta team, but would like to check out the update before it goes out for real (and report any urgent show stoppers), I have made the version from tonight available as a Public Preview. Please let me know if anything is amiss before Tuesday 5PM GMT And before I go to bed for a few hours kip, here is my final 'mess about while testing' vista I made while thinking about future terrain possibilities:

To encourage this thread to update, I have made and posted a quick video which shows you how to use the new Terrain Texture System to create the most horrible hill in the world:



I fully expect mountains to vastly improve in the coming months as I have a few more pet ideas I want to seed into this system so we can knock out something more akin to a realistic large landscape. More on that once we've tackled a few AI and Building Editor issues, as I don't want to get too far ahead of things. Always good to make sure everyone is on the bus before you put your foot down

I was using shimmer because those textures provided the best look and feel for a natural environment in my view.
I took a quick look at the new update and the first thing i noticed is how different it looks compared to previous versions, it really stands out now as if there truly is height difference in the grass and sand.
Having 16 textures for the terrain will really make a difference

Lee and Preben, thumbs up and hats off

There is however something which i encounted earlier Lee, i've loaded the new default map and moved the marker to another location near the water.
This is what happens with the foliage, it floats in the air.

Strange. I tried to open game guru. got a steam error. now it won't update or open. did not say what the error is.

Are you using the "spray" function on that foliage? I wouldn't recommend that on any slope, it behaves oddly.



EDIT: Oh, and by the way, I am really liking the multiple terrain textures, and have barely got my feet wet with them. The video was very helpful as well, thank you, Lee! It will take a bit of planning on the terrain palette to get all those textures in the right sequence, but in the end I think it will pay off!

New terrain texture is interesting.
My texture pallet:

Noticing that the pallet generator, flips the corners of my textures. Is there a reason for this?

Walk thru:










Gives a nice variety.
Blending can be a little tricky.
What is the best transparency for the diffuse texture? Also how is the specular generated for use?

Seconded.

Like i said in another thread, although we have sixteen slots now, because of the way they blend we effectively don't have 16 textures, we have four or five textures with the rest of the slots needing to have gradients of those textures to get the blend to look right. I would have preferred instead of 16 slots having 4 sets of 4 textures sharing layers so we can have some variety, the way it is now we still don't have variety because most of the slots are taken up with gradients of the textures we are using.

Also if you want to do a thin path you can't any more because here are so many bands of blended textures around it you have to paint over a certain sized area before the texture you are painting shows, so now we're also stuck with giant width paths.

Please Lee, at the very least reduce the number of blend bands down to two or three, this is unusable for me at the moment.

An option to switch on and off while blending while painting would be a good idea. So we can have nice clean lines between textures, useful for inside and outside buildings without having to use floors entities.

a square brush would be extremely useful.

28 minutes work and 7 textures, realtime shadows, lighting, a desert Junkyard.

You do have to plan your terrain painting a lot more careful with the new system, but it does allow for some extremely subtle terrain alterations.

Entities used are from M Stocktons excellent Junkyard Pack

https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/10913

Screens below.

What I think what we need is 3 brushes round, square and triangular.
Those 3 should cover most texturing and sculpting needs particularly if combined with an adjustable merge boundary.

This could be achieved by having and inner and outer shape to the brush.

With textures the inner shape painting the pure texture. The gap between inner and outer containing the blended textures.
If we could control the size of the shapes independently we could set the blend area from nothing (both shapes the same size) giving a nice sharp edge to quite large blend area (outer shape much bigger than inner shape).

The same sort of brush idea could be applied to terrain sculpting with the inner shape being the area raised or lowered and the outer controlling the slope. Inner and outer close together a sharp incline further apart for gently slope. A big inner with outer very close would be good for table top type structures. A biggish inner with much large outer would make genital mounds.

The greater control the greater the flexibility to match different peoples needs.

Anyway just an idea

Sounds like a good idea, It would make designing road systems or pathways easier too, inner texture the road, outside part or blend into paths or pavements. All we need next is a fence or wall drawing tool, one that works on gradients too.

Just click and drag to draw them.

So basically you used 7 textures to basically do what we would have done before with two or three textures, so effectively we're down to only two or three real individual textures, and lots of gradients in between.

No gradients just the 1st 7 texture slots with fairly close and matching textures, the other texture slots are as default but as yet not used or replaced. If you spread a few small levels over the entire map, and use a door or teleport to move the player around the map, you can have multi levels on 1 terrain and use all these textures as and when required per section.

Looks like I should backup GG before I update tonight

err that's what gradients are lol

Basically we're stuck with a few unique textures only because we have to use closely matching textures for each to make the blend look right. We're effectively worse off now than we were before.

I really don't know whats going on but GG seems to get worse after every update
For me the sky is now messed up, the animated part doesn't match the sides and you can see seams, well variation in colour and the fog/mist looks wrong too
I've never altered the sky, its whatever the default is

Paths are tough now.

Pity there isn't a default Blend texture that just smooths out the edges

Mhmmmm the 16 textures are a step into the right direction, basically that should be enough for any imaginable level of reasonable size.

However, I have to agree that the blending is very odd and makes it partially useless as it is now. And the seams of the polygon grid on closeup...

I'll be honest, after an hour or so playing, I'm not keen either. I like the layer system as it stands.

Changing the terrain height seems to no longer change textures as before (when you paint any of the new palette) The bottom slots seem to work here, but for many this will be very confusing as it stands. More info is needed.

Some old maps do not look the same.

The default palette seems unfinished and has many duplicate textures. Is this temporary or simply how it has to be? This needs to be right, if people struggle to paint textures on the terrain (when first trying GG) they will give up quickly. The old system made it simple and easy to get into by comparison. As it is now, things are quite confusing. The second texture down on the left hand side for instance is the default grass. Changing that changes the entire terrains look. This is a little odd and seems out of place with the new system, especially as there are several grass tiles by default. You would expect the first tile on the left for this, having it the second really messes with people's neat and tidy meter Also having several of each texture is annoying as it can possibly be. Paint some grass down, then change the texture in the test game. If you picked the wrong grass it will suddenly change to sand or such. This will annoy people.

As Belidos says setting up your own gradients like this is next to useless. If we are going to have a 16 texture palette it needs to be easier to use and setup than this is. I quite liked it at first, but when I played further making a bit more than a flat map I found it quite annoying compared to the old system.

What we really need is a layer system as we had, perhaps limited to the 4 basic textures. Then the rest can be used for decoration and variety and of course paths. Now I may be missing something, it may already be the way it is setup with the last 4 slots. It is though, as clear as mud at the moment, even after having watched the terrain video Lee posted yesterday.

This new system takes some planning on the order of textures, my guess is from the bottom up, dirt/sand/soil/moss/sand/grass/gravel/rock/gravel/grass/soil/forrest

I agree very much that a smooth transition between textures would provide much more freedom in order to make good use of 16 textures.
So shouldn't the way forward be working on performance if that is the limiting factor?
How big is the performance hit as talked about in the other thread?

I have not seen a significant performance hit at all. Memory consumption goes up, but that's logical.

Yeah, that's something Lee has looked into a lot, and never been able to reproduce, it only seems to effect a handful of people, which leads me to think it's something to do with some combination of configuration on their machines, that's one of the reasons most support systems ask for full specs, because sometimes it's just a configuration somewhere and if multiple people with the same configuration report the same problem it's easier to track down.

Tried gg today for the first time in a while and i must agree with most of you,i just cant seem to be able to make a decent looking landscape.i will try again when i have more time.

Dave

Just a thought off the top of my head, i remember way back people reporting this saying it was only happening to them if they ran GamGuru directly from the .exe, and didn't happen if they ran GameGuru via Steam. Could this be happening to you too?

For the reports saying the terrain texture system is worse than before, can you paint a blank level with the old version (2017.2.28) and send me the FPM and a screenshot of this, then load the FPM into the new version and send me a screenshot from the same camera angle. There should be no difference between the old and new when painting the first slot texture onto the default fifth slot texture as the default texture selections are mapped for backward compatibility. Thanks.

As to the issue of banding and texture order, I am open to suggestions. Bear in mind performance is important to me, and any suggested techniques to re-write the terrain/texture system will detract from other features and fixes. The new system was not meant to be a magic bullet, just an increase from 4 textures to 16 under the same system with a UI that can allow selection and customisation of those textures.

Yup, that's another common denominator, most reported the same.

GameGuru does have quite a few known issues when you run it from the .exe instead of from Steam, for example the importer is known to crash if you use it when not connected to Steam, so it's advisable to run it from the Steam client. You never know, you might even find some of your other issues stop being issues if you try it lol

@Lee was there any progress in finding the cause of this blend crash?

I am very happy with the new terrain texture options, granted I have a couple of niggles (odd white lines and forward grey shadow) which are very random,
anyhow I created a little video of a small beach I created 2 textures a seashell shale type of texture and a pebble texture.

so slot one - Shells, slot two - Pebbles, slot three - Sand, slot 4 - Sand 2, I have attached a screenshot of my palette.

Resizing the brush size allows me to blend the edges quite well, I would get banding if I went straight from pebbles to grass, but if you look at the sea in real life from water to grass it is actually a gradient cloest to the tide line you get debris and pebbles as you get further away from the tide line it gets more sandy then eventually grass or concrete depending where you are, so I put that theory to test, I know the pebbles look very poor but is was a very quick attempt

@Belidos : I have attacked the code a few times, but I have never been able to reproduce it. It could be that the ultimate solution is a new terrain editing and rendering system that solves these legacy issues and resolves the larger request for improved terrain sculpting and painting features. If I can see a video of the blend crash from a fresh launch of GameGuru, it might give me inspiration as to the circumstances of the issue and give me a clue, but as of today I have never seen a video or able to reproduce, and it's not been widely reported except in isolated and non-repeatable ways.

You see, this is were the confusion is happening, yes when you do it like that it's fine, no problem at all as long as you want to paint your terrain in a fixed order, the issue is when you don't want to use that fixed order, when for example you want to make a stone path through the woods, that's when you get horrible banding, that's what we're complaining about.

Yeah exactly as i'v been saying, it's been a bark to track down, i don't envy you.

@Bod you seem to get it fairly regularly, any chance you can try and catch it on video for us?

@Belidos - do you mean this?



I see what you mean but if I spent a bit more time on my terrain textures I could make it more natural, even at the side of a real path you have soil or debris

If someone could dredge up some links to solutions on how I can do bitwise operations in a DirectX 9.0c Pixel Shader 3..0, there 'MIGHT' be a way to allow textures to be painted in any order. I say might as the limited research I have done today suggests getting floats back into integer representations and then acting on their bits can be hazardous to your health. My theory is that 32-bits gives me 15 x 2bit slots and a slot for grass information. I would ignore the 16th rock texture which is used for slope texturing, so you would only have 15 instead of 16 paintable textures but they would be order independent and even cumulative for overexposure tricks, and would only have four grade levels (none, one third, two thirds and full) but for a transition from one texture to another, this should be acceptable. All theory at the moment, but I wanted to share my thought process before I go out for the evening. Links, ideas, wild thoughts welcome and I will return in a few hours to resume my ponderings on how to get 16 textures painted on a surface with only a 32-bit texture pixel to control it all

Hi Bod

If you watch the second video again carefully you will see that I do

I raised/reported the issue yesterday

Oh lol sorry I thought you meant you didn't see that problem ,

it is random though if you watch the first video it did not happen once, on the second video it did not happen on first run either it happend on the second run near the end

In the spirit of trying random stuff to remove the shadow and lines I deleted the superterrain file, restarted GG, reloaded level and swapped terrains to another then back to original. This made the shadow etc go away. Don't know if it will return next time or this process was what sorted it really so just throwing it out there

Cheers.

well the best solution is 64bit engine. job is done then, and a lot of the issues we have will be gone.
simples.
but then going to 64bit i presume is no easy task

Another issue i'm having in this build is raising and lowering land is way too sensitive, a single quick shift click is creating massive holes in the ground, and when you hold the mouse and move it it's jerking all over the place.

Same for me, I did report this ages ago in the bugs thread :

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216776#msg2566054

@Bod - do you have bandicam running all the time? I have a problem with GG and bandicam I don't let bandicam autostart I start it when I need it if GG is already running and I open bandicam I get a session restart and lock up just like you, I get around it by closing GG open bandicam then open GG.

Does anyone else use bandicam without it running on windows startup? if so try and open it with GG running see if you get the session restart, would be interesting to see if it happens to others

I have bandicam running all the time with no issues, i do however have issues if i don't have bandicam running and tab out to load it while i'm in text mode, that will cause gameguru t crash for me.

It defaults to 'start with windows' on setup, I have a triple monitor setup 3 x 24" Benq when I first installed Bandicam I had terrible issues with GG random restarts and crashes so I disabled the 'start with windows' and the random lock ups and crashes went away, but like I said if GG is already running and you run bandicam it will always cause a session restart.

Ok ruled that one out then, do you have anything running on windows start-up that uses intensive graphic calls? i.e adobe bridge, thumbnail generator etc.

@Bod - just put a basic quick map together and used the blending tool, there is a pointed mountain see if you can blend it into a hill, I have attached the FPM for you to try