23rd August 2017
It would seem my exhaustive update from yesterday was 'eaten' due to my previous progress post getting too big, so to continue to keep you updated I have started a new one, and to clean up the latest greatest news as we move slowly into beta and PBR country. Briefly, yesterday saw some good fixes covering improved terrain highlighter, clean-up of the IDE menus, better prompting when first initialize terrain painter, better waypoint highlighter and finally fixing the issue with the grass rendering caused by some horrid DirectX 9 vs DirectX 11 methods of handling the RBGA vs BGRA pixel formats. Today also yielded some good fixes including an improved fix in the light mapper for non-standard DirectX 11 formats from older texture files, distant characters that now fog correctly, gun no longer sinks into cartoon terrain, fantasy characters move again, F9 in test game no longer flickers the FOV and a splatter of smaller issues I corrected along the way. As you might imagine from a coder, my day has slipped into late evening coding sessions and I write this at 11:45 PM and just about to put down the keyboard to get something to eat. I have a morning reset at 9AM so won't be getting much sleep between now, a meal and more coding, but I should be very close to creating an internal beta by the end of this final stint. I also took time today to judge all the Easy Building Editor competition entries and will be making those announcements Thursday as planned, and award the lucky winners their prizes and new forum badges. Sorry for the wait and I assure you I won't be doing entire engine ports very often!

29th August 2017
Well, the day has finally come when I am able to start the process of uploading an internal beta to the Steam portal, partly to ensure any new files are being accounted for, and also to give some users a chance at an extremely early feel for the DirectX 11 loading speeds. There are no fancy new visuals to look at yet, no massive increase in rendering speed, just plenty of what you had before with a few bugs to lord over. Most of the 'good stuff' will be happening in September and I look forward to bringing you screenshots as well as news updates to get you excited for the long awaited GameGuru update of the year. Goodbye DirectX 9, hello DirectX 11!

30th August 2017
For the small group of internal beta testers, the extraordinary wait has paid off and their Steam client has furnished them with what I am calling a pre-beta which vaguely describes a build that restored 98% of legacy functionality to GameGuru, but under DirectX 11. I am already getting bug reports coming in so thanks to my testers for that. I am in a meeting Thursday but Friday will be the first day of responding to legacy issues, and resolving some other major issues that occurred since the last update, specifically the A.I freeze issue and some other project stopping matters. The remaining time will be spent updating the new welcome dialog, adding FBX animation support and crafting the first version of the new PBR rendering mode which will require a slightly altered art path for game assets that require rendering. As you may know, there are a number of PBR techniques available to choose from, but a few commonalities that they all share, and these will be the principals I will be following to get our first batch of PBR FBX models rendering under the newly ported engine. I also plan to weave a bit of additional education into the intro for new users so it's understood how PBR models are created and the skill that goes into creating them for your quality game visuals. Rest assured I will not be providing 6GB of PBR game models in the near future, and offering more standardised industry methods for you to get high-quality graphics into your game. Don't worry though, all existing non-PBR assets will still be available as always, but with a small disclaimer to explain to users that they are not suitable for the purpose of impressing the commercial games buying public (though you are still free to do so if you wish). Any new graphics created by TGC or sold from third party collections will be PBR ready and allow a higher bar of graphics quality to be reached, all wrapped up in the friendly game maker you know so well.