Hey guys its been many months and the primarily user base on Steam is still using DX9. Is there any set deadline for when the DX11 will officially release as the primary build for Game Guru. Its about time? What are TGC's plans here?

EDIT: The DX11 Release has come!
https://www.game-guru.com/news-post/gameguru-directx-11-pbr-major-update

No date set but in all honesty its still not ready ...
EBE has issues with DX11 .. Don't think light mapping works properly with PBR ... Third person still has issues ...
I think we still have a way to go yet

ah okay good point on those key elements that are not working 100% yet. I'm assuming these should be prioritized. Actually that might be a good idea for the github, adding a priority level tagging system of sorts.

It won't change anything, people will still get low fps or the same graphics - most of these users won't have a clue how to make it any different.
I don't think the devs should be worried about anything except real bug reports.

GitHub is great and the stuff being added and planned is amazing .
But yes I agree the bugs and getting other features working properly should be the official priority..
Anything else is a bonus

The problem with "getting other features working properly" as far as the GitHub effort is concerned is that no one except Lee seems to know what "working properly" actually means! It's not like there is any design documentation or even a feature road-map to work from. I can see a lot of things that I consider to be not working properly but that may just be because I don't understand how Lee intended those things to work.

For example there is a 'Scale' command in Lua which changes the scale values for an entity making it appear bigger or smaller on screen, but if you use it you will find it doesn't actually change the size of the collision shape, also the origin point for an entity is always the 'unscaled' value (i.e. when using ResetPosition or similar commands) which results in all sorts of strange maths going on in the code to position things correctly. I haven't 'fixed' this because if I did I suspect the entire entity animation process would not work as it does now and more things would end up 'broken'.

I can sort of understand the rationale for why it was done this way as, I think, the intention was to have the entity details stored once (along with the collision shape) and then simply re-used for each 'scaled' version of the same entity. For example if you have a thousand trees at all different scales and positions you only have one base mesh which is then positioned, rotated and scaled on the fly for each copy on the map, but I can't help thinking that the positioning code could be a lot simpler than it currently is.

One thing I can see straight away that could simplify things a lot would be the ability to paint large areas of the map, or block off areas in some way, to indicate to the engine that they should be simply 'visible background' areas, that way the engine could ignore those areas as far as collision shapes is concerned or just create one collision shape to encompass the area. Even a simple box that could be used to mark off an area of the map, outside which collision shapes are not created, might be a neat addition.

Kind of what I meant really ....
Lee can now spend almost 100% fixing whilst other users , contracts or whatever can work on goodies
Easier to type on a keyboard than reality I know but that's how I thought it would go ..

That sounds like a good idea .

Dave

Long time ago someone said „ when it’s done“. (Id guy)
I hope end of the summer it’s „done“
I guess the DX11 update is much more work than Lee expected.
But I can wait some more time, for a good stable dx11 version. With not so many bugs.

Hi dear people who contribute to the development GG! Thank you for your work!
I have a couple of thoughts, If you are interested in hearing the opinion of an "simple advanced user" with a little lua knowledge.
I think the road map is an important thing. I worked for a while on creating sites - and the road map helped greatly in prioritizing.

My humble opinion! Thanks to you, you have already made a huge contribution to the new functions. Perhaps, it is worth concentrating on catching bugs-hunting, bring DX11 to release.
Then, it is possible to try to improve the speed of the Game Guru (in next patch), this is road map would greatly raise the ratings GG, can be very strong. Imo. Achilles heel of GG - incomprehensible falls of fps even on a map with stock models when the number of entities exceeds hundred or two, or even less than a hundred.
Even more incomprehensible, when you look at the rock or simple wall, but FPS is less than in the open area.

PS. Maybe you, as experienced people, will advise Lee to start a road map .. and pay attention to problems with FPS.
I myself feel shy.

I guess Lee has a roadmap for 2018, but don’t forget we’ve also a voting board.
So the community has some influence what will be the next big thing.

DX 11 well that's outdated now as its DX 12 that everyone's going on about.
They should scrap DX 11 and go straight to 12.
When myself and many others backed fps reloaded we backed it for what it was going to be.
That never came about and then it was changed to GameGuru and you still cant use it as a game creator
as i said years ago that i cant see this going anywhere .
Not when the game creators put more of there time in the app game kit and my world creator this will never be a
fully finished product and will be dropped.
And who ever came up with the idea about a donation system to get this to be a fully working product as should have
been never backed it in the first place.

Windows 10 only ....
You have just put yourself out of business and lost thousands in sales ..


That's not what its for ...
Since your last post was 2015 I suggest you read up before putting your foot in it ..

@synchromesh

Just thought I would be devils advocate and point out that in 5 years the only versions of Windows supported by Microsoft will be of Windows 10.

All the other will be going the way of XP.
Windows 7 ceases to be supported January 2020 and windows 8.1 from January 2023 so Windows 10 only would not effect sales for long.
see
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet

As for DirectX11 who kmows though I expect it will soon fall off the supported list as GPU makers adopt a more steamlined and cost effective support model like the one Microsoft is moving towards.

This is something I think Lee will need to keep an eye on, ( unless allowing GG to die a natural death due to factors out of his control is part of his retirement plans then so be it.)

DirectX12 is for organisations who have a decent developer team size. You can use directX12 to develop more for the hardware and less for the software like windows. It makes everything more complicated than directX11. With Lee as the only full time developer for GG, we definitely need a full year to implement it and another one to fix all bugs which comes through the hardware-near programming. As long directX11 is supported by microsoft we should stay there. Except Lee gets like other organisations some millions from microsoft to implement it(like BF1).

If anybody want to discuss about this, he should really look at some code and not watching fancy thousand dollar trailers and say, "we need that". Nobody needed directX12 except microsoft, because the gaming industry complained that they would like to develop for PC, but they prefer consoles, because they can better "talk" to the hardware. Now microsoft pass the buck to the industry back....

I realise that but even so in 5 years time you still wont actually need DX12. GameGuru will still work happily with DX11 ..
Plus the fact its made to sound amazing when to the casual eye and home user its pretty identical visually .. Slightly better for the GPU perhaps but not worth suddenly saying DX12 only that's for sure ..

The old donkey and carrot thing they will always dangle something new in front of your nose hoping you will blindly follow it .

Dave

ugh my own personal irritation with modern games is over lengthy animations when you achieve something and very little gameplay.

A lot can change in technology in 5 years... By then there's probably already dx13 or 14 or even some other technology that replaced DX altogether.


I don't think so,Lee has always said it would be a big time commitment... And many users warned before it started that it wouldn't really be worth it for the average user.

We can only wait, creating GG is a huge task and very daunting for 1 person to do (glad to see there are more people more actively able to help now).

Also it is holiday time here in UK so I expect Lee is/has been away from work for a short while.

He did and everybody said they wanted it (or most did ) so we just have to wait for what we asked for I think most of the hard work has been done

Dave

lol yep I was one of those nay sayers and now I have embraced it

You'd be surprised how many great AAA games are coming out still running on DX11. Developers are not taking the risk of losing customers just to make a Windows 10 exclusive game.

Yeah, personally I can't see why anyone would not want Win 10.

That said, just because MS stops supporting older versions of Windows, doesn't mean everyone will jump on board the Win10 train until they absolutely have too.

I am running Win 10 as an Insider (have been since its first release), and GG DX9 runs perfectly fine on it as does GG DX11, just as they do on pre-Win 10 OS's.

We definitely don't need to keep rebuilding the engine to keep up with the latest, we all know the latest is already outdated when you get it anyhow. Lets just make Game-Guru awesome with finished-off features, and awesome game-making capabilities, along with a great community behind it

Reliquia....

The problem with going to dx12 as said above is that it will limit users to Windows 10, and true within 5 years only windows 10 will be supported, but if history is anything to go by there will still be huge amounts of users still using other versions of Windows, just loOK at what happened with windows xp, there's still a lot of users refusing to move on from xp and it's been decades since they updated xp. Restricing yourself to the latest dx version would be shooting yourself in the foot, the main reason Lee has finally agreed to move on to dx11 now is because the market has finally started to shift it's spread enough that dx11 users outnumber dx9 users by a lot, he resisted the move for a long time because there was still a majority using dx9 and making the change would effect sales badly at the time.

BTW...
One of the other comments was the Donation System ...
Anyone checked it out recently .. Looking good

We still have to wait, it is a long wait but software development is complex and cost a lot of time to solve the bugs, I made a lot of Macro scripts in excel which is not so complex as GG but was still a time spending job. What I have seen the last months was great work by the GG team. So we still wait for the next release to go on with gamecreation. GG-team I wish you succes with this complex job.

Just wait until we actually start to use DX11 for effects/speed/visuals, your in for a big surprise, currently its all about making it work like DX9, so old levels still works. But after that ...

My personal #1 has been fixing the bugs (the boring work, but the most important i think), but i wonder what you all think.

Where should the time be spent ?

What do you think should be done "features" before a officially release can be considered ?
What bugs do you all see as "show stoppers" before the big release ?

I think it is best to have a good official release of the DX11 version before adding more features, hopefully on par with the DX9 performance.

Volumetric particles would be really nice ... it was on top of the voting board but got eclipsed and I thought wrapped up with DX11 update.



Thanks - it is much appreciated

Cheers.

Multiple dynamic light.?..
No way 3 is enough even for a very basic game....
Looking forward to seeing that.

Unird12b

Most definitely; it should always be up to the developer to control those things not the software


Indeed - this would be very nice indeed

Having said that:


Yes always bugs first.... then more features. Features are always welcome, but it is pointless if the software can't be used to create games that are robust enough to let others play them.

As far as I know the biggest problems people are having are performance, memory, stand-alone, and AI, all of which put a real damper on anyone who wants to release a game.

My personal opinion is that features, when added, should never be half baked. If it is worth adding, then it should be optimized until it works as intended - then and only then should the next bell or whistle be added.

So yeah, fix the bugs, then add more bells and whistles

Reliquia....

can we have the exe's manifests updated so that they run as admin from the get go with no user manual elevation?