Hello all, I was wondering if the community vote was taken away or if it is in a different place? I cant seem to find it to see what is being worked on next. Thank you.

The community vote was replaced with github. Better way of tracking, plus it gives the contributers a list of what features are wanted.

Best thing tgc has done for ages get rid of the voting board

Dave

Completely disagree.

In my opinion the voting board should remain for the official feature additions, and GitHub should be for 3rd party feature contributions. That way Lee has a customer generated roadmap for his day to day work, and the 3rd party contributors can pick and choose what they want to do from our requests on GitHub.

Unless Lee plans to start his own feature road map, and leave GitHub to deal with things outside the scope of what he has plans, then i would be happy with that, on the condition that the road map is made public so we know what is happening and in what order.

I thought the feature vote is just hidden until the reset started.


You can not vote for features in GitHub. How do you track what people want? Because something has more likes than other stuff?


Or do own things they like to see in the engine

I am for a voting board, so Lee get a roadmap again! +1

Considering Lee is focused on bug fixing for now. Anything "feature" related is completely up to the volunteer contributors at this point and time and on their own merit of interest to work on.

I did want to see how GitHub unfolded before bringing the Voting Board back into the new website, as there may have been some overlap between the GitHub issues tracker (for enhancements) and the voting board. My current plan is to take the recent survey results, the recent feedback from Steam and Forum, and my work with artists, and refine the voting board before resetting it. I do like the voting board for giving a voice to the majority, it just depends how we can make it work nicely with the resources on GitHub Comments welcome!

I think that the "voting board" is too open ended and leads to a lot of often-transient nobodies having an equal say as long-time veterans who actually know better what features and projects would really help our community.

I just don't like how anyone can go click on what often amounts to a completely ridiculous feature that we couldn't even expect from a giant commercial game engine, and their opinion is given the same weight as someone with 10 badges, 12 years of service, and 6 complete commercial games made with TGC products.

I think that we have a great feature set as is, and anyone has the ability to use LUA to script or C++ to mod and recompile the engine to make any sort of new features they want. Perhaps some improvements should be made to the stability and functionality of the features we do have: like the broken lightmapper, AI/pathfinding, the memory problem, load times, our need for a buildgame dialogue box of any kind. maybe you could improve the waypoint/zones system to make it more user friendly and not only work on terrain. all these are EXTREMELY NECESSARY if you ask anyone around here yet I don't remember seeing them on the voting board, at least not featured too prominently.

I know a lot sensible ideas that come from longtime fixtures around here often get completely ignored when the otherwise-silent majority of 10-year-olds come into a voting board and spam requests like "character maker" or "spray entities" or "tessellation" out of ignorance to the fact that these features will not improve their games at all, will take forever to make, and are honestly nothing more than just fun buzzwords to put on the toybox if we look at the track record for stuff like this (character creator, PBR, etc.). if they knew that gameguru couldn't even easily "make a game" to begin with, they would set their sights a little lower, but we cannot blame this large portion of GG users for this, as Gameguru is a GREAT learning experience, and we do want their business! We just need to take suggestions from the land owners and not the serfs.

tl;dr a more structured REPUBLIC would work a lot better than a straight up DEMOCRACY around here.

I dont like the Idea of bringing back the voting Board.

The top priorities of gameguru are clear:

- Fix the memory issue

- fix performance

- fix AI

Bringing back the voting board will just mean that stuff like "multiplayer" will go to the top, wich I am sure is nothing the "majority" of the gameguru veterans want.

(Mod hat off)

SHORT VERSION:


TL : DR VERSION
The voting board was mostly garbage. It was good for giving a general sense of what people wanted to see in the engine but having it dictate the order of development was basically letting the kids drive the schoolbus.

A good example is the DX11 stuff. Really, this should have been something integral to GG from the beginning and I think Lee knows that. Instead, we've meandered through a host of things that don't necessarily improve the core engine before getting to this point. Things like character creator or EBE are a waste without having the rendering pipeline locked down. We've also spent the last 3 years pretty much creating content that is now out of spec. There are substantial core improvements to the engine that have yet to be made and delaying their development only serves to increase the pain of broken content and broken games. I predict that a future example of this will be AI navmeshes.

GG has a big problem with retaining serious users. Like Bugsy says, most are transient and it's hard to blame them for not sticking around. There are probably a dozen really great looking projects that community members have started and never been able to finish for various reasons. There are a lot of really cool things in GG but most of them are incomplete in some way or another. Before adding wholly new features, it's my opinion that TGC ought to be filling in the framework which has already been laid down. Maybe then we can start to see some of those great projects being finished and pushed to Steam where they may serve to better evangelize the product than any promotion or review ever could. When we have tangible examples of games made with GG that are worth their weight in HDD space, perhaps we can see more dedicated game developers being added to and retained within the community.

I have trust that Lee wants GG to be a great platform that is not only accessible to new users but capable of producing games that non-familial strangers would want to play and enjoy playing. I also trust that he knows how to best build GG to be viable not only for today but for the future. The best thing that could happen would for him to be allowed to achieve this but the tyrannical majority does not usually find these types of improvements to be sexy enough to upvote.

If voting does come back, I hope we can expect to see organized voting blocs upvoting en masse for items that experienced users believe will truly strengthen the engine while deemphasizing fluff features that could be achieved indirectly by giving us more access and control over internal systems.

So your still on the fence then
J/K

I agree with Errant AI on this as I always feel features like third person can always gain some type of improvement. like most features in guru now can gain some type of improvement like the standalone or the projectile system. we keep moving forward passing up on what's already there. good gameplay is a key role in video game development and having things like inventory system can make things interesting for the development. I always feel the voting board had too much to choose from. if the voting board had more control of what you can choose from with a small amount of choices and not this long list of things that would make no sense of putting in guru before the most important improvement features then it would be better to bring back. but only a top five list then once the most voted item is done. then the voting board gets a reset with the four that is left. we break it down until the last one is done then start another top five.

I agree. There was too much on there, what Lee should have done was to take feedback from us, and applying his own knowledge, as well as some common sense, picked say 5 features/issues to list, then let us vote on them, then after each one, add another one and keep the vote going. That way we get to be involved in the decision making, but he sill has a bit of control over the direction taken.

I think we've all been using Game Guru long enough now that a lot of us are eager to move past the sandbox phase and start making real games with it. So anything that helps with that would be more ideal. Less toys and more fixes and real improvements to the semi-implemented functions and features.

The standalone process needs a lot more care and the gameplay experience some more focus. Almost every game on Steam made with Game Guru (not including troll games) has memory issues and an odd green screen of death when bouncing between save files. Also is prone to crashing when alt tabbing.

There were some very silly things on the feature voting board that I was able to add to my games myself over the coarse of only a few months of learning LUA. I found that a lot of the more crtical items on the list were things that were derailed by the Steam community of people who have no concept of game development or project development. Things like voting for a tank over a particle system or multiplayer standalone over improvements to the single player standalone builds.

I'm glad that I'm at a point now where i can at the very least add more of my own features thanks to github and with learning LUA in general. But there are still lots of issues with GG i personally am not able to fix, that are still there. I think what the current community would love to see more of is the semi-added features more finalized like particle system, 3rd person controls, projectile and weapon customization, character creator, AI, entity editing (better drawing modes similar to EBE), object group editing, multi-vegetation, memory management, improved entity search and selection controls and etc.

So basically "finishing up" what was already started.

In the end I've always trusted Lee's personal best judgement on what should be worked on first. With so many version updates as of late i think for now just ironing out all the bugs and improving whats already in GG is best and going from there. I very much missed the days of the old Lee Blog and got very excited to see what was next in store for the product, without it entirely being directed by a bunch of shouting children and adults

I love that we now have other contributors on board at the same time. Its the perfect time now for Game Guru to really fore-see its product objective.

Pretty happy the way things are at the moment .
Seems to be more happening via GitHub that the voting board.
Although I was really hoping for the " Sliding down hills "
and that's a joke by the way

I no we have waited a long time for this update ,but I think now is a time for no more additions just bug fixes for what we have now

Dave

I dont think that multiplayer as a local thing was that bad an idea if it could have been implemented easily. Quite a few people was into the idea and thats why it was climbing up on the voting board, yes i agree other major engine updates are a priority but i think that being able to run our own servers and maybe scripts on those servers would bring an extra dimention to GG
e.g being able to e.g run a multiplayer racing game etc which we cannot do atm. Dont get why you guys are dissing this idea as i think just a basic one would actually be good for GG.
Plus it would give us something to do while the engine updates are being worked on.
thing is with steam your just too limited, and it's too buggy, even if you could have say just 1 map with 4-8 players with Huds or ridable machines etc I'm pretty sure it would be popular multiplayer allways is!
@ t-Bone totally agree with the standalone needing to be brushed up
Just my 5p's worth

Multiplayer, IMO, is a great example of something that probably should have been done as a priority early-on in development but got waylaid for the likes of character creator and whatever else that came along and got more votes. Although MP (particularly standalone MP) may not be popular around here, had the devs been allowed to complete it properly, it would have necessitated more attention to core gameplay, core interaction, particle and effect systems, build security, build options, load times, etc.

Bot Co-Op aside, MP doesn't require AI/pathfinding, scripting, etc (the least "easy" aspects of GG) and, as Honkeyboy notes, would have given a viable game completion route for owners to use while the more complex aspects for good SP games were being developed. It could have also served to grow the active user-base and positively drive DLC/asset sales. Imagine if GG had secured the "easy to use battle-royale game maker" title.

Multiplayer is also a great example of a conceptually good GG feature which is incomplete and essentially unusable in current form. It is relatively cumbersome to use, far too easy to cheat by modifying local files, and not particularly fun.

I agree with Errant AI on both posts. I'm personally not into multiplayer but that seems to be very popular among young teens as well as a few oldsters.

Hi,
I am honestly enjoying this discussion of you GG-veterans very much indeed and even though you might count my GG-forum-membership rather in hours than in days or weeks, I assure you, yes I am new to GG, but neither to programming nor to the game industry, and definitely not to lessons learned in the subject of experience of live
That said, I take the liberty to join in into the discussion. And sometimes a seriously taken notice (or is it 'observation' in English language?) by a complete newcomer is in a very specific way interesting as he/she is, in our case, not "GG-history"-loaded.

Looking at GG and in a certain way also at some other relatively simple to handle engines my 2 cents are best reflected in the following quotes from a couple of you with which I entirely agree.
BTW, this "Short Version"-image by Errant AI made me really laugh loudly, as it brings it (and especially the steam review system) to the point



100% true!



yep, agree, in a slightly different way also the problem of any democracy.



That's by far the best and most important "vote" we all can bring.



True, ask people, which electric tooth-brush you should buy from the 30 in display on Amazon or in the shopping mall. You end up by coming home with none or the one you want to bring back.



+1



How can I more agree than 100 %

I had assumed the 'vote' to bring back 'voting' would be strongly in favor, but it sounds like there is an equal movement to hide or at least seriously curtail the voting board for now, and focus all endeavors to the basics (speed, stability, functionality). I will keep the voting board hidden for a while longer to allow this conversation to find all voices in the community. So far, the two strongest choices is to delay voting until we have a few more core updates under our belt, or release it with say 5 top core features (chosen from the survey and community feedback, and maybe some scrutiny from me) and let everyone vote on 5 undisputed items. I am curious though if Standalone (and improved) Multiplayer should be one of them, there does seem to be more voices saying yes at the moment

My Prio list:
1) this stupid memory bug
2) Performance(Editor and In-Game) Maybe we can implement something like DarkImposter( https://forum.thegamecreators.com/thread/218058 ) or another Lib which helps
3) Lightning(Dynamic lights should cast shadows, 2nd projectile should cast light,...., ask Wolf he knows best)
4) Standalone (Standalone creator like FPSC)
5) AI should be able to walk on all meshes(the rest we can do as community)

Whatever happens, happens. As long as something is happening

Both Improved standalone and some kind of basic local multiplayer is a winner alot of us have been waiting for this now for quite a while as long as it doesnt interfere with the core updates it has to be a step forward for GG.
At the end of the day we all want to make clean good working singleplayer standalones and personally i really think just a nice basic hosted multiplayer will bring more people to the fold, most if not all games i play, my kids play and a ton of people on steam are always asking can we host these games ourselves?
This kind of brings me to believe that it has to be a way forward even in a very basic state.
(even if we have to have hosted multiplayer hunt the rabid rabit or just a chat window with people on a map together) I've seen it work and get good reviews! people like to host their own games
@ Corno yeah agree with the memory bug thing even if it it has'nt effected me personally as i tend to do non linear projects that way i always go back to a small map which seems in most cases to cure it.

corno's list got it perfect. we need to be able to build actual games that load in reasonable time and simply work, at decent frame rates. our AI needs to simply work, especially when placed on large floor-shaped connected entity surfaces (regardless of where they are in the map)

in DX9, lighting wasnt such a big deal and seemed for the most part perfect but now that we have dx11 capabilities and "PBR" it's ludicrous we don't have dynamic lights that cast shadows, static lights that affect specular emission, and some kind of GI/radiosity capability for static lighting, so I'd even agree there too.

multiplayer would be great, but i feel like that's a whole different ball game, and it's not whether the actual feature wouldn't be good, I just think dealing with that first is not the proper course of action at this point since it's been abandoned for so long. if the actual core system was much more stable and rock-hard, when it came time to really implement multiplayer, I would assume it would come easier.

Yeah agree Bugsy it is a whole different ballgame but one that will entise more people. Just look about on steam etc at some of the complete crud that gets decent reviews purly because you can join your mates and do pointless stuff. People like this!
Yes GG's core needs some brushing up but its better than alot of engines in its own way in its current state. its easy to use the graphics are cool enough etc etc why not add something extra? I've seen some terrible 2d nasty excuse for a game get decent reviews purely because they are multiplayer!... check out minecraft rofl how much did that pile of ... make!

At this point, multiplayer may be a ship that has sailed. Generally speaking, SP modes can be successfully added to MP engines but MP modes added to SP engines almost always result in failure. There can always be MP tacked onto something but if it's only useful for non-competitive gameplay, the juice may not be worth the squeeze.

The DX11/PBR stuff is still super early on. It, like many aspects of GG is just the framework right now. So, people shouldn't be so quick to judge it too harshly. However, to really capitalize on the upgrade, we need to be seeing stuff like global illumination ( and other lighting improvements in general ), instancing, and other tech which the upgrade helps open the door to. That is to say, those in-kind add-ons shouldn't be regarded as their own separate features but rather part of the whole. It may take some stick-with-it fortitude but it would really be a shame to see the rendering improvements stall out and become yet another incomplete component. It's this trap that results in being able to do a lot of things on paper but doing few of those things particularly well in practical use.

I encourage TGC to take a more holistic approach to growing GG. When it comes to addressing basic issues, there should be no fear of evaluating difficult solutions. For example, if something like instancing can improve performance, that should be considered as a solution over simply reducing default settings or overly aggressive culling as we have seen in the past. LIkewise, if there is an improvement that can benefit both SP and MP modes, that should be prioritized over something that only affects one or the other. If there is an opportunity to score a win on multiple fronts, it should be seized upon.

Minecraft is a terrible example. it's something that's almost endlessly customizable and at the end of the day can produce stuff i don't think GG can dream of. every game engine is its own so it's not really responsible to compare engines, we just need to look at what things would actually make our engine a valueble choice for someone other than a 10 year old with no real gamedesign aspirations who will abandon it when the next new cool thing rolls onto his steam feed.

what we should look at is gameguru games on steam, and what separates them from other indie games or "B" games that are slightly older (and mainly of the FPS genre) with decent review scores. I'm sure you'll notice across the board all the "decent" FPS games have:

1. perform at great frame rates on most every computer newer than 8 years old
2. look decent with servicable lighting effects
3. load a level in less than 4 minutes
4. don't randomly crash or have memoryleak problems
5. have enemies that don't fly or jitter through the floor or cant move
6. are more than one hour long.

I will concede, of these "decent" or bargain bin games, about 50% have multiplayer. but the things above are necessary for any game. Since multiplayer is a whole other ball game, i think that it would be more sensible to at VERY LEAST have separate people devoted completely to it, with the main focus on what is really important, the 6 criteria above for a game that doesn't have all bad scores.

with these BASIC, NECESSARY upgrades that have been ignored for so long in support of other stuff we didn't really need, I have no doubt gameguru would be entirely capable with the right people using it of creating games of this ilk EASILY!

then it would truly finally be FPS creator reloaded!

Yeah was abit of a bad example :/ lol, and yep can't say i dont agree with all of those points as they definately should be top of the list, and as you say m8 maybe someone will suprise us all and implement something along the way.
P.s yeah that vid did at least run nice and quickly
@ Errant Ai yeah m8 agreed finish what you start first..
maybe i shouldn't play around with arena mode with fpsc with the black ice mod thats whats sparking the "hey this should be in GG !" and "hey why do the bullets make holes in the walls, oo those weapon pickups look cool etc... lol

I started noticing this happen when they fly up into the air and come back down again when they are pushing up against other enemies. Not sure how to reproduce exactly so ive not posted it on the github. But it has happened a few times.

I'm against the Voting Board coming back as well. There were far too many options (although in the beginning, it did give Lee a good idea on areas to begin to focus on, but we're past that now). Community-driven, seemed to evolve into Community-bog down. I also agree that more credence needs to be given to those who've not only been around for quite awhile...but have also shown that they are serious about development and can produce. Otherwise, it's just a popularity contest.

On the Multiplayer front. I've always thought it was a mistake to abandon it. There were SO many things that could be done with it; from the steady developer, to the absolute hobbyist. I had envisioned a few Clans actually making their own levels, even branding them; and doing some serious online skirmishes. If it's not too late; I think a hard look needs to be taken in bringing it back online and incorporating it.

I also agree with EAI and others; that the nuts and bolts, and what is already incorporated, needs to be fully fleshed out...tested and implemented...BEFORE going off again on adding more items of interest. Otherwise, we'll be here next year talking about the same thing.

i always wanted to see multiplayer expanded, look how popular games like fornite and pubG have gotten, those would be pretty easily recreated in GG right now if we have multiplayer added.
of course the core engine needs to be able to cope with the load too... can we really expect hundreds of people playing at once with a fully decorated world and loot etc? would GG handle it?
though you don't need to go huge PvP style, sports games are always popular online and they generally only need much smaller maps and just 2-4 players.

i'm not saying we should put multiplayer above all else, just that i don't think it should be written off as a bad move, it certainly wouldn't be a bad addition.

as for the voting board, i agree having a more select list to vote from would be much better compared to the huge list we got before.

@KeithC Think that pretty much hit the nail on the head
@smallg player numbers would be dependant on the power of the pc wouldnt it m8?
I've run an Empyrion server from mine with 20+ players and played on via my account on the same machine np in a test.
but it would depend on the person running it usually i just played with the kids so 4 people ish.
The voting board just had too many core updates in as features in my eyes things like AI, lighting, etc just shouldnt have been on there at all. just worked on as core components and the features should have been just added in as bonuses

Yes and no, that's always true but you could say the same about single player performance and yet we all know GG rarely performs at its best... Just because a good PC can run at 60fps doesn't mean the engine shouldn't be optimised.. If the engine is poor it will drag down your server performance and nobody will play a game that lags all day long

I say we vote on it

I say we don't!

Hmn maybe we should vote on whether we vote to have a vote ...... errror ... cannot .... divide ... universe .... by ... zero ...

Let’s just fix the engine first and worry about voting later (you can’t soup up a broken engine) we need it working properly first

Dave

My post was deliberately a joke but in reality I'm guessing the majority in this thread to have the vote system back or not would win.

You really cant say a voting system is fair or unfair and does not work if your actually doing it now .
If you don't agree with the voting system and don't like voting then say no more .
Just let Lee decide if and when .. Its the only way not to vote

Confusing and contradicting as hell isn't it

and so was mine, i was carrying on the joke, you know like funny arguing causing the universe to crash lol

Better said then Doc Emmit Brown LOL

LOL hey just add some locally hosted multiplayer and i will have no need to vote at all rofl I'll be far too busy messing about with it
I have 512 maps about 300 of them i could convert easily
Also just think of the difference between fpsc and gg ...GG has open area maps so atm semi large landscapes wheras fpsc tended to be in a dungeon type environment add a standalone mp and GG = forntnight? yeah totally possible! well it'd give devs at least the oppertunity to give it a try and see where it goes...gotta be added in my opinion even just to keep the mp heads quiet lol. I'm pretty sure good things would come of this!
The multiplayer code is there anyway of sorts lets seperate it from steam with a button and have our own multiplayer servers!

@ Belidos and synchromesh lol that made me laugh maties and if we cant have a giggle....more grog!