Interestingly enough there is some older art of Moses depicted with horns, as they mistranslated the hebrew word for "resplendent/radiant" with "horned".

Oh...and please consider staying on topic

@Belidos : Yes multiple grass types are on the menu, well spotted! I am just in 'don't agree to anything' mode in the forums now, its probably best in the long run. But anything official like announcements and product pages have been vetted by my management team so are certainly more real than me. It's not been a month and I am already saying the wrong things!

@jono gamer : As to official list of features, I think the main announcments and official pages are the go-to place.

@OldFlak : Yes the snow and rain hit the roofs of anything, so you will not get rain indoors! No plans to provide custom images for the weather effects as we plan to work with the shader to get the best visuals (for a given quantity of best).

@synchromesh : If you find future questions, feel free to email me so I can then jump back into the forums. I am likely to miss questions for the rest of Feb - so many questions To load old levels in MAX, you simply copy your assets and scripts over to the usual folders and then load your FPM. We will be looking at making a new asset folder for MAX (my showcase scene will need some fancy new art I think) so hopefully there will be no cross contamination between legacy assets and the new stock stuff.

@Earthling45 : The giant editor looks very cool. Can you send me a link to the download, thanks!

Thanks also for the links to what other editors and systems do, I have copied them over for my research process. I discussed Voxel terrain with my internal coding team (and Rick) and the general feeling is that it could be a lot of work to squeeze into the development for devliery in September so is not a likely choice for MAX. The primary goal would be to make the terrain look better, which will come from a better lighting model but also some more controls (for a given value of better). It's still very true most modern games use a variety of hacks, shortcuts and slight of hand to create realism in games without killing performance, so the techniques we choose need to find that balance between how long it takes to do and test, what it will look like, what control do you have over it and how fast it will run. Who would be a developer?

I've emailed the link, Lee.

Awesome!
As a suggestion: maybe we could keep it simple and just use a different mesh for the grass. Instead of having a bunch of planes in the center like now, have two or three bunches of planes and the ability to add image of choice to each bunch.

Lumberyard uses veg tool for everything; grass trees, rocks, plants... Perhaps a simplified version of that approach.



Great news that would be


No probs, maybe we can have some other types added later down the track. Like ash mixed with hot embers.

OldFlak....

these two ansers make me happier than all others from previous days.. and restored fate of humanity LOL

@ Lee
Lots of good news.
You follow your road map and bring us efficient tools that allow us to build the best.

I particularly want to continue enjoying the pleasure of designing lost worlds, and lose myself in them from time to time; Help me to get it.

@Lee thanks for the clarification, i didn't mean to come in hard on it, but i know you are trying to get it right this time around and we need to be on the lookout to avoid misunderstandings. It's great news, and a feature that will really enhance games made in Max.

sure and if we can adda proper particle system i'm ok with the artistic side of the engine,,since hpe we get extended lua commands to can spawn object direclty from lua (for inventories ans so on) and new commands to have a proper water/underwater system...due lee wrote that we will have un-hardcoded all player behaviours so we can add lean, peek and so on to it... things start to coming along nicely to me...

If GGMax can come close to this graphics, then i am in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sodCyouOeVE

And it looks at the end of the video , that its sort of a one man job

That is made with CryEngine which is also at the core of Lumberyard and Far Cry.

It really is stunningly beautiful but you'd have to be paying royalties if you want to monetize a game.
There are games with less visual beauty but quite addictive to play, with GG (if problems solved) and GGM we should certainly be able to produce such games which albeit with less eyecandy are a joy to play.
The little game of Synchromesh is such an example.

From the Lumberyard FAQ:

So, you'd be able use this engine in order to create a game for free.

I dont know if i have missed this, but will GGM support high quality models to import them in to GGM?

not too close ..really not...too much expectations by you

, thats to bad.

man ..that 's cryengine... maybe the best looking engine even better than unreal...so it's a dream GGMax could even by far reach that levels.

something decent like S2 engine or leadwerks should be good to me.. if the backbone will be solid there will be the basis for a decent engine upgrade... otherwise the same TGC shattered dream

What you have to remember is a Team of probably hundreds spent a few years making the AAA game Farcry at a cost of Millions. Then later they release an editor for that game …

The Multi million dollar game engine is already there and your just modding it. Even Lee's full team could never compete with anything like that so ye that's pretty wishful thinking
Creating an engine and editor all in one is a totally different ballgame ..

Wolf Yes i have to agree with you, but hopefully the new GGmax will still surprise us , who knows.

edited: anything better than we have now is good enough

Oh I think its going to be well above what we have now

yes and i'm waiting for other sneaks upcoming...

Thats actually not so impossible, GGM SHOULD come close to that.

Yes, you only pay if you use their cloud services to host your multiplayer game, but it doesn't require their services at all.
Lumberyard is awesome; Super smooth editor, stunning visuals, awesome particles, lots of easy to follow tuts.

As with all other tools out there it lacks the GG's charm, and simplified approach.
I would also think that quite a few people are working on the demo game as well, let alone however many are actually developing the engine.


The improvements we have seen thus far certainly prove that.
With new terrain implemented and a new graphics renderer is will surely be something way above what we have.

OldFlak....

Pre _Ordering !!!....Will MP be functioning in the Beta's????

True, but S2 Engine which has a similar level of graphical fidelity was made by a single person. Most of that AAA team goes into making the content for the game, like animations, models, scripts, sound design, etc.

I'm still gonna give TGC and Lee plenty of leeway (pun intended) with my expectations; GG Max should at least look as good as Leadwerks. If it looks as good as S2 Engine that's a bonus in my book.

S2 Engine doesn't even come close top what lumberyard can actually do, but it's still really good for a one man dev team.

To be fair GameGuru as it is isn't far off being able to achieve what S2 can, it's only missing a few small but important things, like dynamic shadows, sun control, and the ability to adjust hue, saturation, and gamma, among other things.

It looks very good and i can imagine that this will be an engine of choice for the more experienced creators.

Ye it looks great but pretty much 3 games have only been made with it since 2007 and one was by the developers.
They weren't great either … I have to wonder why ?
One looked good " I am not alone "

I am sure that in 2021 GGM it will be much better than what we see now, what we see now is only the beginning, there is a long way to go.

While I am personally a fan of S2, one thing to keep in mind is the lone developer has been slowly plugging away at his engine for over a decade. I don't think any of us want GameGuru MAX to be developed that slowly.



I think it mainly because the engine has been slowly developed for about a decade now and, until late last year (around October) it was too buggy to actual use to make a game. In fact, it may still be. However, updates are coming more quickly and the developer himself is creating a game with his own engine (HellSeed). My hope is that as he develops his own game, using his own engine and his created tools, like GameMachine, that he will iron out a lot of the sticky bugs and some of the strange workflow issues and, in the end, we'll have a much better engine that actually is capable of producing an actual game.

And Lee so:

[video=youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbnTZREMEJI[/video]

Even most of the triple AAA games out there are made with engines that do not support or use voxel terrain. They just have a single plane and use objects/entities to create caverns, caves and tunnels.

Voxel Terrain.......
I wonder if there is a back door (3rd party) way to use another terrain creator
and slide it's output (model) into your GGX map levels.

I'm aware of Axis Game Factory, and in browsing the web, it looks like there's
a slew of Voxel tools for Unity. Searching for info on free builders and wondering
if any of these where a good alternative? I'm not saying to code voxel into GG,
but look into alternative tools (3rd party) because work around are always going
to be something to investigate.

http://www.volumesoffun.com/polyvox-about/

Then again, with 64 bit memory and "on the fly" entity spawning by script,
maybe something pseudo- voxel can be worked out in lua? Why not?

The core engine has to be able to generate the visuals. The only way it's going to be able to render a voxel terrain is if the core code contains a voxel terrain system.
Right now it just has to deal with an array of height values - one number for each x,z, (or is that y) location on the ground. There's no allowance for there to be more than one height value for a specific point - which is what voxel terrain can provide. Actually, I'm interested in just how a voxel terrain *is* stored. I shall go and look it up.

A lot of "math fun" might be needed.

You can't use lua to affect the terrain in GG (unless that's been added recently). I doubt Max will give you that option either. A voxel terrain is completely different as well.

Actually I'm talking about a completely fake 'voxel' system.
This would be in game, and probably not really in design. Of course the original
design could occur, and players could spawn shapes, so.... hmmmm.

More like Minecraft boxes or hexagonal shapes (Roblox) that can
be destroyed or replaced down. So yeah, pretty fake-- could turn
into a memory hog-- but as said Minecraft and Roblox seem to do it easily...

Ah. possibly, but GG is not exactly a beast when handling many entities. Definitely would need some clever coding to get it to run at any speed in GG currently.

LEE: I plan to use AssImp to handle the importing of models to MAX, which I have tested the latest repo and it's pretty solid. Loaded everything I threw at it. No sure about supporting high quality, except as to a given value of 'high quality'


LEE: MP will probably be disabled in the first alpha but will be restored shortly after. The old Steam code is still in there, but needs to be converted to how Photon works. There will be no additional functionality to the user experience of multiplayer, only the underlying technology is being swapped out.