Hi All,

For those who missed the live broadcast and chat, here is a recording of the video, and below I have provided answers to all the questions asked during the live chat:


And here are your answers, it looked like we could answer them all in the chat but they kept on coming, so enjoy the belated revelations below:

Q> Do you know yet how large we will be able to make our levels?
A> We do not have a final maximum size to quote, but the system we have right now can create some truly huge terrains, limited only by the size of storage you have, so for now we can assume you will not run out of space to create.

Q> Is there going to be more build-in structure types for the structure editor. Like doorframes, arches, diagonal walls, etc?
A> There are no plans to significantly change or add to the structure editor. Things like door frames and other building furniture would be added as static entities to the structures you create as you would have much more flexibility importing the things you want for your building than expecting to find them in an out of the box library we might provide.

Q> ​Are tracers and bullet puffs possible? Shooting feels flat!
A> There are no plans to add bullet tracers in MAX but we already have the smoke effect when a weapon is fired. For a great example of what third parties can do with the current weapon system check out the Enhanced Weapons Pack for Classic.

Q> ​Projectile control is what I REALLY wanted?
A> There are no plans for projectile control over and above what is already available from Classic, and if you wanted absolute control you could always use a hidden entity and directly control it as though it was a player weapon/device, but of course, this requires scripting know-how and is not an 'out of the box' feature.

Q> Will we be able to clone multiple items, whole areas perhaps?
A> You will be able to rubber band select an area, detect all entities within that area, and use CTRL+C then CTRL+V to clone them all onto your cursor so you can paste them down as duplicates somewhere else. For single entities, of course you can hold down SHIFT to keep pasting duplicates of that single entity down into your level.

Q> ​Flashlight please?
A> No plans to significantly improve the flashlight system in MAX, except for the improvements that come about due to the new graphics engine and the shadowing that results.

Q> How is the Open VR Dev going?
A> We are not supporting OpenVR directly, we are working on OpenXR which provides 'potentially' much more support for VR, including those headsets outside of Steam. Progress goes very well and we have had some good results so far.

Q> Looking great Lee! Will environmental elements (flowing water, moving skies, rain, snow etc.) be available in VR mode?
A> Everything in your scene for non-VR will be in VR for the most part, including the current rain and show weather effects. No plans for out of the box running water but we do have moving skies which I would be pleased to demo in a future video or broadcast.

Q> What, realistically, will be included in the September release?
A> Pretty much everything you read in the GameGuru MAX Pre-Order webpage, and we are still on track to deliver those items. Naturally, we will be continuing development beyond the release to keep improving those features, and this time around, we will be focusing more on strengthening existing features than adding whole new ones after launch.

Q> What happens with GG Classic?
A> GameGuru Classic will continue to be developed, and we have structured the source code for MAX so that bug fixes that are made in the new engine can be iterated back to Classic so users who do not want to upgrade will still benefit from updates.

Q> Will we still be able to create a standalone EXE that runs for people who already have VR headsets?
A> Yes, your standalone games will run in non-VR and VR mode, so if your end-user has a VR headset (OpenXR runtime permitting), then they will be able to play your game in VR.

Q> Will we be able to change shaders? Like chromatic aberration and other types of effects that you couldn't change in GG classic. Or at least make it easier to change it via the .fx files.
A> There will be no way to customize shaders out of the box, and we are dropping the FX format in favor of a shader format that can be edited and debugged in Visual Studio for faster development. I dare say there will be a way to 'insert' custom shaders, but for release and for official purposes, we will be using the shaders provided by the Wicked Engine.

Q> Will the shooting/combat be improved in any form?
A> There are no plans to significantly improve the shooting or combat AI of games in MAX, and will play and operate much like the mechanisms in Classic for the time being. In VR, you will be able to have the additional skill of aiming down the sight for weapons that feature sights (manually, not some extra mode) but generally, the Classic weapon system will be used to help backward compatibility.

Q> Will there be some bullet impact effects on the player?
A> There are no plans to add bullet impact effects on the player in MAX, over and above the hurt effects you are perhaps already familiar with in Classic, and no significant improvements to the third person reaction effects either.

Q> Zombies attacking soldiers /friendly npcs?
A> There are no plans to add ally behaviors out of the box, and character AI will remain largely unchanged. The MAX project was mainly about improving the underlying engine, the visuals, the import support, adding VR and improving the UI. Scripts from Classic will work with MAX, and MAX gives additional support for Dynamic LUA but there are no new scripts planned to offer the behavior described.

Q> Is it possible to integrate NVIDIA Ansel so we can render static 360 images and videos for non-game projects?
A> There are no plans to support NVIDIA Ansel in MAX at this time.

Q> ​Will max contain hard and soft shadows?
A> You will be able to control some aspects of how shadows are rendered to the scene thanks to the Wicked Engine, but there is no specific hard or soft option available in MAX. It is fair to say there are no hard shadows in MAX to the degree of say using stencil shadows, and in that light, all MAX shadows would be soft shadows based on the lighting of the scene (i.e. four point lights close together would create soft shadows at a cost).

Q> How will multiplayer games work?
A> Aside from swapping the Steam Multiplayer API with Photon, there will be no significant improvements to the multiplayer game system currently demonstrated in Classic. Simple 2-8 player deathmatch arena on a single level.

Q> Seems a lot to do .. Hows the schedule going?
A> If it was just little old me, it would be a tall order, but I have a great team working on MAX and we are confident to deliver all the features listed on the pre-order page in September.

if we find time?we wait since 2 weeks

I’ll be there

Dave

@ Lee


What's about to an easier way to disable dead effects/sounds, from the user side.


But what's about importing entity using fx shader from classic? there may be compatibility too?

Can third person be less hardcoded?

In order to add tracer effects all that would be required is Lua access to the FireSpot data of the weapon carried by the player, in fact if the weapons had an accessible entityId/objectId we could add a ton of extra goodies via scripting, especially using particle effects or physics!

Might have already been answered, but does anyone know if Max has any plans for entity cloning support via LUA?

Like many Game Guru users, I find the EBE/Structure editor a bit underdeveloped to use in most contexts. It's designed to make indoor environments but is too restrictive in the shapes it supports to allow you to make anything truly decent in it.

But today it occurred to me that, even if you refuse to add support for custom wall and ceiling meshes, the one feature that would really help would be a throwback to FPSC; CSG meshes. I loved the way you could 'punch' a hole in basically any wall in FPSC with a CSG mesh and then pop your door and doorframe in that hole. It just seems like it would be a great addition. Right now, doing it manually block-by-block is, to be frank, a total pain in the colon.

AE

You can make your own templates for ebe walls, it's just a text file with ones and zeroes in a grid to represent where the geometry is, it's really simple.

The hurt effect is very poor, we should get atleast some lua commands to create bullet impacts, something like "ifplayergetshit"

That might get confused with if player gets told off by wife

What do you mean by bullet impacts on the player? IRL you don't see bullet impacts you feel them, in most cases it takes some time to even sink in that you've been hit.

If you are talking about 3rd person then if you see a bullet hit, i.e. a large splash of blood and gore on impact then you're dead anyway!

i mean that

min 2:33
idk if its "realistic" or not but anyway impact effects belong to every fps game, the hurt effect in gg classic doesnt fit it

0:45
we should get the possibility to create bullet impacts with lua, like kinda from the first video

"we should get the possibility to create bullet impacts with lua, like kinda from the first video"

You already can.

It would be a simple script, just have a sprite located off screen, and then in the script if you get hit paste it to the screen, with a short timer, then remove it from the screen. Should be simple.

Unfortunatelly, there is not.

ok so can u show me how?i created a thread a while ago, iam gonna reopen it
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220543

I don't know the specific commands, and i'm at work at the moment, so no i'm afraid i can't show you, but i know it can be done, i'm pretty sure there's a script somewhere on the forums for it, maybe one of smallg's?

Cant you just change the " Ouch " sample to an impact one ?
I do not hear any of the npc's shouting ouch ( or similar ) when hit in the video above so there is a kind of work around there you could play with.
In fact in struggling to hear the impact sounds at all in the video .. Personally bullet sounds whizzing would be a more realistic addition.

my idea was to combine the camera shake script from smallg, so if the player gets hited the camera shakes for a part of a second but i dont know which script contains the "player hited" information
All at all seems like GGMax will be GG classic just with a new UI and new render engine, no more or less customization possibilities

And just what did you expect? I mean, Lee has been pretty upfront about what MAX would and would not be. There were never any plans for it to have more functionality than Classic (in terms of game functions). But you are doing MAX a huge disservice by claiming that all it is is Classic with a new UI and a new rendering engine. In fact, there's a completely new terrain system, Max is 64-bit whereas Classic is 32-bit, there's the addition of Dynamic LUA to the GUI, there's the new Character Creator, and a ton of other features that set it apart from Classic.

In any case, most of what you want to do can, I believe can be done via LUA. If you can't script (I know I can't ... yet), then ask for help. Perhaps one of the kind folks here would be willing to help out.

this is fairly straight forward using LUA, you just need take control of the camera upon being hit e.g. when there is a drop in player health status.

It's a pity if this isn't considered. An option to clone an existing item would really help for random or in game generation stuff. Load one item of each type then you can clone each when needed to make up a maze for example. At the moment we would need to place all those blocks down at the start. Makes it a pain to do and also rubbish to test. If you can clone objects, then testing is a matter of increasing the code values so you can test different size maps out super fast. As is, you have to keep adjusting items on the map for each test or just have a million of them so it won't run out lol.

It looks like Engine has to re-calculate all physics plus collision, something like re-doing the navmesh each time you clone any entity over the map, in test mode.

Maybe placing some sort of position marker in order to reserve that position for later use, so when you clone an entity via a script, the engine just has to place your entity in the position marker and destroy it. After all, that position maker does not waste many resources.

Quote: " anyone know if Max has any plans for entity cloning support via LUA?"
Quote: "Unfortunately, there is not."

I've talked blue in the face regarding this topic-- trying to understand the
unique GG specific constraints for spawning entities via script.
In fact Lee said that it was "a good idea. One that they could look into--
if only posted to GitHub - for reminders sake."

The "collisions and physics would suffer" part doesn't seem to hold water-
or it still doesn't make sense. Is the bullet engine insufficient for spawning?
I'll look into that later. So for example, say I paste an object on the corner of
the map, then move it 1000 units OFF map. Then when I need that object
in a specific spot, I move it to 21,648, 702, 19,084 (random numbers).
That would seem like it would be just like spawning the object there directly
at the beginning from a script. I have no interest in how the Zombies or AI
treat that object. I don't use them in any game plans.
The object can still have collision with other objects, gravity and physics of
terrain and all that important stuff.

I present the same argument as I always have and always will-- it should be up
to the developer if they want to use the feature, and standard use of the game
making could be for the rest of the users.

I see it in the same light as Dvader sees it. Your game style could evolve into a
much more creative and robust variety of game-play.
That door should stay open.

So in fact I opened Unreal up the other day and went through some of their
help tutorials. Blue-Prints allows a user to create a single object from multiple
objects and combine them all as one object, as well as spawn any Blue-Prints
just made endlessly via script as desired.

Good job Unreal!
But I'm interested in seeing GGMAX acquire this capacity. Unreal is still a bit of
a bear to handle-- (+C++) maybe in two years a noob could get to grips with it?

and how to do it?
i allready tried
if g_PlayerHealth < playerHealth then
state = "shake"
end
playerHealth = g_PlayerHealth
look on my thread, it doesnt work
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220543

@osiem80
You have a nice thread going over in scripts where this conversation now belongs.
Best stick to that section for any further questions on how to do this.

yes deffinetly, i try to bring the folks there to answer my questions

All in all Lee has about 4 to 5 weeks to go to get done what needs to get done for most common functionality.
Maybe best to hold out and see what we get and go from there

There are two new engine connections (Common Functions) for Prompt/Image and Prompt/Video.
Will these be active functions when MAX is released?
Can you control the size and position of the image or video?

A Question for Lee ( or anyone in the know )

Will GG Max have a better zone system, in classic we have flat zones. It would be great if we could define full 3D Polygonal zones that could be sized along all axis x,y and z and also placed at heights, like on the roof of a building, instead of just on the terrain.

Also will the raycasting work the same as in GG classic, I have some scripts that use raycasting to allow the player to interact with notes etc.

3d zones wouldn't be the hardest bear to achieve with lua--
but maybe not that convenient?
I'm thinking primarily the height factor is the one we are all concerned
about getting 'fixed'. So we just add a 'Y' check for our custom cubicle.

It's a piece of cake for example to construct a digital box (of any dimensions)
that the player would have to exist inside of before triggering a zone...
((At least squared to the compass quadrants.))

You spoke of sprites/huds on screen -- and if the mouse hovers over them--
exactly like that (just add a third check.)

More complex shapes-- more work. I suggest maybe a handful of precise
custom trigger zones that can be placed anywhere. Think of a proximity
sensor that detects player distance. Now imagine 25 of them bounding your zone.

Problem is that after about 20-30 scripts running GGjr ((not sure of MAX))
sloggs down to a tired ol turtle... best graphics cards can't help in this category.

Easy with lua?; (some shapes - yes.) Practical by FPS? (limitless - no.)

Probably not initially. Have to see what Lee does with those ?

@Tarkus1971

Hi there, flat zones on terrain? Zones can be set up in height on buildings or other, also as walls/slopes if preferred, I've used wall zones a couple of years ago all the time in case of jump/avoid triggers. I'm sure if you are more meaning applying a script to an object then set one object with a distance perimeter check would reduce overall cost.