Hi All,

I hope you enjoyed today's live broadcast, and for those who missed it, here is the recording on our YouTube channel:


We had plenty of questions this time, and not enough time to answer them so here they all are again in their spell corrected glory:

Q> ​Is there any chance of fireweapon(e) having the hardcoded parts removed? (Fireweapon has specific angles and distances at which it will actually fire, and you can't specify a position for friendlies!)
A> There are no plans to substantially increase the number of LUA commands for MAX, but we may add some additional settings so enough flexibility exists to allow your AI characters to behave as you would like them to with respect to firing.

Q> A bunch of Game projects are delayed because of bugs that were added in the latest gameguru classic update. When will these bugs be sorted out? I am asking for more than one person here?
A> You can always revert your version to the build before the latest one. You can also report the new bugs found in the Issues Board on GitHub so we can look at them for our Christmas Fixes update.

Q> ​Will the DLC characters shown be dismembered for the character creator?
A> The characters from the third party artist DLC have been specifically designed to work with the Character Creator, so you CAN swap body parts when you get your hands on the DLC.

Q> How was your week so far?
A> My week was very productive, thank you!

Q> Can we share particles made with the particle editor on the GG forums?
A> You are best asking the author of the Particle Editor, but I think providing you are not just shipping his templates into the forums, I think he would be okay with it (best to ask though)

Q> ​What progress has been made on the grass? Can we see it?
A> No progress on grass code since last week, we are looking at a technique to use for the grass movement. There have been numerous suggestions for the functionality, and once that is decided, we can commit to coding something we can demo.

Q> ​is GameGuru max free?
A> No, GameGuru MAX will be $49.99 when released based on our current plans.

Q> A few people have been really useful for the whole community in the past. People like amenmoses who brought us particles for example. Currently, github is closed to everyone. A lot of people have questions regarding the locked github. It's kind of a waste of time because people are not able to add fixes and features. Is there a particular reason? It's also questionable to just lock everyone out of github who has been contributing major improvements. Just a thought from a few community members
A> I have just checked and the Classic repo is not locked and available from here (https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo). We have kept the MAX repo private of course as we are still working on the innards of the product.

Q> ​I remember the character creator in 'classic' was seriously lacking in body parts.I enquired whether more parts would become available as DLCs and was told no because the feature was experimental?
A> Since Classic, we have improved the character creator and intend to make it easier for artists to create their own body parts, and of course allow third party artists to sell character creator compatible body parts (such as the Space Marines you see at the start of the recording above).

Q> ​The Bethesda Tools i use limit you on how many terrain textures you can use in a "cell" . Might be how they optimize their maps or even prevent their level designers from using too many textures.
A> Yes this is related to the material-lookup technique they use for terrain performance. GameGuru MAX has done a different way and using virtual textures to allow the user to paint literally anything they want on the terrain. Time will tell if large terrain texture files are worth the trade-off.

Q> How is the VR progress going (updates on visuals, movement, weapons handling (reload, changing weapons)? Has it been tested with other headsets apart from WMR?
A> No new VR interactivity pieces to share right now, but we have extended our hardware to test for more devices including the Steam Index and the new Oculus Quest 2 which has the Oculus Link feature and good support for OpenXR.

Q> Is the weather components toggle-able via Lua?
A> If there are no commands for this already, feel free to push for this when you see a broadcast touching on the new weather implementation as I think it important to be able to control the weather within your level.

Q> Currently the library browser doesn't like sub-folders in the users folder, you can't drill down into them with it.
A> Sounds like an easy bug to fix, something to deal with once the major items are in place.

Q> Decals working in GG Classic suppose to work in Max?
A> We may need to perform a conversation on any 'decal entities' from Classic as they rely on a shader that will not exist in MAX. We are aiming for good backwards compatibility and if decals prove to be an essential element to many Classic projects, we will find a way to keep them animating under the new graphics engine.

Q> Will game guru max release on time?
A> We have retracted the deadline of December 2020 in favour of an open-ended release date. This allows us to focus on product quality above arbitrary release dates. It is not a decision that will please everyone, but the team feel we have a chance to create an excellent product if we give ourselves the time and resources to do the idea justice.

Q> Xbox controller support?
A> No plans for additional controller support, though we do have basic support for XBOX controllers and some variants of the same.

Q> Any change in copying a part of the map ( terrain ) and paste it in a different place on the map
A> Yes indeed, a big change. In Classic you could not do that, in MAX we are aiming to make this possible. The old 'Store Level' mode will be replaced with a new 'Copy and Paste' feature so you can select a chunk of terrain, then copy it to another location. Should save a lot of time if you want to re-use a mountain you've spent 2 hours sculpting

Q> ​Are the lua apis for GG classic is same or different for GG MAX??
A> Yes they are the same, and there are no plans to update to the latest LUA so we can keep backwards compatibility as much as possible. Once we are underway with the MAX release, we can look at the advantages of bringing LUA API to the latest release version.

Q> Will GameGuru Classic dlc's transfer over to max?
A> Yes you can manually copy over the files, or even better, dump all the assets you want into a level, save that level in Classic, then open that level from MAX. MAX will detect the missing entities and copy them over to MAX and convert as necessary. Most of the official DLCs for Classic have a sample level that contains all the assets for that DLC so the process should be simple.

Q> Sorry if you already answered this, I just logged in. I am getting a 8003 error from the Beta of MAX?
A> You will find the early dev builds will occasionally produce these types of errors. If you find them frustrating, we recommend you avoid builds for a while and wait until we are further along the development process when bugs will be few and far between.

Q> Will we be able to test VR part of the game without a VR? ?
A> You will certainly be able to test your game in a non-VR scene, but the only way to test the VR controller interactions, movement experiences and interactions is to have a VR capable system. Our advice is that if you do not have VR, don't mark your game as VR friendly as there is a quite a world of difference between a great VR game and one that has been quickly and crudely ported from a non-VR experience. VR is still early days, and I think we will all be learning much in the years to come.

Will the new particle system work like the old decals/ entities ?

It would be great if it did, that way we could use simple hide and show global scripts.

[ Question ] [ ? ] On the subject of the new U.I. Would it be possible to have some way to scale the the UI or at least the icons for right hand side Tool Panel in future builds ?

For example with the EBE all the icons are very small on 4K Display even on 1920 x 1080 P.

I do like the way new UI is looking now.

"Q> ​Is there any chance of fireweapon(e) having the hardcoded parts removed? (Fireweapon has specific angles and distances at which it will actually fire, and you can't specify a position for friendlies!)
A> There are no plans to substantially increase the number of LUA commands for MAX, but we may add some additional settings so enough flexibility exists to allow your AI characters to behave as you would like them to with respect to firing."

I think the question was not interpreted correctly.

What is wanted is a Lua command to make the entity fire any weapon it has attached to the firespot, currently it does not do this, instead it triggers a lot of hard coded checks that get in the way, for example a check that the player is within 1500 units! What if you want a sniper to fire? Or what if you want to shoot at another entity?

Maybe just provide a 'FireWeaponNow' command that bypasses all those checks.


"A> I have just checked and the Classic repo is not locked and available from here (https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo). We have kept the MAX repo private of course as we are still working on the innards of the product."

Umm, yes a version of GG is on GitHub but it appears that the last update was 10 months ago. In the meantime we have had several 'bug-fix' builds foisted upon us that have also created new bugs, where are those changes being kept if not in the 'master'?

I would be happy to go in and fix those bugs myself whilst others are busy with MAX but if I can't see the source code changes that have been made in the last 10 months that is a bit difficult.

Decals always is an essential element for both GG and GGMax.
I believe that an animated decal with a shader causes less impact on performance than a particle, there will always be things that cannot be shown with a particle but with an animated decal, and it is also a good alternative for those users who cannot or do not want to use a 3º party particle editor, it is no longer just about using GG's animated decals, but about being able to use the animated decal with shaders system, in GGMax. I myself want the best of both worlds.


I know you don't want to have some sort of advanced user mode, but maybe we can have both options (setup.ini, maybe?), and the user chooses if want to work with standard or advanced LUA api.

Really cool this copy and paste tool rather than store level tool.


Totally agree!

We are on the same page @3com!
Was disappointed that none of the decals worked in MAX this morning. That is the reason I asked.

Perhaps 'Water' should be put in it's own section. It's currently buried in the 'visuals' setting, but it's a very gameplay related thing and the settings you apply aren't visual in the same way bloom and skybox are. I think that'd help organize the elements, and will also help in the future when more water features are built (such as rivers or water entities), since they'll already have their own section beside grass and terrain where water likely belongs in the first place.

A few comments/suggestions about the UI based on the video:

Would it be possible to allow for a smaller top button bar?

The current bar across the top with the buttons/icons is very large vertically and eats up a lot of valuable screen real estate. I would love an option, perhaps in the new Settings panel, that would allow the end-user to toggle a "small" setting for that top bar. This would reduce the icons to half the size and shrink the bar vertically, too, to free up more space if it's needed. I, personally, don't see any reason to have huge icons/buttons, especially when they are only accessed from time to time and not constantly.

Reduce the Terrain Buttons on the Icon/Button bar to just one?

In the latest video, you show that you've reduced the terrain buttons on the top bar to two - one for sculpting terrain and one for painting terrain. I would further suggest that this be reduced down to just one (something representing that the end-user would enter into "terrain mode" if clicked) and that the three terrain buttons (sculpting, painting terrain textures, and painting grass) be available only on the right-side panel.

Why? Because of ergonomics. You click the terrain sculpt button on the far left then drag the mouse over to the far right to select your terrain sculpt tool. If you then want to change to painting, you have to then drag your mouse all the way back to the far left then go back to the far right to, again, select your tool.

Instead, why not have just one button on the top-bar for all terrain functions. Once it's pressed, the right-side panel switches to "terrain mode" and at the top it displays the tools for terrain sculpting, terrain painting, and grass painting. Once the end-user selects what they want to do (i.e. clicking on terrain sculpting), then the appropriate tools appear below. This way, the end-user is ALWAYS using the right-side panel after initially entering terrain mode via the top-bar terrain icon/button. They can easily switch between sculpting and painting without going to the far-left then far-right of their screen. All the tools for terrain would be in the same place and easily (and ergonomically) accessible.

I think the way they have it is fine. Water should be moved there, perhaps, and we'll also see the return of multiplayer mode's button right Lee?
Any news on the max map size for multiplayer maps?