Hi All,

I will not run down every issue here, but you can check out every fixed issue by visiting the issues board on our GitHub page. Here are some of the highlights you might be interested in:

* Hurt zones now work after the player passes through a checkpoint
* Lighting entities are easier to select when placing down
* Stock Medieval weapons are visible once more
* Fixed issue with StopSound playing incorrect sound sometimes
* The _init and init_name handled better when LUA scripting
* Rotating multiple entities work continually with the R key again
* The welcome screen in The Big Escape level works once more
* When using the Scale command in your script, it now restored after the level ends
* Text files are now encrypted along with other media files (except for script text files)
* Changing water height in-game now updates the physics correctly
* Fixed issue that caused trigger zone center handles to disappear
* Entity name now shows again when using the widget, no more None Selected prompt

We would appreciate it if you checked out the Public Preview build and let us know if you find everything okay, and that your game projects still load and play as well as they did in the last update.

I still have the Christmas Fix version? It's not updating.

Mine is not updated either-- Do we have to opt into this via steam?... though indeed I did get the broken/ reload loop effect earlier.
Until that repair J_C mentioned fixed it-- which was a 03-08 file. The rest are of 01-07 still. So there's no scaling return @ script after test level-- which I'm not 100% I like the idea, or it's more useful to keep them scaled? It's a toss-up, and probably a preference that could use a selection choice- in case you want to continue to see what size they are while in map editor.

Broken/ reload loop freaked me out today!!! Will this update fix that? I thought I was all alone with that issue. Thanks Lee!

Still testing but all the bugs i reported are fixed and working perfectly.
Thanks Lee, Preben and the Team
Right now nothing stopping me getting my game finished

I have no project currently but tried a few maps and everything runs ok.

When can I update it? Thank you!

It should Update via steam automatically.
You can also check by right clicking on GameGuru in your Steam Library then selecting properties.
Then select updates and make sure that it is set to auto.
If you still do not have any luck try logging out of Steam and relogging back in.

Not for me! "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" That should force any updates... no luck!

Of course your using the Public Preview right ?

I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. version.ini dated 3/10/21 = 2020.12.08 - Christmas Fixes.

So your not on the Public Preview then ..

Right click on GameGuru in your Steam Library
Select Properties
Then select Beta
From the dropdown menu select
publicpreview - Public Preview from the bottom of the list.
Let it update then try that .

Do I use my GG steam key? Sorry for the confusion and thank you for your help!

No you do not need any key .. You just select...
publicpreview - Public Preview from the bottom of the list.

A key is only required for the actual Beta.

1. This version seems to crash more often than the previous one (it crashes more frequently when saving a level).
2. The lightmapper is borked again and fails when loading certain assets. I have yet to find a correction between the assets it fails on, other than that they are all custom (as is every single asset in my game now).

Do you think we could get one update where you don't break the damn software - is that too much to ask?!

AE

Painting on terrain effects also the rock on the side on mountains. So in other words when i paint the paint also appears on other places..
Harry

Yes

Quick look at GG seems fine here, but I know from experience that means nothing. I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think one of the big issues with GG, is that the devs don't actually try to make a game with it. They make a demo and are done, when in all honesty the worst bugs are found in the details. They should pay more attention to people making games with it and work with them to fix the more obscure issues. As is, we get asked to send a simple map to demonstrate issues. This is often impossible, as the issues are caused by a non-simple map.

I've been using GG since it was released and have always had this issue. I can understand them not wanting to fix every users game of course, many issues will be down to the user. Many though, aren't, and TGC should spend more time with serious devs to fix issues. I can't even remember how many projects I have begun with a promising start, to get totally frustrated by weird bugs along the line. In fact, I have burned myself out with them over the last 7 or 8 years. I still tinker, but I really find it difficult to get involved with a new project these days.

I'm sure with a bit of help from TGC, many of the games I started could have been finished and be good examples of what GG can do. As is, there all incomplete, abandoned and so, useless in every regard. It's difficult enough making games without the engine blocking you at every turn

We can't change the past, but for Max, perhaps TGC would be better off supporting any promising games from the get go. Not just saying make a basic demo/fpm for us to test That never cuts it. I show a lot on my Youtube channel, or used to, but the majority of my projects? No, never shown any and there have been a lot, some being pretty impressive at the time, but bugs prevented me showing them. They are now lost to time and will never be recovered.

There have been many other users with great looking games as well. Many far better than I could make merely down to graphics. Have they been supported? No, well as far as I know of course. TGC need to look at this, they already know the users are their lifeblood. Lee recently asked for examples of GG games that they could show as great examples. If they has supported people at the time a little better, they would have many. As is, they have mostly utter rubbish on steam that needed no support or even much thought. With a couple of exceptions.

I'm sorry to write a short story on this, but it has to be said. If you want a game engine to be good, you need to work with game makers a little more; fix their issues and you fix 100's of other peoples issues. Concentrate on simple fixes and you will be forever fixing them.

^^^^^
Yeah DVader, I think I feel how you sound. One person taking on large projects can produce burns. Wrote a half-chapter like that one once just a couple few weeks ago, but then filed it in the 'eh, you cares' bin- people don't want to hear it. Mostly geared toward MAX and how it could be stringently tested by the busy in-house developers? Cubicals might not stimulate imaginations to a huge degree. No time to go and try to produce a full blown game itself- during the engine development said game should utilize! But I'm sure MAX will come around and be super.

Secondly, I think we are the kind who don't care to make FPS games (I assume... and know I do NOT), and GG requires some might and magic to produce other genres. Should we change careers and join Elon Musk on the first trip to Mars? Wait-- I'm sure he will never board a single one of his own space vehicles. Red-flag! That is the biggest scam I have ever heard- and any ship Elon is not personally occupying- sitting onboard with to make the journey to a new Million people Mars colony -- stay off it if you value your life!

Having said that, I have I think maybe finally arrived at the GG Jr story-line for the game that has been harassing my daily plodding- so maybe I can re-direct some of the hurdles that I've encountered? Even if it's half a text based game. Let's see...

15 years diff and that is only because I had to make a new account due to forum issues at the time! Been around for awhile, my badge should be a a fair few years longer Your still a youngling in comparison, years wise anyway, you may run rings around my programming knowledge. But I had a lot longer to burn out, although all it would take to re-invigorate me, is a project that was limited by my own failings rather than engine issues. Just need to be motivated.

I love TGC products and have purchased most of them over the years, but my point is still valid. GG would be a different animal if TGC had taken some time to work with devs working on serious projects. Cybernescence's WIP is just one I could mention; for a Game Guru project it was very advanced, he even delved into the source code to improve it. If TGC had recognised this and worked with him, it would have made a seriously decent demo of what GG can do at the very least. I have no idea what aid they may have given, but am guessing it was not substantial. There are several others I could mention, but my posts are long enough!

My main point here is that they should recognise this and at the very least work with a couple of devs to squash bugs and issues in their titles. I think GG would be far better now if they had spent more time in this area. Following a serious game from start to finish and making sure issues were resolved would have been a far better path than they took.

Max is new and I think they should consider this for the future. There's some seriously talented individuals who use GG. They should keep track of their WIP forums and actively work on helping the promising ones finish their amazing looking titles. I dabble and have tried to do stuff that GG doesn't normally do, or work on optimisation of games, but that's all. If I make anything that looks good, it's because it's different and I have some media that works; but ultimately it is well received because it is different. But there are several FPS titles that have looked totally amazing and always run into trouble down the line. TGC should spot these and endeavour to at least attempt to address the issues they get.

I don't want this to be a negative comment, ultimately I want mistakes made in the past not to be repeated. It's no use the devs being in a bubble, they need to work with the talent here and take a new approach. Just take a look at the WIP section and see all the amazing looking titles in development. All have been generally hampered, if not stopped completely, by engine issues that TGC should have been more than happy to help fix. Seriously, there's stuff that looks AAA quality in there. If only 5 of them had been finished and released (there's a lot more than that) then GG would have not only a list of great games made, they would have squashed some devious bugs at the same time!

TGC is a small team, but they could utilise their users way better than they do presently. Unreal got big because of Unreal Tournament, they made a popular game with a fast engine and worked from there. TGC probably can't do that, but they could for certain help the people who can a lot better ;p

There ends my second essay I can only apologise for it being so long, again!

Absolutely! I understand for sure I'm only a smudge on the side of an early morning rain puddle on a continent that has had eons to drift across an ocean- not alluding to my being even in the same building much less folder- but I acknowledge your frustration nonetheless. Wait a minute- as far as "rings around my programming knowledge"- No, no, noooo- Big NOPE! I can't do piddly squat, don't know where that would come from? I barely can put some text on screen and maybe plod some objects hither and too? Mine and yours history in that category is comparative to a gnat and an eagle. For me-- what's great is what everyone ELSE has done to further the progress and ease of LUA scripting in GG with the built in functionalities. That part is highly commendable. But back to GG;

The story that a new archeologist discovers from delving into the GG evidences in it's history is one of civilizations rise and fall. Something happened. A large but mysterious event caused the collapse of a rising empire. But--! Now the residue of that empire has staked claims to a highlands region, is erecting tents, farms and even large buildings- and rising back out of the ashes and showing vigor again.

The problem I see with GG Classic is even with all the best intentions in the world, 32 bit would simply never cut it for upper- class FPS games. Unless for much over- simplified levels resulting in stagnating projects that felt to the player years behind. YES there has been some great effort out there- which definitely SHOULD be recognized.

Then add PBR dx11 to an already taxed 32 bits!? Say what? So much more effort would have to be tried to get near the same results as the 64 bit arena-- (it never would but it maybe could be a polished 32 bit game.) There's other things that try a users patience in Classic but I think they all fall on/ are aligned with the crutch of 32 bit.

designing/developing a dinosaur game for my 3 year old and wondered if it was just me but is anyone else finding the water level mode not working when trying to paint water on the terrain at the same level? Anyway , wondered if it was worth creating a water zone, like a floor zone but for water or I could write some LUA to detect the water. I wanted a way for the dinos to detect the water so they can drink from it. I suppose I could try normal zones ......hmmm anyway, back to dev work

[update-scrub that, water level mode working, I must of been doing something wrong]

I've often thought the same thing, DVader; why has TGC never tried to make a game themselves in their own engine? And I get it, the obvious reason is because it's not financially viable to commit the resource required to make even a small game in Game Guru, but it's still a shame.

The relationship TGC has with its customers, particularly on these forums, is super weird at times. They ask for our feedback on features they add, yet they don't act on any of that feedback. There's no way TGC don't know the lightmapper is buggy as hell by now, that PBR implementation was never finished, that the character creator is lacklustre and underdeveloped. Yet they've left these aspects of the program to rot. What's worse is I see the same thing happening with Max. There's zero chance TGC isn't aware of the calls to expand EBE into an FPSC-style segment system, or implement saveable prefabs rather than the simplistic grouping system, or carry over Wicked engine's inbuilt lightmapper. Yet they don't act on any of it. It smacks of a dev team that thinks they know better than their users, despite the fact they've never actually tried to make anything in their software and sell it.

It's become obvious over the years that TGC's greatest resource is its community; we create content for them, we do their marketing with the games we make, we are the QA team. And yet our calls for improvements, many of which are very reasonable, are more often than not met with silence.

But the biggest crime is that we keep letting them get away with this.

AE

I agree with Avenging Eagle that the lightmapper in classic is bad, too many lightburns sence Lee changed the lightmapper 2019. Please Lee fix back the lightmapper as it was, a more soft Light wourld be the result....

You're being way to kind.

More likely they just don't have the skills needed to do so!

My map building skills are horrific. What happened is that when I first got GG in 2018 I spent 3+ months making a full-blown game, the first map started at a school, the entire site all built from the ground up piece by piece and come to find out the FPS was 7-8 on my AMD integrated (which was new then BTW). There was Stand-Alone issues that also stopped it up. This was going to be a Mystery Adventure title with middle school aged kids as the protagonists. NO WEAPONS or SHOOTING obviously! I didn't have any lua specific knowledge then, but had a fun story in mind. That project has followed the path of so many other long abandoned projects. Anyhow that was my introduction to GG. I try to learn to script now, but has that also withered since the 2020 Plandemic? and I have a horrible attrition toward GG map building.

Fixes have already started for classics next update.
If you all reported the light mapper issue on Github now you may get a result ?

EDIT ..
Quite a few up there actually so you never know

Lightmapper won't get changed or improved, gameguru since conversion isn't reliant on plugins like we have with dark lights for example, the lightmapper is integrated with the core renderer, to change the lightmapper you would need to rewrite vast amounts of the renderer to accommodate changes like that. It is some thing that would take several weeks to do, not worth it in the end.So IDK, not likely that it will get changed at all.

Does that mean now that we have to live with the broken thing, which incidentally once worked to a certain extent? Not only me, a lot of people invested in this project back then (see GameGuru Pledger Credits List). So much money came together that at least the basic things could be offered in a functional way. But apparently a lot of money went into other projects that don't interest me. Now we are standing there with a package, I don't know what to call it ... that can't be used to create anything productive. I'm actually not very picky, I still enjoy doing a little tinkering, but after every "update" you have to fear that you have to throw everything away and start all over again. All of the objects I use indoors are basically junk without a working lightmapper because that thing isn't able to create a bit of shadow and add some atmosphere. With updates, a few things are always listed, so the gas man is interested in whether it works. Actually, that's pathetic, since such things were already possible with the original FPS Creator. And through some obscure actions, a lot of credit was lost with the loyal users. What a shame ....
That was just my opinion now, I don't want to initiate a discussion.

Mega Pack 02 - crowbar shows in editor but not in testgame....

Or even better, the dreaded "no plans for-" line. If every livestream multiple people are asking for a specific feature, don't you think you should make plans to include that feature? The idea that TGC act like they know better than their users does make a lot of sense now that I think about it, especially with that phrase Lee once mentioned when people were talking about the lackluster gameplay of GG, which went something like "We've been making FPS logic for more than 15 years now, I think we know a thing or two!" which is a bit ridiculous when basically EVERYONE who uses your software complains that it is barebones and lacking. It also doesn't help that the software which launched those 15 years ago has more features and generally better feeling gameplay than GG, which is a huge step back.

I don't think TGC should waste time developing a game in GGM (And frankly I'd think they'd do a pretty terrible job anyways if they think the current GG gameplay is "good") but I absolutely think they should get a team willing to make a game in Max, and work VERY closely with them to add engine features and fix bugs/issues. Hell, they could easily assemble a team from the community willing to work for free as long as it means improvements to the software.



This, this, this. Painfully true. I can't think of a good way to get TGC to listen to us, since it's either met with silence as you said, or "no plans for X". Maybe we need people with leverage, me being a relatively new member (to the forums/community at least) TGC would probably feel no issues with "brushing off", but if big community members that've been here for over a decade and everyone knows start making a big stink about it, maybe they'd be more inclined to listen?

@fearlesswee
Yeah, we keep bringing up the historic annuls of GG/FPSC which is still a mystery to me.
Luckily today we have MAX to look forward to. Frankenstein is laying on the table!

"I absolutely think they should get a team willing to make a game in Max"
I would very much like to see this suggestion take place, it would just be an interesting observation on how it all transpires. Pretty much the only way to fully understand the viability of any tool-- that is to USE the tool fully as intended. But pretty sure it'll just be the individual user/ in game project progress will have to encounter these bugs and report them, and hope for the best for timely fixes for their project to continue... as per "the usual".

Strangely if I'm not mistaken, TGC direction went from "easy commercial potential game maker" (FPSC) with a whole lot of momentum behind it and great speculation on it's success... to GG -- "game making for everyone." and then GG -- "really just the hobbyists game maker." ie- as an Indie developer, we can't nor try to compete with the big boys.
I have no animosity toward any of that history. I'm just a distant observer here. The intrigue of said mystery persists.

So what happened? Why is this? Politics aside, who really knows? But in the meantime progress happened. I would have to guess 32 bit. 32 bit was a burden on GG's back that never released it's grip, and as everything else progressed into the new era, GG was handed even more burden with PBR, and abandoned on the 32 bit wayside.

Again, just waiting on GGMAX which will pull us out of that slump. It's probably even better that they did NOT try to revive GG Classic, but instead found an open source 64 bit rendered engine to clamp on to. It checks off many boxes of concern-- at least as it's looking. We can soon? end this all on a very positive note-- fingers crossed. How will compiled games behave?

- Wizard of Id
- Lafette II
- Dvader

Lightmapping has always been a bit hit and miss, It can look incredible at times; but has never been what anyone would call 100% successful in GG. Mainly, I could never live with the huge map size increases lightmapping entailed, so haven't experimented with it that much. Now Max is the main concern and TGC haven't included the lightmapping features included with Wicked, we can expect Lightmapping to be pretty much dead in GG classic. Bar simple bug fixes (if very lucky). Even if Max had Wicked engine's lightmapping, it would be so chalk and cheese to GG's approach to not be relevant and need all new code. So updates to Classic in this area are unlikely.

Max is still super cheap. Looks promising. Could be all we want. Also, could be another overhyped project that is full of bugs. At the moment can't say. I took the gamble as it was fairly cheap Won't be losing sleep over spending the cash, will get more use than I would from most games of similar price in the long run. Never made a fortune from TGC products in the past, but always had fun trying

Which takes me to last point.


In honesty? All TGC products are aimed at that market. It doesn't mean hobbyists are all idiots. It just means they dabble and want something that can get the job done without getting too technical and taking too much time. There's no point worrying about that. If a game is good, it makes no difference what it was made in.

On last count , p.s this was working before the latest update, CC characters do not work, crashing the editor, Fpe's are messed up no orientation e.g no .x or.dbo file included so they don't show in the editor, characters walking sideways? erm ok :/ standalone not including pathways e.g create a path with the paint texture tool and it's not there. all this was working previously...anyway had to put my project on hold as these just break it. cummon guy's a quick fix please.

Characters walking sideways has been around for years, just a rare weird one. Or keeps popping back into existence all the time. It's been doing that since DX9 days Only found it happen with several level standalones myself. Not good and quite infuriating of course!

@ DVader not in the standalone m8 in the Editor, haven't checked the standalone yet as it seems a bit messed up as well. This isnt for all the characters which is weird as they are all running the same script and was working fine, Just loaded up my eastern map and all characters on walls walk sideways now but the ones on the ground do not. Very frustrating :/
Edit : had to delete all the non working characters, save the game re place them and that seems to have fixed it for now.
weird bug!

Yeah, without doubt some weirdness in GG code at times. Seen NPC's crabbing sideways along the floor a few times over the years It could be that the original models are at a different orientation on an axis, but were fixed in the fpe and GG is somehow still seeing the original objects rotation. You wouldn't think so, but there can be silly issues with objects.

You may well have hit it on the head there



Dave

Open steam ..> happy with new update ..> install new update ...> see new bugs ....... and again.

Yeah another violence is added . The gg classic burn my lovely project files when discord or google chrome is open. What the *** is this???
example.fpm=360 KB
burned
example.fpm=1kB

Please ask questions @ live chat tomorrow when will these
bugs be fixed? Maybe some feedback after notice that way?

Preben is already on the latest reported bugs and fixed many.
Best thing is to get your issues on Github ASAP
https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues

Live Streams are for Max. Lee will just tell you the same thing.
Get them on Github so they can be investigated.