Well I hope you all enjoyed your Holidays. Here in Pennsylvania my family had a great Christmas together. It was nice to see family I'd not seen in a while.
With that, I skipped last week for the Holiday and am back to provide you with your regularly scheduled updates on GameGuru!
Official GameGuru News
The most recent update was here: https://www.thegamecreators.com/post/gameguru-buildings-pack-dlc-updated
Specifically this update fixes some geometry issues with the buildings pack, which many of us received as compensation for our earlier donations to the FPSC:Reloaded project. This is the first release of fixes done by Graphix and it looks pretty dang good. Like we're finally going to see some forward progress on some very old models that brings them up to a more reasonable standard.
It sounds like they'll be dialing back on the regular DLC updates for now as it seemed the general consensus was that it was getting out of hand.
What's Good in the Store
A note to store sellers - recently stricter guidelines have been implemented for large media images. You can get the full details here: https://seller.tgcstore.net/doc/marketing-advice
Teabone has been... really busy over his holiday. Color me impressed.
Some of these are some fantastic scripts, notably the dynamic water droplets and weapon hud wheel. These are good bits of code and I'm totally in for buying access to them... once I pay off the Christmas gift bills. That said, he does sell his scripts as a pack for a low price: https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11056
Also on the store this week Gtox put up a model that initially looked so-so but having watched the video I have to say the attack animation is great. It happens akin to a jump scare so it's a fairly unique entity.
You can get a copy or watch the video here: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/32267
A seller named simply 'ThatModelGuy' put together a pretty nice looking fast-food style booth. I have several of these but I have to say this one is a nice build with a very good looking model that fits cleanly.
It's on sale for a dollar here: https://www.tgcstore.net/product/32266
A new composer has placed his works on the store and there’s a substantial amount to look at. Take a look at his artist page here: https://www.tgcstore.net/artist/87213
Free Stuff
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217932?page=12#msg2610108 - Graphix put together a great road barrier with an animation for those interested, he also created a full download of every model he's ever done in one easy link here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217932?page=13#msg2610187
Honkeyboy made a map massively larger than the basic map and there's some interesting stuff in this thread about how to make it function properly. https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/220345
Bod made a pretty sweet radio for download: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/215012?page=18#msg2609928
JPH-Games made several building packs for christmas, however there's no zip link so... I guess we'll circle back on this one.
Third Party Tools and Tutorials
How to use Graphix's explosions:
Tarkus1971 put up his own site with media: https://forum.game-guru.com/outbound?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexigentsounds.co.uk%2F
Random Acts of Creativity (WIPs)
De-tachment by "SuperMasGamer" looks promising but lacks any gameplay videos, only has a few cutscenes and promo reels cut. Check out the pretty well put together cutscene here:
In My Own Works
The book is in the fun phase, the point where I send it to proofreaders and my personal editor to clean up and revise. I also get to re-read all 135k words and fix any glaringly obvious mistakes, reorganize, and the like. The content, however, is essentially done. I also got good news from someone with respect to building weapons so I'm hoping I can have those added in time for the game itself to be included with it by June. From a content standpoint though, I'm essentially done!
I did a huge amount of research over the past few weeks for how to use the model importer, learned quite a lot about it. Surprising how much power is actually under the hood when you take the time to learn about it.
Michael Messina (AKA Bolt-Action Gaming) is a native of central Pennsylvania, currently residing near York. He is a Linux Systems Engineer, part-time author, part-time Indy game-dev and full-time father. He is currently working on authoring a start to finish guide for GameGuru via Taylor and Francis (via CRCPress).
