Firstly, I hope you enjoyed your weekend, and before that, your Easter festivities, and we hope you liked our little seasonal DLC to help you create something Easter flavored over the holidays. As it happens, one such user took the Easter DLC assets and made a very cool bandicoot clone, including a great how-to tutorial video of the whole thing which was awesome to watch! If you are interested, his video is here:
In other news, work progresses well with the V1.13 version, including a few key fixes of features broken in previous builds including the Fantasy Pack characters and the AI of soldiers using the ai_soldier script. Anyone using GameGuru since January will have seen the characters from the modern day assets behave a little odd, which has now been corrected. Also, I have added a very early 'Alpha' implementation of FBX importing which will be available to all through the IMPORT MODEL item of the FILE menu. Be warned that there are MANY variations of FBX 3D models, and there does not seem to be a set agreement on how they should be rendered, so I have chosen to mimic the render from Autodesk Maya which is pretty much as close to source as you can get. The current implementation can handle static and skin animated meshes, including the required bone structure and keyframe animation take data, and will deal with both triangle (3) and quad (4) polygon faces right now. I plan to expand this basic implementation with each version, though it will be some time before we have exhaustive support for all the variant 3D models currently stored as FBX, and it's pretty fair to say we will never fully support every corner of the FBX format given the vastness of the properties you can contain in them.
Finally, I wanted to show off a new LUA command and script which will enable you to create moving platforms in your game. The original request was to add 'associate player' commands to LUA, but on inspecting the existing commands, it only required a modified version of an existing TransportToFreezePosition() command to override the players position (but leave the camera angle intact) to allow the player to ride a moving platform but still allow free movement of the mouse look and use of all weapons and other hand-held items.
As this is one of the larger updates, we want to make sure it's fully tested before releasing it into the wild. The beta testers are reporting good things, and I hope to bring you news very soon of the public release of V1.13. In the meantime, have a great week and happy game making!