As covered in our newsletter last week, we are making some changes to the way we deliver GameGuru MAX from 1st September onwards.
In order to focus more of our time on bug fixes and functionality, and less time on builds and announcements, we are ending support for the non-Steam version of GameGuru MAX at the end of the month and will be providing Steam keys to all TGC customers who have the non-Steam version.
Other TGC account benefits will remain unaffected while we perform this transition and this includes the ability to download older purchases.
The general goal is to have Steam do the heavy lifting when it comes to infrastructure, announcements, auto-updates, beta testing and content curation, so we can concentrate our efforts and resources on delivering a fully rounded GameGuru MAX to you by the end of the year.
Fear not! We will not be leaving anyone behind and will work with our community to ensure you have what you need to continue using GameGuru MAX for years to come and, of course, benefit from the extra boost in development time we ultimately free up by not having two side-by-side build versions to support.
Another big news item is that we have just opened up the source code of GameGuru MAX which is now available as a public repository on GitHub. We saw the engagement when we did this with GameGuru Classic and are looking forward to seeing new community contributions on the GameGuru MAX side to accelerate the features you are looking for down the road.
As heralded in our live broadcast last week we have also made a policy decision regarding any new GameGuru MAX DLC. We will not sell functionality as an add-on during Early Access. The community quite rightly pointed out the moral ambiguity of this with our recent release of the Particle Editor and, thanks to this feedback, we have since included the Particle Editor Tool as a core feature of GameGuru MAX. From here on in DLC will be only game assets that extend your choices, similar to shopping on an asset store, and will not include any kind of functional advantage over a user who only uses the core product.
And finally, not to be overshadowed, we have a shiny new Friday update for you, including many fixes and also some noteworthy improvements such as:
- Improved model importer to allow characters to be specified and animations organized
- Smart Objects can now store their own local thumb image for use in the library
- Multiple fixes to ally AI, line of sight detection, and animation glitches
- New ZDEPTH mode 2 allows objects to render without penetrating geometry, like HUD weapons
- Added 20 new behaviors to the Behavior Library, courtesy of Necrym59
- Added 28 new LUA commands to control entity object material properties
We are the first to say the current bug list is much too large for comfort and we are dedicating a good portion of our newfound development time to work through the backlog and get the count right down. If you find something that is not yet reported please do let the team know via our GitHub issues board.
Also from 1st September, we will be replacing the regular twice-monthly Friday updates with a flexible cadence so we can release things as they are completed and tested, rather than pause activity to prepare a big update.
Sometimes we have new code ready just days after a Friday release, other times we need 3-4 weeks to finish something solid. So we are trialing a more ad-hoc release schedule and increasing the use of beta and public preview builds - so you will not be found wanting when it comes to updates.
Happy Game Making!