The title says it all, and after many weeks and many many tweaks we have a release for you, in the shape of a sizable update to Game Guru. We kept new features to a minimum this time, which mainly consists of a new way to map any face onto the custom characters created in the Character Creator module. Whether it be your own face for your multiplayer avatar or the faces of your enemies in a first or third person romp you have more tools at your disposal to create a unique and interesting game.
In the update, you will also find subtle improvements to the third person system so enemies are a little more aggressive, able to attack from a greater range.
If you so wish you can create some seriously crazy visuals if your game style demands it, though in my own test above I probably got carried away a little.
In another walk through test, I suddenly turned around at the end of the level and realized just how much game there actually is in The Big Escape, one of the sample levels you can find in the latest version.
Some other interesting changes have happened such as the temporary removal of the Interactive Tutorial mode in favor of additional menu items to link videos, tutorial pages, demo games and more help links on the IDE which we feel is less intrusive that a huge splash when GameGuru starts.
Perhaps the biggest news is that starting next week my 'speed team' consisting of myself and Ravey 'the raven' Dave will begin the work of increasing the performance of the product, and the number one requested feature from the community in the last few weeks. Despite working on performance about a year ago, we neglected the low to mid range systems which had better than average graphics cards and multiple cores, and users want to use their PCs to maximum effect (of course). To that end we will be breaking down GameGuru into its component parts and analyzing each area for possible speed gains, from the individual game loop instructions right the way through the scene graph, physics and the AI system. We will also be adding multiple core threads to the engine to run several processes in parallel to the main game thread when more than one core is detected. All these small gains will accumulate into a sizable increase in your frame rate and hopefully turn a level that struggles to get to 30 fps into something that does not drop below 60 fps. No small achievement, which is why for this project we have banned deadlines, with a single simple goal to get ALL stock levels running at over 60 fps on our mid-range test system.
We have recently released the GameGuru news about the update and also the main TGC newsletter as well, so if you want to read more just visit the main site or even catch-up on the daily antics of a developer by checking out my blog here: https://www.game-guru.com/devblog/?p=241
Until next week, have a great weekend, make many many games and as always please let us know what you think of the latest update and get your feature requests ready for the arrival of the new voting system when we will see what you'll be getting next after performance!