Since the last GameGuru MAX update in May we have remained focused on fixing as many bugs as possible to ensure your game-making experience is uninterrupted and the stability of the product increases overall.
If you are familiar with the EXP build available from Steam, you may already have enjoyed some of the fixes and small improvements over the last few months, but for those who are sticking with the official public builds, there is quite a list of items for you. A full list of changes and fixes can be found in the history.txt file in the root of GameGuru MAX, but here are the highlights.
Given the high number of reports of incompatibility with some AMD cards, we have added a system to render through a DirectX 11 to Vulkan layer for AMD cards reported to have the black screen issue. Let us know if your AMD card still experiences this issue and we will add your model of card to the detection list.
We have improved the speed of calculating the nav mesh that uses trees, saving some users minutes of waiting between test games, and the engine does a better job of freeing up resources when leaving the test game such as cloned objects. The nav mesh blocker system used for things like opening and closing doors now has an improved system that prevents characters from freezing as they walk past doors in the act of changing state.
Explosions now respect solid walls and cannot influence objects on the other side of them, and apply correct damage and physics to line-of-sight objects and characters. They also pre-calculate line of sight in advance to remove the stutter you often saw when lots of explosions happen close to each other.
A simple batch conversion has been added to the model importer for those users who have hundreds of models that need to import quickly. Smart objects now retain the custom collision mode set and fixes rotation issues to retain the original grouping exactly when you use them as prefabs to accelerate your level constructions.
Weapons once again have the ability to host transparent parts such as reticules and other glass aspects and work in concert with the existing transparency system and lightray blocking.
The storyboard has new functionality to restore any stock screens, returning them to their original configurations as needed. Standalones now detect all versions of emissive texture names and include them in the final game exported, and exported games resume any paused sounds or music so as not to break audio continuity. We have also fixed the 3D sound issue so objects emitting 3D sounds are placed correctly in the audio landscape for the player.
Basic Steam Workshop support has been added to support select trusted contributors to bypass the official and EXP builds and release content updates quicker. We will be slowly extending this to more contributors over time.
We are far from fully eliminating the bugs, with over 290 still lurking, but we chop this number down each week, and before long we will be down to edge cases and can afford to look towards your feature requests that are also hosted on the issues board.
Thanks for your patience as we work through old and new reports alike, and we look forward to the day we match parity with GameGuru Classic which has boasted zero bug counts for a number of quarters already.
It's also worth noting, and that you may have spotted already, that many third-party artists are eager to provide official game-making content as official DLC for GameGuru MAX, and that providing they hit a quality bar, we are happy to release them. These DLC do not interfere with or delay the bug-fixing effort and, in fact, allow us to concentrate a group of common bugs under a single set of fixes when new DLC highlights those areas.
GameGuru MAX already comes with over a thousand game assets, functionality and guides to help you import your own, and you should view all DLC as entirely optional and offered as a convenience to those who want to augment their game-making choices with high-value assets, licensed and ready for you to add them to your creations.
We are excited to see GameGuru MAX get stronger with each build and are enjoying the progress reports coming from the community on various exciting game-making projects already underway. We are also happy with how the new monthly live broadcasts are going, and moving from weekly has given everyone more time to collect cool new things to show and share. If you want to join in on these extended hour-long Q&A sessions, we host them on the last Wednesday of every month at 7 PM BST on our YouTube channel.