Welcome to the GameGuru weekly news and what a week it’s been. Some great advancements on our performance work, as well as improved visual work and a more focused approach following feedback from our beta testers. You can of course read all about this a little later, but as usual, let’s take a look at what our community is up to first.

We’ve featured a lot of E30Legends fantasy work in the past, but this modern day London Undeground screenshot from the Steam Artwork gallery really caught our eye as a nice change of pace for this talented user.

Another exciting development this week is this great sci-fi pack being showcased by GameGuru artist and user Voodoo. Click on the image above to see the models in action. Even better news, is that Voodoo is releasing the pack for FREE on the GameGuru store in the next few days. Click here to view the forum thread and pass on your thanks.

Ok, that’s what’s new from the community, let’s take a look at what else is happening in GameGuru world.

Store News

The store continues to grow at an amazing rate, you can now find more than 6,100 items available, with the number increasing daily.

New from the excellent BSP is yet another high quality weapons pack. Modern Weapons pack 3. It contains five super high quality weapons ideal for all of your modern warfare games. You must check the pack out and view all the screen shots of the models.

The master of critters Dagored has returned with this great giant centipede, ideal for fantasy or post apocalyptic games, or just because it’s another must have critter. Click on the image above to watch this creepy crawly in action.

Lastly this week is a look at Pasquill’s excellent Vehicle pack, we’ve featured his work on this pack before, but you can now purchase all of his modern day vehicle models in one go at an amazing discount. The pack features five vehicle types with texture variations, totaling 25 different looking vehicles ideal for modern day genres (with a few rusty variations for those extra grungy games.).

Become a Store Artist!

The Game Creator Store connects creative artists and musicians with enthusiastic GameGuru game developers. Can you create game-ready 3D models or themed atmospheric music for the GameGuru community? If so, sign into the GameGuru website and sign up to become a store artist!

Play Expo

As many of you know the two leading lights of TGC (Lee Bamber and Rick Vanner) attended Play Expo in Manchester over the weekend. They both had a great time and came back with a lot of information and feedback from users old and new.

Lee explains and shows the finer points of GameGuru with TGC community visitors at the Expo.

We were also very impressed with how easily the younger users got to grips with GameGuru. Users as young as 9 years old were quickly making and playing their own levels.

All in all, the Expo was a great success for us and we would like to thank everyone for making Lee and Rick so welcome and we hope to be back next year to meet you all again.

Twitch News

The GameGuru Twitch Broadcasts continue and don’t forget that we broadcast every Wednesday at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST and 8am PST. Every week we answer your questions and share some tips and tricks on how to get the best out of GameGuru. We’ll also have up to the minute reports about GameGuru and maybe some insights into our plans for the future.

If you missed last week’s broadcast, you can catch up on it and all previous broadcasts by clicking on the image below.

GameGuru Development News

We’ve seen lots of great work internally with some good feedback for the majority of testers. Building on this success is a whole gambit of new performance tricks that we’re working on right now. As always we’re going to be a little cagey when trumpeting facts and figures until we’ve got some solid and consistent results, but our beta testers have tested a variety of maps and scenarios and are reporting between 10% and 200% increases with most of them seeing a doubling in performance across the board! We’ve recently completed our first multi-core occluder function and are tying this in with a clever batch exclude system which we’ll be testing out on our beta testers soon. We have some very high hopes for this and expect another big improvement for the entire testing team. The plan is to continue improving performance for the rest of October and then release the new version to everyone mid November. Following that work we’ll be swinging back to work on the DirectX11 engine which will make your games shine with lots of lovely new rendering techniques! You can expect the DirectX11 release around February time.

Signing Off

Once again we draw to a close, we hope you are happy to hear of our progress to date and we’ll keep you up to date with all of the facts and figures coming over the next few weeks leading up to release day.

As always thank you all for your patient support, you keep us going during this long but vital area of the development.

Don’t forget Lee’s regular blogs, and we’ll be back every Monday with more on GameGuru and our showcase of the best of the best from our excellent community.

The GameGuru Team