Welcome to your GameGuru MAX update announcement. This month we have double-downed on DirectX 12 porting work and can report some excellent wins ahead of our Alpha build release. Since the last report, we have completed about 96% of the feature set now, with the remaining functionality mostly vested in the very latest DX11 builds. Our snapshot of the DX11 code was from many months ago and we will need to sync all changes since that snapshot to the DX12 engine before we can declare 100% feature complete. Similarly, our snapshot of the DX12 Wicked Engine is from the same date so we may need to upgrade that code too, depending on how much we have changed the graphics engine. The original goal was zero changes on the original Wicked Engine fork, but it has been necessary to make changes to restore expected MAX functionality and improve performance for the kinds of levels GameGuru MAX creates, and in some cases, entirely rewrite sections such as the tree rendering. The hope is that such changes can form an ancillary code base that re-links to the latest fork, thus allowing MAX to tap into the latest juicy goodness of the hottest Wicked Engine versions.
Some coolness already activated is the Texture Streaming for game objects, giving you a much smoother FPS without the spikes, as the actual textures occupying video memory are only those you are directly looking at, not the contents of your entire level. We are hopeful to extend this to our new terrain bake system, an extra tickbox if you need more speed on lower-end systems.
We are still pre-Alpha, so very much an internal version right now, but we hopefully to be able to prepare a public Alpha once we have reached 100% functionality, match the latest MAX version, and have hit our performance goals.
This screenshot is taken from our lowest test rig, a Core i5 2.5Ghz Alienware laptop sporting an NVIDIA GTX 1050, purchased new about 10 years ago. You are looking at the Island Showdown demo level with performance and graphics panels open.
We started our port on a high-end NUC with a 32GB video memory graphics card, then down to a 6-year old AMD card with 4GB PC, and finally a laptop with just 2,5 Ghz CPU. As you can see, with most features back in play, we are chasing performance to ensure no-one suffers when they move from the simpler DX11 pipeline. Progress so far is good, and the plan is to continue this work until we reach or exceed parity. At this point, I think we can say you are going to get your DX12 version :)
Join the community on our DISCORD channel (https://discord.gg/8eFKsXDema) and if you find a bug, it would be awesome if you could post a report on our GitHub issues board (https://github.com/Dark-Basic-Software-Limited/GameGuruRepo/issues). Until next time, happy game making!