How to record gameplay with the best result?

• Goal: Capture game Video PLUS Sound, as fluently as possible.

So. You just downloaded ton of screen capturing tools, convinced that recording your FPSC game is the simplest thing in the world.
Wrong!
Most likely, you will spend a night installing crappy programs, which are demos anyway. Or in best case half baked not working betas.

How to copy directory structure without files?

First Aid for FPSCreator users:

How to copy directory structure without files?
You may know you can use xcopy command for this. Damn, you even read some help how to use it. WHY O WHY is it not working?

The problem is with long directory names containing special characters. Please don't ask why  is Microsoft putting crucial system files into such.
So, after one hour of typing crap into command line, you found this page.

The Solution: 

1.  Make directory, where you will put your "stuff". Maybe g:\fpsupdate.
2.  Using Total Commander, go to C:\Program Files (x86)\The Game Creators\  (supposing its your instalation path)
3.  type cmd into Total Commander command line
4. type xcopy *.* g:\fpsupdate   /t /e  

The command will copy directory structure WITHOUT files. You may then copy your files to proper folders for easy upgrading fpsc versions. All about XCOPY command.

Note: You don't need Total Commander for this. If you are retro Tron freak, you may spend afternoon navigating your folders with system commands. Enjoy!  

Viral Outbreak Review

Viral Outbreak (model pack 52) delivers several fully scripted and animated horror characters. New shader feature, "planar projected shadows" gives another bit of realism to fpsc characters. The high point of this pack are shaders, although modeling, animating and texturing are fantastic.
The best character regards overall performance is Grendel, by my opinion. The other characters are good too, but I think that are not very generic by nature (which may be problem if you want to customize the content of your game at max level, and still using stock entities).
The demo of advanced shader techniques in darkbasic-fpsc, Medusa character, is also very intense, and not before seen in any fpsc related product (although its name could be rather Mr. Hankey, buy the pack to see what I mean).

Considering price of Viral Outbreak pack, it would be very good even if there was only one character in it.
Conclusion: Must to have.

Overall Rating: Super Cool

Zombie Apocalypse Review

Zombie Apocalypse (model pack 39) includes 21 zombie characters. The modeling, texturing and animation is excellent and the characters are really creepy.
Scripting is very good and usable just out of the box. However, when there are many characters in one level there seems to be some confusion in entity behaviour (but, they are fraggin zombies anyway, so its not much a problem).
Entities are ok to place even in segments with no problem. They are following you even up the stars by default.
The characters are complete with nice default sounds for your game prototyping.

Overall rating: Best zombie pack for fpsc ever!

Adaptive Tesselation

Here is fine example of instanced tesselation from Nvidia SDK. The technique basicaly offers more detailed 3d object with mapped high resolution via GPU. FPSC Engine is not supporting this feature, yet...
If you are interested in theory about this example, you may read more at Nvidia Developer web site.
Whitepaper by Tianyun Ni and Ignacio Castanis is here.
This example works on directx9 (tested with nvidia GForce 8 product range GPU).

More about DirectX11 use of tesselation in this Nvidia presentation:

System specs scan for betatesting

When betatesting, its always useful to learn the correct system configuration for a better bug hunting.
You may use directx tool dxdiag for this (bonus - it is already installed with directx on your computer).

Go to Start/Run
type dxdiag 


You may save system specs to a text file. Delete unneeded info from it, and you are ready to send it to your project manager.


You may also use Microsoft msinfo32 tool in the same manner. (However dxdiag provides more useful info for game debugging).

TIP: You may check many features of your system. For instance, it is useful to learn which directx driver is your system actually using (in case of The file d3d9d.dll is a debug version, which will run slower than the retail version. message). Go to your directx utilities folder, find directx control panel, check Use Retail version of Direct3D for more speed - if it's not checkboxed already).

Metro Theater Review

Model Pack 38 aka Metro Theater brought power of PS 2.0 shaders into fpsc game prototyping. The pack contains nice segments and entities, but the main theme are shader scripts.
Fpsc always included some basic shaders, which were mostly source of constant frustration. Metro Theater finally brings some kind of order into increasing entropia.

Both static and dynamic entity shaders are here for your learning and customization ("mirror" scripts are specifically designed to work with demo level/rooms, so you need to change textures to use it in your game).

Provided showcase level compiles surprisingly quick and presents the best features of the pack. You may see video walktrough on TGC shop pages. Many segments in the pack are actually usable in any project.

Metro Theater  was first official "water" pack, with quite convincing effect for the engine. Interesting note: the water scripts work surprisigly well with new fpsc 1.18 water shader!

Models included are mostly good or above fpsc average quality (except for terrible piping and couple of similar unimportant items).


Overall rating: Go get it!

Useful Utilities

Here is a list of utilities and links you may find handy:

Security:
PC safety scan for Windows, online FREE tool
Microsoft Malicious Software Removal 64-bit
Microsoft Malicious Software Removal 32-bit

Latest Drivers:
Nvidia
ATI

Check For Flash Version Online:

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/find-version-flash-player.html