I've uploaded a new release last night correcting the player's pickup to be much more reliable. It should be very rare for a case in which the player is in a object and releases it causing the player to fly backward. I could have kept objects solid but that caused another can of worms. I also posted this on my OneDrive due to issues of people not being able to download it from this site.
Yesterday I was working on implementation of the power balls and the launcher. I've written a rough draf
Hi Leadwerkers ⚙️,
today I have a cool announcement to make. In the past two years I was working on the Phodex Framework, which is a set of helpful tools, utilities and systems, created to unleash Leadwerk's true power and potential, to be able to create the games I had in mind. Now, that I have released my first Leadwerks game Bladequest: The First Chapter and the Phodex Framework has proven its worth in practice, I thought it is time to share some parts of the framework, especially those
I'm using the excellent sol2 library to interface C++ and Lua in the upcoming Turbo Game Engine. I've decided not to create an automatic header parser like I did for tolua++ in Leadwerks 4, for the following reasons:
There are a lot of different options and special cases that would probably make a header parser a very involved task with me continually discovering new cases I have to account for.
sol2 is really easy to use.
Each class I want available to Lua will have a stat
A small update has been published to the default branch of Leadwerks Game Engine on Steam. This updates the FBX converter so that the scene units (meters, feet, etc.) are read from the file and used to convert the model at the proper size. Previously, the raw numbers for position, scale, and vertex positions were read in as meters. The new importer also supports both smooth groups and per-vertex normals, so models can be imported more reliably without having to recalculate normals.
An error
For who those who don't know (or remember) Vectronic was my first person puzzler project I was developing from 2013-2016 starting with the Source Engine and then onto Leadwerks. The goal of the project was to create a puzzle game and allow people the assets to make their own puzzles. Although it never saw it's end, you can still play the demo here.
So what happened? Vectronic was how I pretty much learned a lot about programing, art and game design in general. I kept going back working on i
An update is available for the new Turbo Game Engine beta.
Fixed compiling errors with latest Visual Studio version
Fixed compatibility problems with AMD hardware
Process is now DPI-aware
Added high-resolution depth buffer (additional parameter on CreateContext()).
Subscribers can download the new version here.
Luawerks has been updated to 1.2.6, making some small adjustments and fixes to the system. If you have previously purchased Luawerks, this update is available for free on the Leadwerks Marketplace.
Following changes include:
Fixed flag typo correcting LUAWORKS to LUAWERKS
Moved error.mat/tex to the Materials/Common folder
Added a useuisystem boolean to disable the menu,
Adjusted VR mode not to call any UI elements.
At this time, this update is only exclus
After three weeks of work, Pre-Alpha v1.1 is ready.
Terrain
The terrain has seen some behind the scenes improvements with speed as well as visual improvements to geometry and texturing. When I manage to get Texture Arrays working I will be able to finish of the new texturing shader that will include Tessellation and over 16 different texture maps as well as various masks that will paint according to erosion and forest locations.
An image of one of the mountains randomly pl
TLDR: I made a long-term bet on VR and it's paying off. I haven't been able to talk much about the details until now.
Here's what happened:
Leadwerks 3.0 was released during GDC 2013. I gave a talk on graphics optimization and also had a booth at the expo. Something else significant happened that week. After the expo closed I walked over to the Oculus booth and they let me try out the first Rift prototype.
This was a pivotal time both for us and for the entire game industry. Mobi
Building on the Asset Loader class I talked about in my previous blog post, I have added a loader to import textures from SVG files. In 2D graphics there are two types of image files. Rasterized images are made up of a grid of pixels. Vector images, on the other hand, are made up of shapes like Bezier curves. One example of vector graphics you are probably familiar with are the fonts used on your computer.
SVG files are a vector image format that can be created in Adobe Illustrator and othe
There's a discussion on the forum that sort of veered into talking about Khronos' GLTF file format specification:
Some of this gave me some ideas for changes in the art pipeline in Turbo Game Engine. I was not feeling very concentrated today so I decided to do some easy work and implement a loader class:
class Loader : public SharedObject
{
public:
std::vector<wstring> extensions;
virtual bool Reload(shared_ptr<Stream> stream, shared_ptr<SharedObject> o, const int f
The Seventh World is a Medieval Fantasy Survival game, inspired by the likes of Skyrim and ARK Survival Evolved.
It's been under development for the last two years but only in the last eight months has a real commitment been made to it. Spending every night after work and every other day working on it I've achieved a base from which to build on.
The cuboid landmasses are called fragments. They are arranged as a sphere to make up a planet. Game-play will eventually include mov
I found and fixed the cause of the cubemap seams in variance shadow maps so we now have nice soft seamless shadows.
I also changed the engine so that point lights use six 2D textures instead of a separate cubemap texture array. This means that all light types are sharing one big 2D array texture, and it frees up one texture slot. I am not sure if I want to have a hard limit on number of shadow-casting lights in the scene, or if I want to implement a system that moves lights in and out
As I work with the new engine more and more I keep finding new ways it makes life happy and productive.
Smart Pointers
I have talked about how great these are at length, but I keep finding new reasons I love them. The behind-the-scenes design has been a lot of fun, and it's so cool to be able to write lines of code like this without any fear of memory leaks:
LoadSound("Sound/Music/fully_loaded_60.wav")->Play();
What do you think that code does? It plays a sound, keeps it in m
Working out of this subject:
I tested a script for a simple "GoToPoint()" function for a customizable character controller for NPC. This may not be so good as the implemented LE character controller with classic navigation system but it could be promising to use it in open world (so not in much corridored dungeon game!) where the the NPC should crawl or swim or whatever do things as for example underscaled world (thats what I am actually interested in ?)
The NPCs are using an "
The Turbo Game Engine beta is updated! This will allow you to load your own maps in the new engine and see the speed difference the new renderer makes.
LoadScene() has replaced the LoadMap() function, but it still loads your existing map files.
To create a PBR material, insert a line into the material file that says "lightingmodel=1". Blinn-Phong is the default lighting model.
The red and green channels on texture unit 2 represent metalness and roughness.
You g
I've got the basic GI algorithm working but it needs a lot of work to be correct. I tend to do very well when the exact outcome is well-defined, but I am not as good at dealing with open-ended "artistic" programming. I may end up outsourcing the details of the GI shader to someone else, but the underlying data management is solid enough that I am not scared of it anymore.
There's a lot of aspects of the design I'm not scared of anymore. We worked out smart pointers (including Lua integratio
The beta branch has been updated. The following changes have been made:
Rolled beta branch back to release version, with changes below.
Added new FBX converter.
Fixed Visual Studio project template debug directory.
Fixed Visual Studio project template Windows Platform SDK version problem.
If everything is okay with this then it will go out on the default branch soon.
I finally have a cool screenshot to show you of our new real-time global illumination working.
Here is a comparison screenshot showing direct lighting only:
Now there are still lots of small issues to worry about. Right now I am only using a single cone trace. More cones will improve accuracy, but I think light leaking is just always going to be a fact of life with this technique. Still, the results looks great, require no precalculation, respond to environment changes, and
Now that we have our voxel light data in a 3D texture we can generate mipmaps and perform cone step tracing. The basic idea is to cast a ray out from each side of each voxel and use a lower-resolution mipmap for each ray step. We start with mipmap 1 at a distance that is 1.5 texels away from the position we are testing, and then double the distance with each steo of the ray. Because we are using linear filtering we don't have to make the sample coordinates line up exactly to a texel center, and
I have successfully transferred lit voxel data into a 3D texture. The texture is now being used to display the lighting at each voxel. Soft edges are appearing due to linear filtering in the texture. To achieve this, I used an OpenGL 4.2 feature which allows you to write values into any arbitrary position in a texture. This could also be used for motion blur or fluid simulations in the future. However, since Mac support for OpenGL only goes up to 4.1, it means we cannot use real-time GI on a Mac
We left off on voxels when I realized the direct lighting needed to be performed on the GPU. So I had to go and implement a new clustered forward renderer before I could do anything else. Well, I did that and now I finally have voxel lighting calculation being performed with the same code that renders lighting. This gives us the data we need to perform cone step tracing for real-time dynamic global illumination.
The shadows you see here are calculated using the scene shadowmaps, not b
