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For loop optimization

Today I learned a pretty basic but very usefull programming principle. It is about declaring multiple initialisers in a for loop. I am working with a mobile application and speed and memory are more of an issue than on computer right now. My application is finished when you look at its functionality and construction, but it has to be optimized.   Here is a narrowed down example of what I am doing:   for(int i = 0; i < veryLongArray.length(); i++) { DoSomething(i); } This is very b

AggrorJorn

AggrorJorn

The path to becoming a Visual Studios 2010 "Expert"

Much like many jobs, in programming there are tasks that you enjoy working on and then there are the tasks that lack joy and glory but are quite necessary. I recently began moving our project from visual studio 2008 to visual studio 2010 and well I can firmly state that this task fell into the latter category.   After receiving this job, my first step was to jump right into it and use the VS 2008 to 2010 converter wizard. Everything seemed to move smoothly but being a programming pessimist, I

Chris Vossen

Chris Vossen

A Red-Letter Day

No matter what, tomorrow is a big day for the tech industry. What do you think will happen? http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8  

Josh

Josh

One of the weirdest bugs of my life

So inexplicably, two days ago animation stopped working on all my Mac machines. I checked out the graphics module, looked in the surface class, the animation routine, and couldn't fine anything wrong. The same code ran fine on Windows, and all the animation is on the CPU, anyways, so it couldn't be a graphics issue.   I noticed if I explicitly set the frame number instead of using the time as the frame, it worked fine. So I start printing out the frame number in the animation routine. The

Josh

Josh

Preparing C++ Projects

I've been doing a lot to create the final Leadwerks projects to build static libraries, and the corresponding Visual Studio, Xcode, and Eclipse projects to load those libraries and start coding with Leadwerks 3 in C++. We're also making progress with our sample game "Darkness Awaits". The community came up with an awesome logo for the game that captures the spirit and feel of the original concept, which first formed as a mod for the original Quake engine. I uploaded gamecreator's Photoshop fi

Josh

Josh

Code, babes, clowns, and an inflatable dinosaur. Just a typical night at Hacker Lab.

I've been following Eric's progress with this idea since last spring, and it's really great to see what started as a fuzzy concept turn into reality.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK_yjZpOs6w   About Hacker Lab We believe that technology can change the world and the starting point is education. Hacker Lab aims to educate folks and seed startups with community driven resources. Collectively we can build a brighter future using lean methods in both education and business.   We Provide

Josh

Josh

Building Deployable Projects

It's quite a challenge to get something semi-deployable to work on four platforms. I never intended to become an expert on the subject, but here are some of the interesting things I have picked up recently.   Code generation mode in Visual Studio By default, Visual Studio builds programs in debug mode that won't run on consumer's machines. Fix it by changing the code generation mode: http://www.leadwerks...grams-cant-run/   Static Libraries in Xcode Xcode has no "exclude from build" opt

Josh

Josh

Lua Interpreter on OSX

I've got the editor and Lua interpreter communicating on OSX, but am having trouble creating a window...some weird Objective C problem. I've got to go get my local Xcode expert.

Josh

Josh

Unwrapping Character Model : Final

Today I had some time and made the end of the arms and legs.Thats it for now, only some final corrections follows ( and the normal map of course ).   The next step is to rig the character and animate him   Here are some pics from the LE Editor:  

ParaToxic

ParaToxic

Part 3 Unwrapping Character: Hands

Well today I saw tousands of Bodypaint 3D tutorials from Cinema4D and made the texture fpr the hands with the photos of my own. I think it is okey for now , some parts aren't as good as they should , like the thumb, because the UV map is very bad at this area.   It costs me 3 hours of work to make that whith the bottom and top view of my own hands.The normalmap should optimize all that stuff.    

ParaToxic

ParaToxic

Level Construction Set Part 3: An Instancing Issue

Instancing is great! It improves performance drastically and it's almost like getting 100 pizza's for the same price as 1. However, there is one instance (excuse the pun) in which instancing is not ideal and that is when you want to have the same mesh to have different materials applied. Basically the problem occurs when you apply a material to one mesh in a set of instanced meshes all of those instanced meshes change material.   In my Level construction set I have multiple pre-fabricated piec

Road Kill Kenny

Road Kill Kenny

Icing on the Cake

I recently made two small improvements that make the editor much more fun to work with.   A shader consists of two pages of code, for the vertex and fragment programs. I originally designed the shader editor to use tabs to divide up the two code chunks. However, this meant the shader editor could have only one shader open at a time. This made copying and pasting from one shader to another rather tedious.   To improve this, I merged the shader and script editors into a single window. Mult

Josh

Josh

Terrain Test

I borrowed Shadmar's terrain splatting shader. This is the result after fiddling around with it for a few minutes in Leadwerks 3. (No normal mapping yet, but that's easy to add.)   Physics can be added by generating a physics shape from the terrain model. It doesn't allow heightmap editing in the editor, but I think this will serve as a good solution until our super uber mega streaming terrain system is built.   Thanks to Shadmar for the assets.   Klepto is also looking into a few OpenG

Josh

Josh

Level Construction Set Part 2: Level Editor WIP

I've been working on this level editor for my game to go with the level construction set idea I chose to adopt for my level management. The below video is a Vlog showing my progress with the editor.   The idea behind the editor is to reduce the rather impossible grunt work known as filling in a database line by line with data to create a data. I make the level in the editor and all that information gets saved and it writes those lines for me.   Current Major Features Include: - Loading Leve

Road Kill Kenny

Road Kill Kenny

First UV Unwrap from my character model

Hei ya I made this new blog to entry some news for my game.So the last weeks I started to plan the whole game with a great idea ( I think ).   Some days ago I made a new character model ( just the low poly for now ) and started to unwrap the model.   Now I have the face and would like to show it to you.       Edit:     Today I made the basic clothtexture for the human.I looks a little bit dirty and I think I have to make more details because it's a little bit boring.But don't forget

ParaToxic

ParaToxic

Leadwerks 3 on Windows 8

I picked up an Intel SSD for fairly cheap and installed the Windows 8 Release Preview on it. With this configuration boots up in about 5 seconds. I actually spend a lot longer waiting for BIOS to finish than for Windows to start, which is fantastic.   Anyways, it makes sense to me to take screenshots for the docs from the newest version of Windows 8 since Windows is still the dominant operating system. I couldn't find a driver for my ATI 3850, so I swapped it out for a GEForce 480. Here's

Josh

Josh

Visual Studio

I experienced some problems this week when I tried to create an executable with Visual Studio 2008 for deployment. On Windows 7 test machines I would get this error:   I finally tracked the solution down to a Visual Studio project setting. In Project Settings > Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Code Generation there is a property called "Runtime Library". By default it is set to rely on external DLLs. Change these values to non-DLL settings (like MT or MTd) and they will include

Josh

Josh

The slender rebuild - An easy project?

Okay, so last night I got a burst of inspiration after seeing a horror movie. I wanted to use that energy to create a simple horror game. Recently I played Slender and I was surprised to see how 'easy to create' it seemed. Ofcourse that is easier said than done. So lets get to work   Rebuild for Leadwerks So how hard can it be right? Within 2 hours I had a nice little start. You jump over a fence and thats were the fun begins. I have added a temporary ending to set the mood a little.   Leve

AggrorJorn

AggrorJorn

Level Building: Lego Construction Set

Hi All,   Currently I am working on making my level building in my game much more diverse and easy. Formerly I was having to create custom models for each room in the game. This worked but was hardly efficient, very time consuming and did not leave much hope for the end user to create and share levels either.   So I set off to kill two birds with one stone: Make a level building system & editor to streamline level creation in my game Make the editor easy to use to open up the possib

Road Kill Kenny

Road Kill Kenny

Editor Enhancements

I've always believed strongly that a native UI presents a cleaner, more consistent, and more beautiful interface for the user to interact with. Not only do they look better, but they present less of a learning curve because the user already knows how to interact with them. When applications move beyond competing to see who can make a better home-made button, they can focus on greater underlying functionality and stop wasting time reinventing the wheel that the operating system already provides

Josh

Josh

LE3 pre terrain possibility using Bryce7 and splatting

I thought of trying out Bryce7 for creating terrains in LE3 since we don't get the chunked-lod terrain we have in LE2 to go at first.   So here is my initial tests using a custom splat shader for RGB only. Bryce has an very advanced material generator so I think RGBA (4) or 2xRGBA (8) is within reach too (haven't tested yet)   Anyway here is my first try exported an 32k vertex mesh (fbx) from Bryce7 (it's not LE terrain, just a mesh)   Bryce7 is still free over at DAZ. (so go grab it)  

shadmar

shadmar

Terrain Errosion Blending Technique

using UDK terrains as inspiration i wanted to try and get the same effect within leadwerks.   UDK's terrains can look extreamly nice, but that is fine when you have support for megatextures. This mean you have terrain building software such as world machine and others that offer features for creating massive mega textures which not only means you get unlimted layers as such, you get full procedral weathering effects, errosions, rocks etc and of course a mega normal map to make the whole terra

Andy Gilbert

Andy Gilbert

Rocky Scene

After finished another larger rock i decided to put a few into a scene to see how they go.   In the scene are only 3 different rocks! They all rotate and scale to create a nice non repetative scene.   All very low-poly, the newer larger rock in the back are 500 tris where as the other 2 type are 200 tris each.     Also Played with this little scene a bit more.. Thanks Andy

Andy Gilbert

Andy Gilbert

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