Actually i ported my Gui system from MiniB3d / native OpenGl to LE
preamble: since im legastenic and english not my main language, this text could be very ugly to read for you, sorry for this.
I will try to improve this in Future posts, but it cost me like 8x concentration to to care about correct spelling, so then i would take 4 hours for this text intead of 10 minuts, please be sorry with me in this case!
it was easyier than i thought first, also i just rewrited some stuff that i was
Lately I've been talking a lot about making non-programmers happy, so here's something for the coders. B)
For Leadwerks3D documentation, I considered three possibilities:
-IPB-based docs
-Wiki
-Offline CHM files
Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, as always seems to be the case.
IPB
A bit slower, harder to organize, harder to edit, looks really good and consistent with the site, search requires quite a few clicks to get where you want to go, missing table of contents is
It doesn't happen to me much anymore but when I get stuck on a difficult problem, I get very restless and short-tempered. I guess that's the point where most programmers give up on a project. Since I can't physically wrestle code to the ground and give it a good beating Billy Batts style, the fight or flight response probably is not conducive to sitting in front of a piece of glass and figuring out code. On the other hand, I have a tendency to get difficult things done, no matter how hard the
To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
A* Pathfinding MapData Generator.
To make an entity in Leadwerrks3D behave, you can drag a script from the asset browser to the actors list in the entity properties editor. Each entity can have multiple scripts attached to it. Each script can have different variables exposed, with control for the GUI they are displayed in. For example, you can specify upper and lower limits of a spinner or a list of choices for a drop down box. Each script attached to an entity, along with its set of properties, is called an "actor" because.
Below you can see the properties editor. When you select a script attached to an entity, the properties for that script appear on the right. Here we have a simple "Pulse" script that changes the color of the entity along a sine curve. This can be used for making lights that pulsate slowly, or continually turn on and off.
Here's what the script looks like. The "--in" tag at the end of the Pause and Resume functions indicate that these functions can be activated in the flowgraph editor.
To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
AI, Waypoints, A* Pathfinding, Lua & Leadwerks.
The various parts of the new editor are coming together. Today I got the properties list box drag and drop functionality working. I actually had to go back and rewrite some of the list control rendering code because I haven't used it in a while, but it didn't take long.
I'm trying to attack known unknowns first, so we're focusing on the flow graph, AI, and game logic, and everything required to build up to support that. I've already written a CSG editor and an engine with great graphics,
Leadwerks 3 is compiling for Android. There's presently a problem with the file system that is preventing any 3D rendering, but we'll get that worked out shortly. We're targeting Android 2.2.
In order to compile C++ for Android on Windows, we had to install the following:
-Java SDK
-Eclipse IDE
-Android SDK
-Android NDK
-CygWin
-GDB
We also learned that OpenGL ES 2.0 does not run in the Android simulator. For the time being, we have to run the engine on an actual Android device.
Once again, I like to attack the things I haven't done in the past first. I know how to make a CSG editor. What I haven't done in the past is a visual editor for gameplay and logic.
In the shot below, you can see the properties editor, with the "Scripts" tab selected. I moved the name and angle editor outside the tabbed panel, with the idea that these are so important they belong in the main window, but the real reason was to break up the boredom of a full-window tabbed panel. Under the
The scene browser lets you see every entity and brush in the scene, and also lets you arrange entities in a hierarchy. You can add a light to the scene, position it onto a lamppost, then use the scene browser to parent the light to the lamppost model and save the whole thing as a prefab.
There's no "mesh" class in the new engine, and entities inherit a lot of the properties that models in LE2 had, like scripts and physics. Models are just MDL files, and generally just contain model and bon
Modding games is a popular sport, and very productive, since you don't have to code usually much, maybe some little additions only.
However, modding has its limits, as you are usually bound to a quite hardcoded game genre environment, unless you use Garry's Mod or something, but that has then it's own limits too with the engine features.
Since I am currenly building a GameLib FPS template for LEBuilder, these thoughts came up. What the template will do, is to create a simple FPS game with o
We have our design parameters. We know the editor should let the user control every aspect of the engine in a visual manner, without having to use any other tools or do any editing of text files. We have 3D World Studio to serve as inspiration for the design and feel of the program.
The sky's the limit. You, the users, have told me that you want to invest in a system that does more for you and makes your life easier. I'm happy to provide the basis for your next projects. Thank you for l
I implemented resizable viewports this morning. This is so much more fun than fiddling around with compiler settings.
You can grab the bars between viewports, or the very center space, and drag it around to resize the four viewports. I usually prefer a smaller perspective view, and like to devote most of my space to the 2D views when doing serious editing:
You can also drag the views around to make a single big viewport, or just have two viewports visible:
In 3D World Studio, w
The fantastic Fatcow icon set was recommended to me in the comments in a previous blog post. These are very similar to the Silk icon set, but come in 32x32 and 16x16 versions, have more icons, and better coloration. The Silk icon set is sort of a desaturated pastel tone I don't like, and Fat Cow's icons are more saturated and bright. I had actually considered running the Silk icons through a color-correction algorithm, but Fat Cow has already done the work for me.
I knew from the start I
I hired a local Android developer to get Leadwerks 3.0 running on Android devices. We don't know a lot yet, other than that we have an OpenGLES renderer, and everything should be cross-platform compilable. The Android version of LE3 is using a minimum requirement of Android 2.2, which is the lowest version that supports OpenGL ES 2.0. This will run on about 75% of Android devices:
As you can see here, the proportion of 2.1 devices is steadily dropping. If a linear rate of decrease i
Leadwerks Software has released version 2.5 of their game development software Leadwerks Engine, featuring enhanced graphics and support for the Microsoft .NET application framework. Josh, CEO of Leadwerks said, “.NET support fits in with our goal of making game development simple and more approachable for programmers. We have an energetic community of coders who have been requesting .NET support for some time, and we’re happy to deliver that in Leadwerks Engine 2.5 along with enhancements to ou
I am usually very excited to read about new graphical techniques, and even new hardware approaches, even if they are presently impractical for real use. I was very interested in Intel's Larabee project, even though I didn't expect to see usable results for years.
However, sometimes articles get published which are nothing but snake oil to raise stock prices. The uninformed reader doesn't know the difference, and these articles are usually written in such a way that they sound authoritative
It took a while to figure out, but I was able to get drag and drop interaction working on OSX. (Thanks to Seb Hollington for helping with the coordinate transformation stuff.) Now the editor lets you assign textures by dragging them onto texture slots, just the same as on Windows. There's one last step before the editor code becomes totally platform-agnostic. A file system watcher needs to be implemented on Mac. On Windows, this was fairly straightforward, because there is a built-in API fo
To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
3rd Person Movement & Animation Control Rig Test
Things change
and other things using those things must be updated from time to time to keep them working properly.
Leadwerks Engine C/C++ was originally designed to work only with VS 2008, but keeping GNU C++ in mind, then a few updates were made to make it work with MinGW 3.4.5. Now MinGW 4.5.2.1 has been updated to support the newest C++ standard, and so a few updates need to be done in the Leadwerks Engine C/C++ headers too. But don't worry, those updates are fully backwards compatibe, s
So here's what it took to get Leadwerks running on the iPhone:
Let's start at the point we had the C++ code building and running with an OpenGL 1 renderer on OSX. I was worried OpenGLES might be a dramatically different API that required a whole new learning curve, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's just a stripped-down version of OpenGL, more like OpenGL 3.3 than anything else. Making the OpenGL2ES renderer was mostly just a copy and paste operation, and then I had to comment out a few
Leadwerks has released a new evaluation kit for version 2.4 of their game development tool. The demo lets developers program games in C, C++, and Lua script for a trial period of 30 days.
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