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Moving forward with Leadwerks Engine 2.4 and Leadwerks 3.0

I feel like you guys are owed an explanation of our long-term strategy, and now that I have definite plans I am happy to reveal them to you.   I've been spending a lot of time in the Silicon Valley area, and have learned a lot about business. We've been investigating external investment. I believe we could raise pretty much any amount of money we want, based on the fact we already have an existing business that is self-sustaining, and we have a great strategy. However, money does not necess
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28

Convex Decomposition Made Useful

Physics simulations typically require physical geometry to be provided in a series of convex hulls that approximate the shape of the object. This is because the intersection of two convex objects can be calculated fast enough for use in real-time simulations.   One solution for creating this type of physical geometry is to create a low-detail model of the object in a modeling program. However, this process can be tedious and is often overlooked by artists. Auto-generating this type of geome
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New Texture Compression Formats

The Vulkan renderer now supports new texture compression formats that can be loaded from DDS files. I've updated the DDS loader to support newer versions of the format with new features. BC5 is a format ATI invented (originally called ATI2 or 3Dc) which is a two-channel compressed format specifically designed for storing normal maps. This gives you better quality normals than what DXT compression (even with the DXT5n swizzle hack) can provide. BC7 is interesting because it uses the sam
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Screen-space directional occlusion

Screen-space directional occlusion (SSDO) is the next logical step after simple screen-space ambient occlusion. This routine uses a raytracing approach to approximate global illumination. You can get my shader here.  
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New beta update available

A new update is available with the following changes:   Player collision against terrains is now working really nicely. In general, the player controller has become very solid and accurate. It's also quite a bit faster than before.   An experimental feature lets you make CSG brushes the child of another object and check a "shape hint" option in the physics properties. This will use any attached CSG brushes to build a new compound convex hull for that model. This is best used to make pref
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Open to the Public

The last few weeks have been interesting as we've been figuring out where Leadwerks 3 fits into the game development landscape.   The good: The feedback from the Leadwerks 3 users has been more positive than anything I've ever seen. People love using it. All the care and attention to the tools has really paid off. The return of constructive solid geometry is a huge win. At the upgrade pricing, we're doing a lot of sales. Leadwerks 3 makes more in a week than Leadwerks 2 made in a mont
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How to Expose C++ Classes to Lua in Ultra Engine

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
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Darkness Awaits

Leadwerks3D will ship with a finished game demo to demonstrate how to use the software. Darkness Awaits is a third-person dungeon explorer with a 45 degree view. It's like a cross between Diablo and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This is an idea I had back in my very early days of game development, before I even learned to program. This was originally done in the Quake 1 engine. It didn't really go anywhere, but what we had was awesome. You could run around and shoot skeletons with f
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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
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The Amazing Draggable Checkable Multiselectable Multidimensional TreeView with Icons

Last week I compiled the engine into a DLL and a static lib. That was pretty painless, and I have the project set up so it's easy to switch back and forth. I still haven't got Code::Blocks compiling right, which I will need for the Linux build. It can't seem to find any libs, but it's not too important yet.   After altering the behavior of the MaxGUI canvas slightly, I was able to load the engine DLL in BlitzMax and display 3D rendering on a windowed application. It's very easy to do this
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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
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Further down the rabbit::hole

Let's start with some code for making instances and unique copies of a material: Material* mat1 = new Material; mat1->SetColor(0,0,1,1); Material* mat2 = mat1->Copy(true); Material* mat3 = mat1->Copy(false); mat1->SetColor(1,0,0,1); mat1 and 2 will be red. mat3 will be blue. Shaders, textures, and entities work the same way.   Drawing commands are in. I like how OpenGL3 gets rid of all the built-in matrix stuff and just lets you deal with pure matrix multiplication. It
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28

Small behavioral change

In the next beta update, the way entity fields work in the script properties will be a little different. Instead of dragging an object from the scene tree onto the field, you will type in the name of the object (or copy and paste the name from the object's name field). This is being done to make the behavior more intuitive. After working with both approaches, I find the new way much easier to use.     This does however mean that an object that is used in this manner must have a unique na
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The Financials of Custom Content

The Leadwerks Merc character, who I think will go down in history over the next few years second only to the infamous "Crawler", is an experiment. First of all, I wanted a completely custom-made character to developer AI with. This ensured that I was able to get the model made exactly to my specs so that we would have a template for other characters to follow. Fortunately, the script I wrote can easily be used with other models like Arteria's Strike Troop.   The quality of this model is rea
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Rendering Text on Linux with Xft

Diving into the innermost workings of the Linux operating system is a pretty interesting challenge. Pretty much nobody nowadays implements anything with raw X11 anymore. They use QT, SDL, or for drawing Cairo, with Pango for text rendering. The thing is, all of these libraries use X11 as the backend. I need full control and understanding over what my code is doing, so I've opted to cut out the middleman and go directly to the innermost core of Linux.   Today I improved our text rendering b
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Advanced Tessellation in Vulkan

Previously I talked about the technical details of hardware tessellation and what it took to make it truly useful. In this article I will talk about some of the implications of this feature and the more advanced ramifications of baking tessellation into Turbo Game Engine as a first-class feature in the  Although hardware tessellation has been around for a few years, we don't see it used in games that often. There are two big problems that need to be overcome. We need a way to preven
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Collision Decisions

As I was implementing the collision commands for Leadwerks3D, I noticed a few things that illustrate the differences between the design philosophies of Leadwerks Engine and Leadwerks3D.   You'll easily recognize the new collision commands, although they have been named in a more verbose but logical manner: void ClearCollisionResponses(); void SetCollisionResponse(const int& collisiontype0, const int& collisiontype1, const int& response); int GetCollisionResponse(const int& c
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Carve, hollow, and cleaning up the scene tree

CSG carving now works very nicely. The hardest part was making it work with the undo system, which was a fairly complicated problem. It gets particularly difficult when brushes are in the scene hierarchy as a parent of something or a child of something else. Carving involves the deletion of the original object and creation of new ones, so it is very hard to describe in a step-wise process for the undo system, especially when all manner of objects can be intermixed with the brush hierarchy.  
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Articles

Vulkan Dynamic Rendering

The VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension has made its way into Vulkan 1.2.203 and I have implemented this in Ultra Engine. What does it do? Instead of creating renderpass objects ahead of time, dynamic rendering allows you to just specify the settings you need as your are performing filling in command buffers with rendering instructions. From the Khronos working group: In my experience, post-processing effects is where this hurt the most. The engine has a user-defined stack of post-pro
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Josh in Articles

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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
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2D Drawing in Leadwerks 5 beta

Previously I described how multiple cameras can be combined in the new renderer to create an unlimited depth buffer. That discussion lead into multi-world rendering and 2D drawing. Surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap in these features, and it makes sense to solve all of it at one time. Old 2D rendering systems are designed around the idea of storing a hierarchy of state changes. The renderer would crawl through the hierarchy and perform commands as it went along, rendering all 2D elemen
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Relocation

My productivity has not been good lately because I am agonizing over where to live. I don't like where I am right now. Decisions like this were easy in college because I would just go where the best program was for what I was interested in. It's more difficult now to know if I am making the right choice.   I can "go big" and move to San Francisco, which weirdly has become the capitol of tech. I lived there before and know all the craziness to expect. I used to work at 24th and Mission (be
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Marble Game Template

Previously, I laid out a pretty complete design of the racing game template I want to build. There's definitely enough there to build out the concept with very little left unanswered.   We are going to have a marble game template, because of its simplicity and ease of learning. However, unless the template really looks like a game people would want to play, it doesn't offer enough "carrot" to inspire people. This idea is less well-defined than the racing game, so I am only in the idea
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Building a Collaborative Content Production Pipeline - Part Two

Previously, I described the goals and philosophy that were guiding my design of our implementation of the Leadwerks Workshop on Steam. To review, the goals were: 1. Frictionless sharing of items within the community. 2. Protection of intellectual property rights. 3. Tracking of the chain-of-authorship and support for derivative works.   In this update I will talk more specifically about how our implementation meets these goals.   Our implementation of the Steam Workshop allows Leadwerks
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Vegetation Demo

I'm really happy to see all the great and scary games coming out for the Halloween Game Tournament. I have something of my own to share with you.   The Leadwerks 3 vegetation system is a groundbreaking new technology. All vegetation instances are procedural and dynamically placed, so that physics and rendering of any amount of instances can occur with zero memory usage. This demo proves that the idea actually works!   This demo shows the new Leadwerks Game Engine 3 vegetation system in ac
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