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Learn about game development technology

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4.5 Beta Update 3

Another build is available on the beta branch on Steam. Fixed zip import behavior. Fixed physics swept collision bug, waiting for confirmation this fixed other reported problems. Kinematic joint rotation not fixed yet. Updated to Steamworks 1.41 Updated to latest version of OpenVR Code::Blocks C++ project not updated yet. We're getting close to release, so your reports (especially the ones with examples!) are appreciated. Instructions for upda
Josh

Josh

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GEForce 470 and 480 specs released

480 stream processors on a single card. http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=13422 http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=23088   Thanks to CarlB of FoxConn for tipping me off on this.
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Leadwerks 5 beta Update

A big update is now available for beta subscribers! Multipass Rendering You can use several cameras to increase the depth range or mix 2D and 3D graphics. 2D Graphics As discussed earlier, 2D graphics are now supported using persistent 2D objects. Depth Sorting Multiple layers of transparency will now render in correct order, with lighting in each layer. Note that I used an empty script called "null.lua" to prevent the glass surfaces here from being collapsed at loa
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Leadwerks Merc

Here's an update of the model sheet for our "Mercenary" character. We're spending more time in the planning phase than previous attempts, and I think the effort is really paying off.   All design is really a process of decision-making. If you don't make decisions you'll end up with something without much definition. Everything about this character was decided according to factors I set out at the beginning of this project.  
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Small Fixes

Most entity types will start with collision type=0 now. Fix so collidable emitter particles won't collide with the emitter itself anymore. Added lens flares to lighting prefabs in showcase map. Added bloom to showcase map. Modified the way the Flicker effect script works.
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Sell your 3D content in the Workshop Store

I am now accepting additional paid content from select authors to publish their Workshop content. Valve will take their standard 30% cut, you will receive 50% of each sale, and Leadwerks will take just 20%. If you are interested in reaching a new audience with the Workshop store, please contact me. You must be a seller with 3D models or textures in an existing marketplace for 3D content, or have a website showing your work.     More information on publishing here: http://www.leadwerks.c
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Articles

Vulkan Viewport in a GUI Application

Before finalizing Ultra App Kit I want to make sure our 3D engine works correctly with the GUI system. This is going to be the basis of all our 3D tools in the future, so I want to get it right before releasing the GUI toolkit. This can prevent breaking changes from being made in the future after the software is released. Below you can see our new 3D engine being rendered in a viewport created on a GUI application. The GUI is being rendered using Windows GDI+, the same system that draws the
Josh

Josh in Articles

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EAX Effects in Leadwerks 5 beta

I've been doing some work on the sound system in Leadwerks 5 beta, and I added EAX effects in. If you have a dedicated sound card this can be used to add some nice reverb effects that make your sound environment sound a lot more real: Here's the simplest usage: auto fx = LoadSoundEffect("Sound/FX/sewerpipe.json"); auto listener = CreateListener(world); listener->SetEffect(fx); This will apply the effect to all mono sources. Stereo sources are assumed to be music or GUI n
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Articles

GUI Work

The terrain streaming / planet rendering stuff was the last of the feature creep. That finishes out the features I have planned for the first release of the new engine. My approach for development has been to go very broad so I could get a handle on how all the features work together, solve the hard problems, and then fill in the details when convenient. The hard problems are all solved so now it's just a matter of finishing things, Consequently, I don't think my blogs are going to make any
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Josh in Articles

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Optimizing the Vertex Pipeline

In my work with NASA we visualize many detailed CAD models in VR. These models may consist of tens of millions of polygons and thousands of articulated sub-objects. This often results in rendering performance that is bottlenecked by the vertex rather than the fragment pipeline. I recently performed some research to determine how to maximize our rendering speed in these situations. Leadwerks 4 used separate vertex buffers, but in Leadwerks 5 I have been working exclusively with interleaved v
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OpenGL 3

I finally found a good reason to upgrade the renderer to OpenGL3. This will allows MSAA with deferred lighting. It might possibly also yield some performance gains, but that is speculation. This will occur some time in 2010.   Source
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Kickstarter Shipping Update; Leadwerks in the Wild

All stickers have been shipped, and they look absolutely fantastic:   I've never been a "sticker on my laptop" kind of guy, but I am putting one of these on mine as soon as I get home.   Physical items are a little different from getting software to customers. With software, there is at most a delay of a couple hours between the time I have it ready to go, and the customer is using it. I did not anticipate much of a turnover time for the shirts, and I still don't have all the ones I need
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Texture Load Plugins

Texture loading plugins allow us to move some big libraries like FreeImage into separate optional plugins, and it also allows you to write plugins to load new texture and image formats. To demonstrate the feature, I have added a working VTF plugin to the GMF2 SDK. This plugin will load Valve texture files used in Source Engine games like Half-Life 2 and Portal. Here are the results, showing a texture loaded directly from VTF format and also displayed in Nem’s nifty VTFEdit tool.
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Articles

Editor Scripting API

The Ultra Engine editor is designed to be expandable and modifiable.  Lua script is integrated into the editor and can be used to write editor extensions and even modify the scene or the editor itself in real-time.  We can create a scene object entirely in code and make it appear in the scene browser tree: box = CreateBox(editor.world) box.name = "box01" o = CreateSceneObject(box) --make editor recognize the entity and add it to the scene browser o:SetSelected(true) We can even
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Josh in Articles

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Game Player Preview

Here is a preview of what the Leadwerks Game Player Workshop looks like. A rotating banner shows the top games, like a mini-Steam within Steam. The difference is this distribution channel has no restrictions on when you can publish your game, and you can deploy games to all supported systems, including SteamOS, without having to actually compile on those systems.   I envision a time in the near future when everyone with a small fun playable game can pick up tens of thousands of new users pla
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Articles

A First Look at the New Editor

I've been wracking my brain trying to decide what I want to show at the upcoming conference, and decided I should get the new editor in a semi-workable state. I started laying out the interface two days ago. To my surprise, the whole process went very fast and I discovered some cool design features along the way. With the freedom and control I have with the new user interface system, I was able to make the side panel extend all the way to the top and bottom of the window client area. This g
Josh

Josh in Articles

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TGIF

Happy Friday.     One thing I will point out is that success is much more about creative experimentation than it is about sheer willpower. You have a little control over willpower, but not a ton. It's much better to keep the same amount of effort and just be smarter about what you do, than to try really really hard. That means taking a lot of risks and experiencing a lot of small low-cost failures to find what works.
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Beta update available

An update to 4.3 is available on the beta branch. This fixes it so the editor is not DPI-aware and will be scaled correctly if scaling on Windows is used. This build is also built with a fresh install of Windows 10 and Ubuntu (but it shouldn't make any difference).   This is a full build for Windows and Linux, with C++ libraries included. Game Launcher is also updated on its beta branch.   If there are no problems with this, it will go onto the default branch in a couple days.
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Particle Plugins and More

The Leadwerks 5 beta will soon be updated with particle emitters and an example particle system plugin. Previously, I showed some impressive results with physically interactive particles that collide with and exert forces on the environment. I decided to use the plugin system for controlling particle behavior, as this offers the best performance and can be run on the physics thread.  A particle system plugin uses some predefined structures and functions to modify the behavior of particles w
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3.6 Final Touches Update

I rolled Newton Dynamics back to the version we were previously using due to some strange behavior. We're not utilizing any new behavior yet, and I don't want to spend time debugging it right now, so from your perspective it makes no difference.   Also added a check to prevent textures from reloading when they are bound to a buffer.   This update is available now on the beta branch and will be released next week on the default branch. Rich is also working on a couple of decal textures to i
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Dynamic Voxel Updates

I've been working to make my previously demonstrated voxel ray tracing system fully dynamic. Getting the voxel data to update fast enough was a major challenge, and it forced me to rethink the design. In the video below you can see the voxel data being updated at a sufficient speed. Lighting has been removed, as I need to change the way this runs. I plan to keep two copies of the data in memory and let the GPU interpolate smoothly in between them, in order to smooth out the motion
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Game Launcher release plan

Since the community has done their part and we are approaching 100 game, it's almost time to take Game Launcher out of early preview mode make it a full release. When it becomes a full release on Steam the number of people playing your games will go up, a lot.   There are still some odds and ends in the interface to finish up. The thumbnail loading routine needs to be improved. There are some changes that need to be made so it will work better with Big Picture mode. So I am aiming for a re
Josh

Josh

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