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Learn about game development technology

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Post-GDC Wrapup

I'm back home now, relaxing after a long week away. And what a week it was! I got my lecture out of the way on Monday. I felt like I was pretty well prepared, but some acoustical problems in the hall really made it very difficult to concentrate, plus I was pretty nervous about talking in front of about 600 people. I did it though, and hope to do another one next year. The recorded lecture should be available in the GDC vault. During my talk, I described my experience as a PC developer,
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DPI Scaling

I've implemented DPI scaling into Leadwerks GUI (beta branch, Lua on Windows only).   To set the GUI scale you just call gui:SetScale(scalefactor). A scale factor greater than one will make it bigger, a scale factor less than one will make it smaller. There is no limit to the range you can set, but negative numbers are probably not good.   Scaling causes the GUI to be drawn at a different size, but widget dimensions and mouse events are still interpreted as though they were at their origin
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Legos and Game Artwork

I recently had a strange interest in looking at Lego sets online and watching reviews. There was something about them that I felt like related to game development and level design. Something very interesting I noticed was that each set would include several extra elements that formed a story line. This added "play potential" to the set. For example, the raft below includes three pirates loaded with weapons, one who is obviously the leader, a treasure map, so the crew has an objective, and a
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Turbo Game Engine Beta Update

A big update for the beta of the upcoming Turbo Game Engine is now available, adding support for VR and Lua script! VR Rendering Turbo Game Engine now supports VR rendering, with support for true single-pass stereoscopic rendering on Nvidia GPUs. Other hardware will use a double-rendering path that is still faster than Leadwerks. To turn VR on simply call EnableVR(). Controllers are not yet supported, just rendering. Lua Scripting Lua script is now supported in Turb
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Clustered Forward Rendering Victory

I got the remaining glitches worked out, and the deal is that clustered forward rendering works great. It has more flexibility than deferred rendering and it performs a lot faster. This means we can use a better materials and lighting system, and at the same time have faster performance, which is great for VR especially. The video below shows a scene with 50 lights working with fast forward rendering One of the last things I added was switching from a fixed grid size of 16x16x16 t
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Texture Import Features

Since I am working with the Blender import pipeline and also getting artists onboard the Steam Workshop, it makes sense to work out any little details in the art pipeline that can be improved. One of these is the texture import process.   Leadwerks 3.0 was designed to function across PC and mobile, and one of the compromises that had to be made was texture compression. There is no universally supported texture compression format on mobile, while the PC has several variations of DXT compressi
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A Week in Seattle: Steam VR, Gas Works, and the Strawberry Moon

Last week I travelled to Seattle for a few days to lay some groundwork for the future of Leadwerks Software. During the week I tried out Valve's VR hardware, visited a gassification plant, and survived a trifecta of astrological phenomenon. Steam VR Although I attended Steam Dev Days, I did not get a chance to demo Valve's virtual reality hardware. I was invited by one employee to come back and check it out, so I decided to take them up on that offer last week.  Valve's VR is improved over
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Change Map Example Added

A new map called "09-Change Map.map" has been added to the example game. This demonstrates how to use the new TriggerChangeMap.lua script to make your player progress from one level to the next.   In order to use this script, you must update your project with the new executables. Select the File > Project Manager menu to open the Project Manager, then press the "Update" button to update your project.   A new chunk of code has been added to App.lua to handle map changes. This code will
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Vulkan Tessellation Made Practical

Now that I have all the Vulkan knowledge I need, and most work is being done with GLSL shader code, development is moving faster. Before starting voxel ray tracing, another hard problem, I decided to work one some *relatively* easier things for a few days. I want tessellation to be an every day feature in the new engine, so I decided to work out a useful implementation of it. While there are a ton of examples out there showing how to split a triangle up into smaller triangles, useful discus
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Amazing Tools

This is just so cool. You can generate simple primitives for any entity. A convenient "Fit Shape" button will wrap the primitive around the entity, with an option to include the entity's children. However, the real power comes when you generate physics shapes from models. You can right-click on any model and get a menu to generate a physics shape. The polygon mesh and convex hull will look familiar if you've used the PhyGen tool in Leadwerks Engine 2. There's also a new option called "Conv
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Animation speed in Vulkan vs. OpenGL

I created a test of 1000 animated crawler models to see how the performance of Vulkan stacks up against our older OpenGL renderer. Here it is in OpenGL running at 37 FPS, which is pretty respectable considering how many animations are playing (and about 4 million polygons). With Vulkan the same test yields a framerate of 66 FPS, 78% faster than the OpenGL version. Here is a video of the characters animating. Each skeleton is its own unique animation system, there are no sha
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Shadow Caching

I have shadow caching working now in Turbo. This feature is already in Leadwerks Game Engine 4. The idea is that static scene geometry should not be redrawn when a dynamic object moves. Imagine a character (6000 polys) walking across a highly detailed room (100,000 polys), with one point light in the room. If we mark the scene geometry as static and the character as dynamic, then we can render a shadow map cache of the static scene once. When the character moves, the static cache is copied into
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iWerks

When I saw specs for the graphics card they are using in the new iMacs, I knew it was time for Leadwerks to come to Mac. Steam for Mac also recently came out, so the time seems right for Mac gaming. Of course, some guy blew up the Roseville Galleria, so the Apple store was closed. I ordered the 27" iMac with a 3.2 ghz dual core processor and upgraded the graphics card to an ATI 5750. Here's what they sent me: The computer case/monitor (it's all one piece) is a solid piece of aluminum that
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17

Leadwerks 3.1

It's December, which means Leadwerks for Linux is nearly here! Last week I had to get into more depth with our tutorials. We're creating a series of maps that demonstrate simple game mechanics. The goal is to show how to set up game interactions by attaching scripts to objects and connecting them in the flowgraph editor, without getting into any actual programming. These lessons center around a first-person shooter, but are applicable to many types of games.   I had to get my hands dirty i
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Ubuntu is probably the future of PC gaming

Here's something I've been thinking about. What do you think?   Apple Locking down OSX. No optical drive. The Mac software shelf at Fry's is now obsolete. Mac App Store. Gatekeeper only allows "signed" applications, by default. [*]Miniaturization of computer hardware, at the cost of graphical performance. [*]Move to non-upgradable hardware (glued-in memory). [*]Moving away from file system access (iCloud). [*]Hardware is expensive, and will always be a luxury item.   W
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New Animation Commands

I've built a modified version of ReepBlue's C++ animation manager class (based off my Lua script) into the engine. This adds a new command and eliminates the need for the animation manager script.   void Entity::PlayAnimation(const std::string& sequence, const float speed=1.0f, const int blendtime=500, const int mode=0, const std::string endhook="") void Entity::PlayAnimation(const int index, const float speed = 1.0f, const int blendtime = 500, const int mode = 0, const std::string end
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Terrain Deformation

In games we think of terrain as a flat plane subdivided into patches, but did you know the Earth is actually round? Scientists say that as you travel across the surface of the planet, a gradual slope can be detected, eventually wrapping all the way around to form a spherical shape! At small scales we can afford to ignore the curvature of the Earth but as we start simulating bigger and bigger terrains this must be accounted for. This is a big challenge. How do you turn a flat square shape into a
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5

Pathfinding

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
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Articles

Advanced Transparency and Refraction in Vulkan

Heat haze is a difficult problem. A particle emitter is created with a transparent material, and each particle warps the background a bit. The combined effect of lots of particles gives the whole background a nice shimmering wavy appearance. The problem is that when two particles overlap one another they don't blend together, because the last particle drawn is using the background of the solid world for the refracted image. This can result in a "popping" effect when particles disappear, as well
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Josh in Articles

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Version 4.4 beta update

Leadwerks Game Engine 4.4 has been updated on the beta branch on Steam. Networking finished and documented. GUI finished. All new physics features finished. The character controller physics and picking up objects has been improved and made smoother.  There is a problem with the player sliding down slopes, as seen in the FPS Character Controller example map.  I will work this out. I also noticed during testing that picking up some objects in the FPS / AI map will f
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22

Design Confusion

Sometimes I run into situations where I don't really know how to structure things. I don't mind this, because it usually results in some really elegant design once I figure out what to do. I just play with ideas and try not to force anything, and when the right idea arises, I will recognize it.   Explaining a problem to someone else can help facilitate that process. How many times have you solved a difficult problem right after you posted a description of it on a forum somewhere? The proce
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18

Out of OpenGL3Context

I spent a lot of time last weekend making sure resources are correctly shared between rendering contexts. It's surprising how many commercial games make you restart the game to switch graphics resolutions, and I find it annoying. Leadwerks Engine 3 uses a small hidden window with an OpenGL context to create the OpenGL 3.3 contexts, and it just stays open so there is always a persistent context with which resources are shared. Textures, shaders, and vertex buffers can all be shared between Ope
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Try the new environment probes

Environment probes are now available on the beta branch. To access them, you must set the "UnlockBetaFeatures" setting in the config file to 1, then start the editor. Environment probes are available in the "Effects" object creation category.   Environment probes should be placed with one in each room. Use the object scale to make the probe's volume fill the room. (Like decals, probes will display a bounding box when selected.) You do not have to worry about covering every single space as
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Terrain in Leadwerks 5

I wanted to work on something a bit easier before going back into voxel ray tracing, which is another difficult problem. "Something easier" was terrain, and it ended up consuming the entire month of August, but I think you will agree it was worthwhile. In Leadwerks Game Engine, I used clipmaps to pre-render the terrain around the camera to a series of cascading textures. You can read about the implementation here: This worked very well with the hardware we had available at the time, b
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Leadwerks GUI

Leadwerks GUI is now functioning, on the beta branch, Windows only, Lua interpreter only.     GUI Class static GUI* Create(Context* context) Creates a new GUI   Widget Class static Widget* Create(const int x, const int y, const int width, const int height, Widget* parent, const int style=0) Creates a new Widget. Widgets can be made into buttons, dropdown boxes, or anything else by attaching a script.   virtual bool SetScript(const std::string& path, const bool start = true) Se
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