I haven't been blogging much because I am making so much progress that there would be too much to cover. In this article I will talk about one little system I spent the last week on and show the improvements I have made to the workflow over Leadwerks.
In the asset editor, when the root of a model is selected, a "Collider" field appears in the physics properties. You can use this to quickly calculate and apply a collider to the model.
The convex hull collider includes an option fo
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.
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
Lots of things are happening around here right now!
First up, we've got some free professionally made animations for you to use with our futuristic soldier character. You can download the files here.
Michael Betke of Pure3D has been cranking out AAA-quality 3D models ready to use in Leadwerks Engine. The following sets are available:
Birch Trees 1.x (€22,00)
Pine Trees 1.x (€22,00)
Ground Plants 1.x (€19,00)
Each set features new unreleased content. Buy a couple today
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 Leadwerks.com server started acting up earlier today, and I had no idea why. Database errors were occurring, and I had not made any changes to the site. I called our server site in Chicago. First they restored the full site from a backup from 2 A.M. yesterday morning. The matter was still not solved, though. A couple hours later, they determined that an automatic CPanel upgrade had caused PHP extensions to be loaded multiple times. This was fixed, and now we are back to normal. If you
Leadwerks3D has built-in project management features that assist the user to create, share, and publish projects. When you first start editor for the first time, the New Project wizard is displayed. You can select a programming language and choose which platforms you want the project to support. It is possible to add project templates for new languages, too.
Once a project exists, you can go into the project manager and switch projects. This will cause the editor to use the project dir
As the founder of Leadwerks Software, software piracy is an issue that has directly affected my income. We solved the piracy problem by turning our product into a service. Only paid customers can access our community website and get full use of our product. Piracy rates dropped to virtually zero after that. I consider our piracy problem totally solved. The marketplace changed, we adapted to provide a better service, and overall both the customers and company are better off than before.
Netf
I've been working with "Klepto2" to integrate the Scintilla text control into the new Leadwerks editor. Scintilla is very powerful and feature-rich, but is somewhat insane to work with. You've got to have a Scintilla expert onboard to integrate it successfully, which we fortunately do.
Previously, I was relying on calls to a Debug:Stop() function to control breakpoints. This was hard-coded into your script program, and breakpoints could not be dynamically added or removed. Since Scintill
Well, starting with leaving my iMac's power cord at home, this has been a chaotic day, but we're getting it under control. Leadwerks 3 is a much bigger step beyond Leadwerks 2. We're no longer confined strictly to the PC platform, we've now got a C++ code base that can be used in many ways, and our new tools are really nice to use, if I do say so myself. It's also nice to sort of reconnect with our origins in the CSG editing tools. The feedback on this has been very positive, and I think it
Several people have asked me for my hardware recommendations for a new Linux gaming machine. I get rather frustrated by PC manufacturers who load computers up with expensive Intel CPUs and extra RAM you don't need, and then forget to include a graphics card. Or they proclaim PC gaming is not dead and proudly announce their "gaming machine" with a shoddy GPU, that costs more than my first car. I've been building my own PCs since high school, and I know you can build a PC with superior performa
Previously, I talked about my plan for Leadwerks for the next 6-12 months:
Leadwerks Editor
Adding new tools to make life easier.
Refining the workflow to eliminate any remaining"sticky" points.
Bug fixes, to make it a super slick and polished experience.
The Engine
New features in graphics, physics, networking, etc.
Performance optimization.
Improved compatibility across all OpenGL 4 hardware.
Third-Party Technologies
Blender, SteamOS, Steam Workshop, vir
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
PC towers have been about the same since they became popular in the 1990's, replacing the previous horizontal form factor:
Cases have gone from beige to black, but very little else has changed.
PC towers tend to be designed for the old ATX style motherboards, which were first introduced in 1995:
PC cases are still designed primarily for this form factor, ignoring the fact that many internal components have changed.
The sound and ethernet card are now typically built into
There are three low-level advancements I would like to make to Leadwerks Game Engine in the future:
Move Leadwerks over to the new Vulkan graphics API.
Replace Windows API and GTK with our own custom UI. This will closely resemble the Windows GUI but allow new UI features that are presently impossible, and give us more independence from each operating system.
Compile the editor with BlitzMaxNG. This is a BMX-to-C++ translator that allows compilation with GCC (or VS, I suppose). This w
An update is available on the beta branch which resolves the AMD rendering issues on Windows 10 with 1x MSAA setting enabled:
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/13273-graphical-glitch/
The following components have changed:
Lighting shaders adjusted to handle regular 2D textures (MSAA level 0)
Editor updated, for Windows.
Lua interpreter and debug interpreter updated, for Windows.
The C++ library has not been updated yet.
I've added a textfield widget script to the beta branch, and a new build, for (Lua interpreter, Windows only, at this time). The textfield widget allows editing of a single line of text. It's actually one of the more difficult widgets to implement due to all the user interaction features. Text is entered from the keyboard and may be selected with arrow keys or by clicking the mouse. A range of text can be selected by clicking and dragging the mouse, or by pressing an arrow key while the shif
So I've been using Valve's VR technology quite a while before the HTC Vive was released, but I only recently picked up the final consumer version. Here are my thoughts on VR games.
First, VR games are completely different from non-VR games. Motion in the virtual world should never contradict motion in the real world. All the early Oculus demos are examples of what not to do.
"The Lab" by Valve really shows the depth of interaction VR opens up. You interactions with the virtual world
In this blog I am going to explain my overarching plan to bring Leadwerks into the future and build our community.
First, regarding technology, I believe VR is the future. VR right now is basically where mobile was in 2006. The big publishers won't touch it and indies have a small but enthusiastic market they can target without fear of competition from EA. I have an HTC Vive and it is AWESOME! After using it, I don't really want to play games on a 2D monitor anymore. I want to be in the gam
The revision of our vehicle system has been a long time coming, and I am happy to say the wait will soon be worthwhile. The new system uses a hyperrealistic slip differencial system to adjust the power given to each wheel.
The results are a clear cut above any game vehicle physics you've ever seen.
I am also taking steps to make the vehicle system easier to use. The AddTire() command can now accept an entity as a parameter for the tire object. This would typically be
I'm asking the community to look over the new documentation system and find any mistakes before I sign off on the project. The tutorials are not completed. The API Reference should be completed, although the main API Reference page is not showing anything right now.
https://www.leadwerks.com/learn
Here are my notes to the developer who is working on the docs:
Please review the material and make sure everything meets your satisfaction, and leave your comment below if needed. I figure
When considering the script system in Leadwerks 5, I looked at alternatives including Squirrel, which is used by Valve in many games, but these gave me a deeper appreciation for the simplicity of Lua. There are only a handful of rules you need to learn to use the language, it’s fun to use, yet somehow it does everything you could ever need.
These were three big issues I had to solve. First, the Leadwerks 5 API makes extensive use of smart pointers, which our binding library tolua++ does not
