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About this blog

A blog where I talk about anything relating to Leadwerks, and then some.

Entries in this blog

Loading Sounds with JSON

Loading sounds in Leadwerks has always been straight forward. A sound file is loaded from the disk, and with the Source class emits the sound in 3D space. The sound entity also has a play function, but it's only really good for UI sounds. There is also Entity::EmitSound() which will play the sound at the entity's location. (You can also throw in a Source, but it'll auto release the object when it's done.) While this is OK for small games, larger games in which sounds may change might mean y
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LEX2 Evaluation Demo

For the past few months, (on top of working on my greenlit mod) I've been developing a new foundation for Vectronic that will take care of all the 'internal yucky bits' such as window/context/world management, and other features and functions. I really wasn't happy how the first implementation came out as I felt like I was taking too much from the developer, and it was messy and confusing to do something simple like adding a loading screen.   LEX2 is more lua friendly, not bloated with scripts
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Code

Level Transitions

Level transitions are the old school way of getting your player from one map to another. Here I implemented a system much like HL2. Not much else to say, but I should be ready to talk more soon. (Hopefully!)   
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Leadwerks and Premake

Premake is multiplication project maker.Unlike CMake, it simply generates a project file for the given IDE giving you a clean result. You only need the one light weight executable and a lua script for this to work.  I've spent today setting it up with Leadwerks. I haven't tested Linux yet, but it should work. My premake5.lua file: g_LeadwerksHeaderPath = "./Engine/Include" g_LeadwerksLibPath = "./Engine/Libs" function GlobalSettings() -- Include Directories includedirs { "%{prj.na
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Code

Leadwerks + FMOD Studio

Cyclone was shaping up visually, but I was getting feedback about the sound implementation not being so good. I previously created a script system that defined all my sounds under profiles. This was a step in the right direction and made it easier to tweak sounds without recompiling code. However, no matter how much I played with variables, I never was able to satisfy the complaints.  After I showcased my first gameplay trailer, I decided to finally sit down and really understand FMOD. I wa
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Input with Action Sets!

As you may have known, I've been dabbling with input methods for a while now using SDL2. Since then, I've learned how to do similar functions using the Leadwerks API. The goal was to make a inout system that's easily re-bindable, and allows for controllers to "just work". My first research of a goof system comes from a talk at Steam DevDays 2016 as they discuss how to allow integration with the Steam Controller.    My thought was: "If I can create my own Action System, I can
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How to attach C++ Actors in Leadwerks 4

For some reason, I've been seeing a lot of questions on how to add actors created into C++ recently. My first attempt on this was in 2016 with Crawler's Den; A modern remake of the SDK example level. That was on a version of Leadwerks in which there was no official Actor system in place. Today, the engine has an Actor class which can be attached to any entity, but besides some loose examples, it's not well documented. Also there is no official way on linking your entities in the editor with your
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Code

Going Forward With Cyclone And Ultra Engine

With the new engine coming along and me noticing limits with Cyclone's current architecture, it's time for me to start thinking about the mistakes I've made and how would avoid repeating them with the new engine. Luckly, Ultra Engine is far more flexible than Leadwerks thanks to smart pointers and the event system. I wish to share some of my plans going forward. Log, Log, Log Everything! I personally never look at my log files. I instead look at the CMD output and the debugger to see w
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From C++, To Lua, to C++ Again!

I've started on my quest to make a full C++ has started today. I've noticed that LEX2 via the project manager didn't copy over as clean as it should, so I had to make the project from scratch which wasn't a big deal (for me). I should look into a way of getting that fixed.   After setting the project up, I noticed a few errors I was getting after I commented out the LUA_GAME preprocessor. It was a quick fix, and development went under way after that.   For this project, I'll need things tha
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First Test, VecBall Design

Another week, another weekly report. Vectronic is going more smoothly then ever before taking things one at a time, and just shelling out maps and ideas quickly. Last week, I did a few improvements with how the player picks up objects, and fixing the issue of shooting projectiles through objects. I did not shell any more maps because I thought it would be better to focus on a small amount of puzzles at a time, perfecting them before making more maps. For this, I needed help.   As of this week,
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4

Experimentation

I almost let a whole week go by without writing a blog, ahh! I've been doing a lot of thinking and experimenting over the last few days, and talking to other people about Vectronic.   Last week, I talked about improving functionalities of the pickup system and the platforms. Although the pickup system is near done, the platform system, well they need work. I made a topic about them here, and kind of left me on a stand still on the project because I see them as a vital piece of the game, and th
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Cyclone

Cyclone's New Menu

The time finally came to revamp the main menu for Cyclone. Doing menu work for me is really hard to get into but once I'm knee deep into it, it's all I want to do. I decided now is the time to work on a semi-final menu system due to the following. I just finished Steam Input and the menu wasn't compatible. The white text on a bright background was hard to make out. I only had a "New Game" option. There was no way to jump to a map you wanted to play without the console enabl
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Cyclone

Cyclone Participating in Steam Next Fest 2022

I'm excited to announce that Cyclone will be participating in Steam Next Fest 2022! While I'll not be live streaming, a playable demo will be available during the festival. The demo will act like an even softer release than the Early Access release, which should roll into the planned release date of June 23rd, 2022!   Add it to your wish list on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1803590/Cyclone/ Check out the itch.io Page: https://reepblue.itch.io/cyclone Join my publ
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Cyclone

Cyclone Open For Mods

As a teenager, I've spent thousands of hours with the Source SDK. It was really cool how Valve gave people the real tools to develop and create maps and mods. Overtime I got to see and take apart games to see how they actually work. Overtime, the indie engine market took over, and making Source mods is now just a terrible experience. Hammer crashes more frequently and the SDK branch of the engine has old bugs that were never patched. I want the excitement I had of making maps and cool featu
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Cyclone

Cyclone is now available in Early Access on Steam!

After sixteen months of week-by-week development, I'm happy to announce that the anticipated spiritual successor of the Portal mod, Blue Portals is now available for sale as an Early Access title on Steam!   I want to take a moment to thank [b]everyone[/b] who has played the demo and gave feedback. There's still work to be done! Being an Early Access title allows Cyclone to continue keep players involved in the development process to help it evolve into the best it can be!  I hope
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Cyclone

Cyclone Is Coming Soon to Steam!

It's been roughly over a year since active development started on this project. Today, I'm excited to announce that Cyclone now has a "Coming Soon" page on the Steam Store! This marks a huge milestone for the project and I'm looking forward to getting this out as soon as possible.  Cyclone is planned on being released as an Early Access title. Releasing into Early Access will grant a layer of feedback, bug reports, and ideas that can help build the remainder features, as well as additional
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5

Custom Shapes for MDLs in Leadwerks 4

There has been some discussion regarding on how to set collision shapes for your models. For 95% of models, you should be building shapes with the Model Viewer as described here. In some cases, the model artist might want a custom shape to be made. In this post, I'll be going over how I import models into Leadwerks, and building custom shapes. A few notes first. I use Blender; Blender 2.79b to be exact. I haven't get got the hang of 2.80 and until the new engine's art pipeline is fully onli
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Code

Creating a Stable Foundation - 5 Years In The Making!

In late 2014, I made the bold decision to focus less with Source Engine mods and pick up an actual engine I could use without legal conflicts or worrying about knowing the right people. At the time, it was like all other options were telling me to forget everything I've picked up through the years of making popular maps and mods and learn something that's completely unique to their software. CSG tools were declared too uncool, and any engine that was nice enough to support it enforced that any a
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2

Compatibility Wrapper

While we have Leadwerks today to make our apps, Turbo is currently in development. To make my projects more long term, I decided to take a step back from my VR project and create a wrapper class that apps can use to more easily transfer to the new engine.  Keep in-mind, this doesn't cover everything and I'm used the last beta from November for testing so things can change. Regardless, as long as that bridge is made, I can always go back and edit the Turbo stuff as more things come online. The go
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Building Cubemaps In Leadwerks.

With the recent popular substance shader by Shadmar, more talk and focus has been about cubemap reflections surfaced in the community. Reflections in Leadwerks were done in the past with the SSLR post process shader which made all surfaces reflect the world in real time.         However, it had the following problems: It was applied to ALL materials in the scene. If you had a material that wouldn't normally reflect such as concrete or wood, the shader would still effect those materials. B
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4

Battle Plans For 2016!

It's been over a year ago since I've released the Vectronic Demo using Leadwerks. The demo was composed of assets I've made ported from the Source Engine and my lack of understanding of the API and lua scripting at the time. (I'm used to coding everything in C++) As of writing, it has 1,221 subscribers on the Steam Workshop, 25 out of 26 positive ratings, and is the second most subscribed item! So there is sigh that this as a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was a success. And again, the Game Launch
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Back On Track!

After a whole summer of working on the LEX template, and learning new things about the engine, I'm happy to say that Vectronic will soon be back on track in full development!   Before I go into full detail, I wish to mention that the Vectronic Demo has been updated with Josh's optimization edits, and the VecBall has a new effect I've made during the development of LEX. If you had sluggish performance before, I recommend you check out the update!   Now that I've got a nice foundation with a m
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4

Back Again For A Bit

It's been quite a while since I posted here. All is well, and I now have some time to talk to you on where I've been and what I wish to do in the future. I started a job back in August and my enormous amount of free time dwindled to a few hours a day. However, I now have an income to support myself and buy new toys. I wanted to get into the Linux ecosystem and further distance myself from the Windows world. So for about $300, I've built a PC with an i3-6100, 4GB of DDR4 Ram, put it in a Min
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Adjustments & Fixing Little Things

Besides fixing the UV's for the VecDispenser, Adding in the box model, and some added sounds thanks to ThirstyPanther, most of the work this week was done with adjusting scripts so that the game as a whole plays better.     Picking Up Objects   Last week, I mention that I adjusted the pickup system so that it will auto center the object when it's picked up. While the stock code for the pickup system is good for occasionally picking up objects, in Vectronic, you're gonna be picking up boxes
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A Quick Update For LEX

I recently updated the Leadwerks Extended Executable with more shaders, and hot fixes. Fetch and pull this update in git. I wanted to post this yesterday, but I was having issues.   Fix 1: No more crashing upon Alt+Tabbing This fix is eventually gonna be made engine side, but I was not sure if Josh plans on that being pushed to the default branch, or the beta branch. While the beta and default branch are synced, I jumped the gun and fixed it.   //---------------------------------------
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