A new update is available for Leadwerks Game Engine 4.6 beta. This fixes many bugs.
Slow kinematic joint rotation
Heightmap import flipped
Map switching crashes in VR
Project Manager cancel button bug
The Zone DLC map failing to load
Ball joints not working
Take a look at the bug reports forum to see all the recent fixes in the engine and documentation.
This is a full update, with new builds for Windows and Linux, for C++ and Lua games. You
Finishing this today, I'm happy to publish this: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1662222417
The car is funny to drive, the prefabs is ready-to-use but feel free to change the script variables to test it.
Drop the prefabs in the map, it uses the classical FPSPlayer from Leadwerks.
The car is based on joints: 4 wheels, 4 damper and 2 Hinges for the directions.
The script incorporates smoothing damping modifications to get the car stable; modifications on
I'm in DC this week helping the folks at NASA wrap up some projects. I'm going to move back to a supportive role and focus on development of Leadwerks 4.6 and the new engine, and I am helping them to hire some programmers to replace me. We found some very talented people who I am confident will do a fantastic job, and I can't wait to see what they create using Leadwerks Game Engine.
I helped a team using Leadwerks at NASA get through some big milestones and expand. I hope that someday soon
Previously I talked about array textures acting as "bindless" textures, but there is an actual OpenGL extension that allows a shader to access any texture without the stupid texture binding / slot convention that limits OpenGL 4.0 shaders to a minimum of 16 textures. Implemenation was surprisingly easy, although Mac hardware apparently does not support this extension. When combined with the multi-draw commands in OpenGL 4.3, and some other tricks, it is possible to render multiple sets of object
The clustered forward renderer in Leadwerks 5 / Turbo Game Engine required me to implement a texture array to store all shadow maps in. Since all shadow maps are packed into a single 3D texture, the shader can access all required textures outside of the number of available texture units, which only gives 16 guaranteed slots.
I realized I could use this same technique to pack all scene textures into a few arrays and completely eliminate the overhead of binding different textures. In order to
Leadwerks 5 / Turbo makes extensive use of multithreading. Consequently, the API is stateless and more explicit. There is no such thing as a "current" world or context. Instead, you explicitly pass these variables to the appropriate commands.
One interesting aspect of this design is code like that below works perfectly fine. See if you can work through it and understand what's going on:
int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
//Create a model ;)
auto box = CreateBox(nullptr);
//Cre
It turns out GLTF is actually three different file formats. ? Textures can be loaded from external files, embedded in a binary .glb file, but they can also be saved in an ASCII GLTF files using base64 encoding. Having three different ways to store textures is not a good design decision, but at least it's better than the disaster called Collada. (Note to Khronos: If your file format specification has more pages than a Tom Clancy novel it probably sucks.)
Our GLTF loader now supports files wi
The Leadwerks API has standard Boolean functions that detect when the end user has pressed a key. While this is very simple and easy to understand, the issue comes when you wish to support binding of actions. Instead calling functions when a certain key was pressed or held, a better way to detect key events is to assign a key to an action. (e.g: Is the Jump key pressed). In Luawerks, I've written an action script in which returns the window call if the key defined in the user's settings is hit.
"My Return" would imply that I've been away for some time. To be honest here, I've been using the Leadwerks editor since before it was an official "game engine". Before you would use it to create your items to then import into another game engine. I've been always interested in creating games, since the late 90's. I remember using a few other older editors whose names I've long forgotten with the sands of time. I have always wanted to create an RPG, as that's my favorite genre of games. So the n
Some of the Leadwerks Game Engine design was originally developed to run on PC and mobile. In order to supported multiple renderers (OpenGL and OpenGLES) I implemented a system that uses an abstract base class with an API-specific class derived from that:
Texture
OpenGLTexture
All OpenGL code was contained in the OpenGLTexture class. This worked fine, and theoretically it would have allowed us to support multiple renderers within one build, like OpenGL and Direc
Since the GLTF file format can pack textures into a single file with the model, I needed to implement asset loading directly from a stream:
auto stream = ReadFile("image.png");
auto tex = LoadTexture(stream);
This was interesting because I needed to add a check for each supported image type so the loader can determine the file type from the contents instead of the file path extension. Most file formats include a string or "magic number" at the beginning of the file format to indicate what
I'm now able to load materials from GLTF files. These can use external textures or they can use textures packed into a GLTF binary file. Because we have a standardized material specification, this means you can download GLTF files from SketchFab or Turbosquid, and your model materials will automatically be loaded, all the time. There's no more generating materials or messing around trying to figure out which texture is the normal or specular map. An extension exists for DDS texture support, fort
So, most of December was eaten up on some NASA VR projects. There was a conference last week in Seattle that I attended for a couple of days. Then I had meetings in northern California and Arizona.
Unfortunately, I can't really talk much about what I am doing with those. Rest assured I am working on a plan to grow the company so we can provide better products and support for you. I'm taking a hit on productivity now in order to make a bigger plan happen.
Today is my first day back home
Luawerks has been updated to 1.2.7, making some small adjustments and fixes to the system. If you have previously purchased Luawerks, this update is available for free on the Leadwerks Marketplace. Please note: Luawerks is not ready for Leadwerks 4.6 and it's recommended to use Luawerks with Leadwerks 4.5.
Following changes include:
Added an optional Map selection menu. "New Game" will default call a panel in which all the maps in your Maps directory will be listed, Note: This will
That's what I obtained for driving experience with 4.6.
For me it's ok, just the distance of the wheels to the cars are growing too much while getting speed.
Sounds have to get upgraded too
I add a video that show car driving possibilities in the down-scaled world I want to create with an own scaled character controller. The idea is to obtain with this a bigger world lol
So everything is under scaled, the car too.
It's not GTA 6 but it's very ok for what
This month I was working on a lot of NASA projects using Leadwerks. My goal with this is to build up enough business that I can start hiring more people to help. It's nice to make money using my own tools, and it gives me a lot of ideas for the new engine.
This morning I felt like experimenting with the design of plugins in the new editor a bit. I came up with two types of plugins. One will add an new menu item to the model editor that flips the normals of the current model. The ProcessEven
The beta branch on Steam is now updated. Version 4.6 introduces peer-to-peer multiplayer capabilities with a new multiplayer game template. Check out the new features in the documentation:
P2P
Lobby
Voice
The physics library is updated to the latest version of Newton.
The editor has some enhancements as well:
Model editor view range is calculated from model extents, so if you load a model that is huge it won't be invisible.
Model editor displays n
I've made progress with the new vehicle system and it is shaping up nicely. The vehicle wheels consist of a slider joint with a spring (the strut) connected to a pivot, connected to the wheel by a hinge joint (the axle). If the wheel can be steered, an additional pivot is inserted between the strut and axle, with a motorized hinge to control steering. There were two big problems in addition to this that need to be solved in order to make a vehicle that is stable at high speeds.
First, the m
Here's a look at the new vehicle system that is being developed. The API has been simplified so you simply create a vehicle, add as many tires as you want, and start using it. The AddTire() command now accepts a model and the dimensions of the tire are calculated from the bounds of the mesh.
class Vehicle
{
int AddTire(Model* model, bool steering=false, const float spring=500.0f, const float springrelaxation = 0.1f, const float springdamping = 10.0f);
void SetGas(const float accel);
void
I'm wrapping up the new multiplayer capabilities for Leadwerks 4.6, and I am very excited about what this offers developers.
We saw previously how the lobby system is used to create or join games, and how to retrieve Steam IDs for messaging. Once we have joined a game we can start sending messages with the P2P::Send command, which includes a few overloads:
static bool P2P::Send(uint64 steamid, const int messageid, const int channel = 0, const int flags = 0);
static bool P2P::Send(uint64
The next update will include a new networking system with built-in voice chat for multiplayer games.
Voice communication is built into your game and can be enabled simply by turning it on when a specific key is pressed:
void Voice::SetRecording(window->KeyDown(Key::T))
You can selectively filter out users so your voice only gets sent to your own team or to a specific player:
void Voice::SetFilter(const uint64 steamid, const bool state)
When another player sends their voice
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