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Blender - Art of UV unwrapping

Introduction Everybody hates to UV unwrap their models after their done finishing their 3D models, and i do too, but i'm good at it. Some people use software like RizomUV or Blender add-ons to make their job easyer, but it does'nt work for every texturing workflow. If you are using a 3D painting software like Adobe Substance Painter, then you should let your computer do the UV unwrapping job, but if you don't have the money for Substance products like i do, then you do textures the old

Blender - Animating Tutorial (And how to Bake an IK rig)

Introduction Some folks here in the forum asked for help on more advanced Blender topics, like baking animations from an IK rig. I'm here to spread my knowledge, since i also learned from other people on the internet. I'll be using Blender 3.6, without add-ons. 1. Blender animation basics I recommend starting out with a rigged model for the first time, but if you dont have one, here is a tutorial on how to make yours. After you got your model, you have to make an armature, wh

Inventory & Crafting and how it could work

Due to several inquiries about how I created my inventory, crafting, and storage systems, I would like to explain my approach in more detail. In this blog post, I won't use any code but rather focus on explaining the underlying logic. 1. The InventoryItem Class The foundation of these systems is an Item class, which I abstractly created to represent different types of items (materials, placeable objects, weapons, consumables, etc.). The reason for an abstract class is straightforward:

Andy90

Andy90 in Guides

Geometry

So we went through a lot of fragment shaders. Did some vertex displacement. Went through tessellation. Now, some geometry. I don't have much to say about it. Just keep poking at it with a proverbial stick and eventually situations start to look familiar and you know what to do because it's similar to stuff you've encountered before. It does seem to me that there's not a lot of variety in geometry shaders. There's a bit, though. Enough to make it interesting. But grab these shaders and you'll hav

havenphillip

havenphillip in Shaders

Ultra Engine 0.9.3 Released

Ultra Engine 0.9.3 is here, with usability improvements, bug fixes, and new AI-powered features to make game development easier. You can get a discount now in our store or on Steam all week. "Futuristic Room" by Dennis Cliofis Object creation has been overhauled with a more visual approach that lets you easily select the object you want to add to the scene.   You can also insert a new object into the scene tree, under the selected node, or in the scene root.

Admin

Admin in Articles

UI Window Manager

I had already created a similar window handler for Leadwerks in a previous project. As I'm currently importing my project into the new engine, I thought it was time to refine this functionality. But what exactly can the Window Handler do? As the name suggests, it manages multiple "UI Windows" so that only one is displayed at a time. This is particularly useful when working with different windows for the UI, such as one for inventory, another for a crafting menu, and yet another for dialog

Andy90

Andy90 in C++ Classes

Mouse Movement Controller

This component generates a Mouse Movement Controller featuring a free-look mode. Typically, such character controllers find application in ARPG (Action Role-Playing Game) or RTS (Real-Time Strategy) games. In this setup, you observe the character from a top-down perspective and direct their movement to a specified position by clicking the left mouse button. The Component itself need the terrain name and the name for the walk animation. Also your character needs an idle animation. 

Andy90

Andy90 in C++ Components

Ultra Engine Early Access is Here

Ultra Engine unlocks the full power of your GPU to deliver up to 10x faster performance for your game. Ultra Engine is now available in Early Access, both in our store and on Steam. Use coupon code "LAUNCH" to receive a discount before January 1. Ultra Engine is a huge leap in technology that provides a new future-proof foundation, while keeping the strengths and general design philosophy we developed in Leadwerks. There were many major underlying changes made to create a better development

Admin

Admin in Articles

6 Reasons You Should Use Ultra Game System

Back in July, I set out to create a base for creating a version of Cyclone with Ultra Engine. I've gotten a lot of feedback from the release and started to conceptualize ideas on how to prevent or limit on making the same mistakes. One major goal I had was to compartmentalize the system. This should just exist on it's own and game code should just lay on top of this. This was possible thanks to the event system which cuts down on the number of pointers that need to be passed. Components can

reepblue

reepblue in Code

Finishing Touches

At long last, the engine that felt like it would never be done is here. This is all the result of an idea I had and wanted to put to the test. Of course I never anticipated it was possible to deliver a 10x improvement in rendering performance, but here we are with the benchmarks to prove it. Research & Development The last four years of research and development were an opportunity to rethink and redesign what a game engine should be. Along the way there were a few ideas I had that

Josh

Josh in Articles

SALVATIONLAND - Update 2.0. Director's Cut! Soundtrack on YouTube!

Since we are getting close to announcing our new project and will be very busy with its development, we wanted to take a step back and "elevate" the quality of our previous project. The update ended up taking us two weeks of work instead of the planned one, but in it, we were able to implement so many exciting features and even bring back some previously unrealized content that we realized it wasn't just another update, but a re-release. Version 2.0. We are proud to present to you the direct

ERKGames

ERKGames in News

Old Blog, New Times

Hello! This blog was created in 2012, but here I am resurrecting it. The option to create a new blog disappeared when I deleted another old blog that had no articles. Anyways, please ignore the previous entries, because they are really old and outdated. The code shown in those blogs do not work with LE 4, and I don't even think I have the engine that was released around 2012. To catch up a bit; back then I ended up doing contract work with various game engines, then getting the jo

Paul Thomas

Paul Thomas in Scavenge

SALVATIONLAND - Update 1.5.2, English Manual and future plans...

We are back and we have some good news for you... First, we have released update 1.5.2 for SALVATIONLAND, which includes both various technical changes, as well as a very important improvement. And this improvement requires an advanced description. This month marks 6 years since the team and I launched Leadwerks Game Engine for the first time and started working on it. It's been a long time, isn't it? And during this time, we had a chance to conduct a lot of experiments and face both t

ERKGames

ERKGames in News

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

reepblue

reepblue in Code

Colliders in Ultra Engine

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

Josh

Josh in Articles

AI-powered Texture Generation in Ultra Engine

Not long ago, I wrote about my experiments with AI-generated textures for games. I think the general consensus at the time was that the technology was interesting but not very useful in its form at the time. Recently, I had reason to look into the OpenAI development SDK, because I wanted to see if it was possible to automatically convert our C++ documentation into documentation for Lua. While looking at that, I started poking around with the image generation API, which is now using DALL-E 2. Ste

Josh

Josh in Articles

Ultra Engine glTF extensions

As I have explained before, I plan for Ultra Engine to use glTF for our main 3D model file format, so that your final game models can be easily loaded back into a modeling program for editing whenever you need. glTF supports a lot of useful features and is widely supported, but there are a few missing pieces of information I need to add into it. Fortunately, this JSON-based file format has a mechanism for extensions that add new features and data to the format. In this article I will describe th

Josh

Josh in Articles

Building Universal Game Assets

I have two goals for the art pipeline in the new game engine. Eliminate one-way 3D model conversions. Use the same game asset files on all platforms. In Leadwerks, 3D models get converted into the proprietary MDL format. Although the format is pretty straightforward and simple, there is no widespread support for loading it back into 3D modeling programs. This means you need to keep a copy of your 3D model in FBX and MDL format. You may possibly want to keep an additional fi

Josh

Josh in Articles

Huge Update 1.4 - Released!

This update is the latest in a series of major updates. Now the game will only be supported with small patches as needed. We have come a long way together with you, dear players. Thanks for your support! Changelog: - Cleaned up about ~500 megabytes during resource check - Added junk buyer at the level "Gamsk - 2" - Police chief at the "The Beginning" level now plays an animation during his first appearing - Optimized game assets - Optimized levels - Added new character voic

ERKGames

ERKGames in News

Cool Ice Effect

Here's a cool effect I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. This shader uses parallax occlusion and a trick similar to that in the weeper (22a_weeper). The idea is that you can get a cheap refraction effect by multiplying the texture coordinates of the diffuse texture with the normals (naturally you'd have to establish the diffuse "outcolor" after you establish the normals). It looks something like this: float amplitude = 0.1; vec4 outcolor = texture(texture0,ex_texcoords0 + normal.x

havenphillip

havenphillip in Shaders

Package plugins and Quake files now supported

Package plugins are now supported in Ultra Engine 1.0.2. This allows the engine to handle other package formats besides just ZIP. In order to test this out, I created the Quake Loader plugin, which currently supports the following formats used in the original Quake game: PAK WAD BSP (textures) SPR LMP Why Quake? Well, the original Quake game is what got me into game development through modding, but Quake is also great for testing because it's so weird.

Josh

Josh in Articles

Voxel Terrain Part 3 - Dynamic Components

Took some time to figure out the best approach to do this but I've got it now. To start with I created components that are all the same size.  I am using 16x16x16 components.  The voxel terrain is 128^3 so dividing that evenly is 8^3 components.  In this image there is 512 of them.  The red are inactive and the green are active (they have a model the represents the surface).  This posed a problem for very large terrains.  I would need a component size small enough so that LOD and real-time

SpiderPig

SpiderPig in Voxel Terrain

The Seventh World - Part 1

After months of work on various base classes I have finally started to re-build my game in Ultra.  There is still a lot of work to do to these classes (voxel terrain especially) but my aim is to keep the ball rolling by getting them to a workable state so I can build a playable game and then work on fine tuning later.  Plus, I find it more fun to fine tune classes when there is a working game at your finger tips rather than just a bland test project. I started off with voxel terrain.  Basic

SpiderPig

SpiderPig in The Seventh World

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