[Project Launch Settings and Mod Support]

Properties editor:

[Project Launch Settings and Mod Support]

On 10/6/2021 at 4:11 PM, Yue said:

A search box option in Assets and Scene I think would be great

Here is what it looks like now:

[Project Launch Settings and Mod Support]

Search is working right now. That's what that text field in the asset browser is. It can handle a hundred thousand files in less than a second. I'll write a lengthy article about the asset browser, as a lot of work went into making that work at scale.

[Package Plugins]

So you may notice the package files are appearing both in the file panel below and in the tree view as folders.

just realized that GLTF files could be treated the same way, since they can have texture files embedded in them.. Optional of course.

crazy possibilities.

[Package Plugins]

Also can rip all the textures out of a BSP. Of course there are many different versions of WAD, PAK, and BSP formats, so supporting one particular game requires some mix and match code in the plugins.

[Package Plugins]

Bwahaha this is so cool

[Package Plugins]

Funny enough, the original Quake on Steam recently received an update. It's the same game, but using a new engine. They did not make any huge changes, but now it is running with actual hardware acceleration and everything is a bit higher resolution. That's exactly the kind of thing you could do with this, an "engine mod" that loads the original game files but renders it all in another engine.

[Package Plugins]

Loading Quake LMP images...

[Package Plugins]

Poking around the original Quake game folder...

[Package Plugins]

Not just Valve games, but everything.

I am designing the entity system to be extremely configurable. The properties are based on a bunch of JSON file templates:

{
    "ObjectType":
    {
        "name": "Spot Light",
        "root": "Light",
        "properties":
        [
            {
                "name": "Cone angles",
                "group": "Light",
                "type": "VEC2",
                "minimum":
                [
                    0.0,
                    0.0
                ],
                "maximum":
                [
                    90.0,
                    90.0
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

There will also be customizable build/launch paths.

[A First Look at the New Editor]

The new editor is so flexible, you could probably configure it to load , edit, and launch a Leadwerks project, while the editor is using the new Vulkan renderer.

Right now I have it working like VSCode, where there is no project file and you just can open any directory and start editing. It's very interesting.

[A First Look at the New Editor]

1 hour ago, reepblue said:

Besides your will to do so, what prevents you throwing in the Leadwerks renderer in there and replacing the current editor? 

I'm not going to make a new editor for Leadwerks but I might embed the Leadwerks renderer in the 3D viewport for the trade show. The technical benchmarks are impressive but not very flashy.

[Animated Textures]

I found the cross-fading is not good for animations that use an alpha channel, but it’s great for solid textures. So I would not use this with 2D sprites unless the texture was not using a linear filter, so the frame change would be instantaneous.

[Vulkan on Mac with MoltenVK]

I had to add a fallback rendering mode which was quite tricky but ultimately worked. This handles the situation when the hardware has a limited number of shader image units supported. This is necessary on my MacBook Pro, although I don't know what the situation is on newer Mac models. Showing a screenshot on Mac that uses this method to display two different textures is actually quite a feat!

This was the last real hurdle to release "Ultra 2D Kit". There is more work that needs to be done, but nothing nearly as complicated as Vulkan rendering code.

[Vulkan on Mac with MoltenVK]

Text rendering works now: See the full-res image for the real appearance.

[Vulkan on Mac with MoltenVK]

Honestly surprised MoltenVK works as well as it does...

 

[Vulkan on Mac with MoltenVK]

14 hours ago, Boland said:

“MacOS is now about as locked down as iOS”. 
 

No it isn’t. 

What I am pointing out is that there is no longer any option to allow applications to run unless they have gone through a certification process.

[Ultra Engine Player Input Features]

Just finished this.

[Vulkan on AMD Graphics Cards]

This was written jokingly in the style of "how-to" articles that are obviously designed for SEO.

[Simplex Noise]

Does the noise shader produce different results outside the range of (0,1)? It would be interesting to see two textures mixed with random noise across a large surface with no repetition.

[Linux, You Changed Man]

Having used both Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and VMWare for a while now, I definitely recommend VMWare over anything else. Setup is easier and it has working copy and paste between machines.

[Ultra App Kit Released]

I am assuming you will want some kind of grid control for that so you should look at custom widgets:
https://www.ultraengine.com/learn/CPP/Widget_AddBlock
https://www.ultraengine.com/learn/CPP/WidgetBlock
https://www.ultraengine.com/learn/CPP/CustomWidgets

[Ultra App Kit Released]

23 minutes ago, george68 said:

Hi,

What is the difference between the Ultra App Kit and the Ultra App Kit Subscription?

Nothing except the subscription will always get the latest updates and the other will get paid updates in longer intervals. Both will get bug fix updates.

[Three technology products you should be using in 2021]

27 minutes ago, reepblue said:

I should switch my email address on this site to my new one. I have a lot of mail tied to my GMail but most of it is trash.

You can set up gmail to forward mail to your new address.

[Three technology products you should be using in 2021]

I'm going to add one more to the list, Matomo Analytics:
https://matomo.org/

It's a Google analytics alternative that lets you keep control of your data. You can get the cloud-hosted version with a paid plan, or install the self-hosted version and collect analytics without any data leaving your own website. This will likely also make pages load faster, since they don't have to "phone home" to another site.