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Josh

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Blog Comments posted by Josh

    Josh

    Posted

    The big stumbling points in Leadwerks, I feel, were that the editor was not extensible, and it I had trouble meeting the user halfway once the command API was explained.

    With the technology I had at the time it was not really possible to make an extensions system for the editor. I have a better Lua / C++ bridge now, and it is possible to use Lua like Max Script.

    For the second problem, after lengthy discussion with the beta testers I developed an entity component system that works with C++ using a preprocessor. It allows a high degree of code reusability that I think really will allow great collaboration. That means me showing you how to do things, and it means you working with others to accomplish your goals.

    Josh

    Posted

    After working with the gallery and videos sections for a week, I can tell you why the games pages weren't as good.

    With the gallery and videos, you are overloaded with a ton of good quality content. You can take in a lot just by clicking around. 

    With the games pages you had to hunt a lot more to get less content.

    Josh

    Posted

    If I could go back in time I would have:

    • Not moved screenshots and videos to Steam.
    • Never bothered with Steam Workshop.
    • Never made the game launcher.
    • Ignored people who told me I need some kind of marketplace and focus instead on better support for common 3D model formats.
    • Made a dark forum theme much sooner.
    • Implemented PBR materials sooner.
    • Spent more money on advertising.
    • But I feel good that everything I am doing with Ultra Engine is on the right track.

    If we can build up the old level of crazy creative activity we used to have, combined with the much better new software, we will be in very good shape. The fact that social media is massively oversaturated actually works in my favor because people can come here and actually get real interaction when they post something instead of just AI-generated likes and fake views that never actually occurred.

    VR is another bright spot of course, because it provides me and you with a niche that is sizable but not so big that EA wants to take it over.

    • Like 1
    Josh

    Posted

    With the screenshots back in our possession, the whole website feels different than it did even a week ago. with these small changes the site feels much more artist-friendly and ready to accept new content. I want our community site to feel like a hybrid of a hard technical discussion forum combined with an image-heavy artwork site.

    We've become more focused on making and producing finished games, which is good, but I do miss the amount of WIP images we used to get, even if they never resulted in a finished game.

    Of course I need to get the new 3D engine out. This is what drives everything.

    The missing piece right now is how to drive more traffic to the website. I have a budget for advertising and I will be experimenting with this. It looks like at the same time, it's become very hard to have any of your work noticed on social media or YouTube, and people are actually getting more views and interaction on this website. If I can drive a lot of traffic to our website, all your content will have a place to actually be seen instead of being ignored and never seen on social media wastelands.

    Josh

    Posted

    The Marketplace "games" category is for uploading your playable game or demo, or even selling it.

    The videos section is for videos.

    The games database doesn't make sense. It has that weird issue that renames the downloads into an unintelligible string and loses the file extension. It discourages exploring because only half the games are downloadable. So it's not really good at doing anything.

    Josh

    Posted

    3 hours ago, reepblue said:

    BTW, I couldn't find an easy way to get to the game's section from the menu.

    This will not be deleted, but it is being "de-emphasized" (hidden) to focus traffic on stuff that is more engaging. The leadwerks.com website header still has a link to it, but I don't want a link on the new site.

    Josh

    Posted

    11 minutes ago, GenebrisЖ said:

    Can you make Photoshop?

    Yes. I mean you can't make a GUI designer program and start selling it as your own software.

    (You could make a GUI design program if it requires a license for Ultra App Kit in order to use the saved files.)

    Basically I don't want someone taking my GUI toolkit and repackaging it as their own, whether it is controlled through code or some other way. That's all.

    Josh

    Posted

    22 minutes ago, m.yuneeb90 said:

    What are the licensing terms for ultra app kit if I preorder it? and how stable is it at the moment, like can I start using it to build a desktop application or do you think that it would be more wise to wait a little till its full release, I am  just interested in desktop windows application the feature set mentioned on store without stretch goals. Thanks.

    You can't use it to make an application creation library or design program, i.e. don't repackage it as a new application creation SDK. Anything else is okay, and there's no royalties or other extra costs.

    The software is finished at this point and ready to release. I am working on videos and promotion now.

    Josh

    Posted

    The full 3D engine build time is now down to 1:25 on an SSD. Previously it took five minutes. This is going to make a big difference in the speed at which I can develop the engine.

    Build times on an HDD are inconsistent, to the point where testing different settings is meaningless.

    • Like 2
    Josh

    Posted

    On 2/6/2021 at 10:04 PM, Ma-Shell said:

    Please don't use Window::MoveMouse! You will have users constantly asking themselves, whether that's absolute (i.e. move mouse to x, y) or relative (i.e. move mouse by dx, dy). Even if you can easily look it up I think, it is more helpful when scrolling through the autocompletion-options to just see on the first look what the function does without ambiguities.

    On 2/6/2021 at 10:36 PM, Genebris said:

    I love when everything is named like GetValue / SetValue. Clean and logical.

    Thank you, that is very helpful.

     

    Josh

    Posted

    4 hours ago, reepblue said:

    Wasn't Stream::EOF() replaced with Stream::Ended()? Although EOF is faster to type, it conflicts with macros in some cases. 

    Nothing is final. In the current build I am using EOF. It's kind of a historical name. The Win32 macro can be undefined, and I have had to do that in some other instances.

    This is the great conflict. If we use more consistent naming then we have things like this: 

    Window::SetMousePosition()
Window::GetMousePosition()

    This feels better to me, but is less easy to guess: 

    Window::MoveMouse()
Window::MousePosition()

    The new API does have some things that feel a bit more like BASIC, like the CreateBlah() commands instead of the weird static functions in LE4.

    If I am not 100% adherent to a consistent naming method than there are a lot of judgement calls to make.

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