Josh

The subject of spheres in 3D World Studio has been one of great levity (see here and here) around the Leadwerks community. I spent today finally implementing a CSG sphere primitive. This is a little different from creating a conventional triangle mesh sphere because each face is a single polygon with either three or four sides. Here's my scratch paper that got me through this process: I'll spare you the mathematics and get right to the good stuff: This completes the basic primitives, which include boxes, cylinders, cones, wedges, and now spheres. Tomorrow I will get started on compound primitives (arch and tube) as well as smoothing groups. Let the hilarities ensue in the comments below.

zsort=1?

We need the scene to test, please.

We want people to start using Leadwerks now, so if you buy LE2 and upgrade to L3D, it's cheaper overall then waiting for L3D.

We're working on it!

No, it's just an internal member of the entity class, with an array of translations and quaternions.

The conversion process creates an animation frame for each time step, to make it so it's ready to load right into the engine with no preprocessing. This makes animation fast because the engine only needs to look up the closest two values in the animation array, instead of stepping through a lot of variable time frames.

Actually, I have some convex decomposition routines that will decompose any polygonal geometry into convex hulls, so it would be possible to implement that. Not sure when and if, but it's doable.

That pretty much describes the way Leadwerks3D assets work. It's one thing to download Blender for free, but it's another thing to have a modeling tool you can use proficiently. Even if you're a 3ds max expert, level design is much much easier with unique CSG modeling, rather than trying to piece together a lot of pre-made components. You might not happen to have a hallway or floor the exact size you need, and scaling components to fit will stretch their texture coordinates. Good level design is a mix of unique CSG geometry and prefabricated details.

UML diagrams, object-oriented frameworks, and beautiful modular architecture are great things to develop, but sometimes you just need to make an application that real people can use. For me, that means you start with the behavior you want, and work backwards to make the code that does it. In the past I've considered fancy object-oriented mouse tool classes, but the style of editing I want is intuitive, easy, and fast, using the fewest number of mouse clicks possible to achieve a task. I think that's why so many people loved 3D World Studio, and it's a quality I want to retain in the design of the Leadwerks3D editor. I now have basic CSG editing working. The code that does this is a little more event-oriented spaghetti than the engine core, but sometimes that is appropriate. I can't wait to start working with a CSG editor again, with new features like smooth groups. Drag and drop materials onto objects is already working, and it feels so intuitive and pleasant to use. This is the stuff I programmatically live for.

I'll look up your account and set you back up when I get home tonight.

It doesn't make any difference in this scene, because almost every single object is visible.

Here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHEmpXkcuzs And a description: Please spread this around. Thanks!

The API for c++, Lu's and jc# is all the same. We can't write documentation for lua because it has no variable types.

The documentation is by no means done, but there are entries for almost all classes and functions here: http://leadwerks.com/documentation I thought you might be interested in seeing what we have coming up.

You'll see the results of it in our promotional material for Leadwerks3D.

Everyone's gone for the weekend, and I am still here, so it seems like a good time to stop and say hello to the community, who I have not been communicating with much lately. We spent some time this week doing some market research, and investigating exactly why Leadwerks is different and unique. After that I feel like I have a much better picture of the game industry as a whole, and of our strategy going forward. That's the "big picture" stuff we CEO's do. Meanwhile, back on the ground, I have code to write and a few outstanding bugs to correct for Leadwerks Engine. I've made progress and have very basic CSG editing working in the editor. I ran some performance tests with my new iPad 3, and the results are looking good. More on Monday about that. We're looking to recruit a few more interns in the Sacramento area. Anyways, this is less structured than most of my blogs, but I wanted to write something. How was your week?

Done and done.

Hi guys, I recorded a video last night that has the potential to be very popular. It has to do with the iPad 3. I am planning to upload it Monday morning, around 7AM Pacific time. I would like to ask the community to help spread it around that morning so it can reach the maximum number of viewers and maybe go viral. Thanks in advance for your help, and if you can suggest any sites to post it on, that would help. It's a general-interest topic that isn't specific to Leadwerks.

Change the word "solidclass" to "pointclass".

Leadwerks does support X and JPG formats, but you've already decided.

Brushes do not have an orientation, so I would not be surprised if that file caused a problem.

To answer your question, having 2 of every forum was 2 much.

You might try Smart Packer, it will compress all files into one EXE.

@fladrache, yes. @rick, maybe. The problem is if a model is rotated, so that its axes don't align to the world axes (even if they are swapped), scaling the model would result in a sheared matrix. Our math routines continually enforce an orthogonal matrix, to ensure that floating point errors don't add up over time and start skewing your entities.