Josh

Yep, that is the style nowadays. The new YouTube site design is actually a really good example of that style. You guys do IPB skins? The skinning system is pretty difficult, it's not just regular CSS. The black bars kind of bother me. Here are a couple alternatives. What do you think?: We can change anything, including the entire layout, but it has to be decided now.

I see Rick's account has been hacked by a 15-year-old girl.

The first update has been posted. Use the "skin in progress" link above to view it. Please post any general feedback you have, but keep in mind that work on it has just begun.

IPBForumSkins.com is designing the skin for "Werkspace 2.0". Our existing skin is the result of several different people's work. IPBForumSkins was able to do a few small fixes for me in the past and they gave the best results, so I decided to hand the whole design over to them. Their instructions are to make a clean, professional, Web 2.0-ish design for the site. I will post updates in this thread and ask for your feedback, since I don't have an eye for design. The links below can be referred to as progress is made: Skin in progress: http://www.ipbfocus.com/skins/skinchange.php?id=64 Default IPB skin, for comparison: http://community.invisionpower.com

Aria and I have discussed it into the ground, and there is no one best way to do this. All the browser providers except Google are strongly opposed to it. Google's native client is one option. It's the best approach, but it won't ever catch on with the other browsers. A custom player that downloads your game in a single .game file and executes Lua script in a sandboxed environment is safe and completely under my control. I would just disable file access, custom shaders, and DLL calls and it would be impossible to write a malicious script. (You can cause a BSOD with a bad shader.) It would use an ActiveX plugin like OSAKit does, to embed the 3D window in a browser. There's also a new version of Flash coming out that compiles C++ into action script. It would be slow as hell, but would run on most computers since almost everyone has Flash installed. All these approaches have benefits and drawbacks, and we'll probably end up supporting a combination of them. I don't expect a clear winner to emerge for several years, because the browser providers are ideologically opposed to this. My guess is one approach will become popular, and the other browsers will have to add support to stay competitive, probably Google Native Client. I don't know of any other way to do C++., but if you have ideas I'm all ears.

Steam? What's that. Is it a virus? My computer plays Farmville. It's on my Facebook. I like Justin Beiber, he seems like such a nice boy. -typical PC game player, 2011.

Got a link to an MS page about this?

90% percent of published Leadwerks3D games will probably focus on low-end graphics, and if they are run on a PC, they will probably be played through a web browser. I'm the last person in the world to admit this, but that's the reality of where the games market is. I'm trying to get the web plugin installer down to about 2 mb. The VC distrib package would triple that size. Not a big deal for you and me, but remember that this will be played by Grandma on her netbook connected to the neighbor's wifi. Of course there's people who do games with high-end graphics, but I can't stay in business if I only provide software for them. At the very least, the engine has to be able to scale between the two extremes. If the VC2008 situation does work out like they are saying now, then I will consider VC 2011, but we've seen MS announce the end of support for something and then keep going. I find it incredible that they no longer support C++ programs out of the box on any version of Windows with a wide install base. Code::Blocks + GCC would probably work better on Windows than Visual Studio, if nothing improves.

That would be the "Publish" step, and yes it is similar.

Leadwerks3D has built-in project management features that assist the user to create, share, and publish projects. When you first start editor for the first time, the New Project wizard is displayed. You can select a programming language and choose which platforms you want the project to support. It is possible to add project templates for new languages, too. Once a project exists, you can go into the project manager and switch projects. This will cause the editor to use the project directory as the path to load all assets from. All files will be displayed relative to the project directory. You can drag an image into the icon box to add it to the project. (Xcode users will probably notice the influence here.) The +/- buttons will allow you to import a project or remove one from the list, with an option to delete the directory (iTunes much?). I want to add more features like exporting projects into a folder or .zip file, or maybe a .werk project package the editor recognizes. The editor will have options to skip asset source files like .psd, .max, etc., and only copies relevant files, so all the hundreds of files the C++ compilers generate will be skipped. We might eventually even add integration with SVN repositories, backup systems, and team management features, but that's beyond what we need to worry about right now. A "project" in Leadwerks3D is a game or other program, and will typically contain many maps (scenes). Since this kind of defies a conventional design around file requestors and files and folders, we might not even use a traditional "Open Map" dialog. All the project's maps will be available in the "Maps" directory in the Asset Browser. I can even save a thumbnail of each map when the file is saved. To add a new map to a project, you would simply drag it into the Asset Browser, preferably in the "Maps" directory. Or maybe we will also include an "Open File" file requestor that can be used to import any map, material, texture, etc. into the project. The current design of the editor is the result of a lot of experimentation and testing, so I'll continue to play around with it as I add features. Michael Betke and I have traded a lot of projects back and forth, and this system is designed to make that task easier so we can all exchange self-contained projects. If you have any suggestions to add, post in the comments below, or in the feature requests forum. --Update-- And here's the export screen. This is similar to the "publish" step. I need to write a parser that goes through source code to determine what files are actually needed in the project. The project template defines what file extensions to scan for used files:

It's our whole culture. Computers, cars, buildings, are all designed to break quickly. According to this article, Windows XP is at about 38%: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/12/windows_7_overtakes_xp I think it's fair to say 95% of Windows XP consumer machines (not developers) don't have the VC 2010 service pack installed. That means Leadwerks3D games won't run out of the box on 36% of end users machines if I use VC 2010. I know you can include it in an installer, but developers will neglect to do so, and we are also looking at alternative installation methods and trying to get file sizes down to a very small size (web browser plugins). If the user has to download something extra, a huge number will turn away at that point. Each one of these screen is an opportunity for you to lose a customer: Little Timmy isn't going to have a clue what this means. Is it a virus?: Even if installer sizes or downloading an extra installer weren't an issue, a large number of people simply won't go through the steps of installing it. I know your opinion makes better technical sense, but the whole point of Leadwerks3D is to address what the market wants and what makes good business sense. MS could have solved this by including the VC 2010 service pack in required Windows updates a year ago, but they didn't. Now they're turning C++ into a .NET monster that requires additional plugins just to run a program. We can't let their bad leadership doom our efforts to reach customers.

I'm still working out the details, but yeah, that's the idea. I guess the analogy would be like a Visual Studio project...sort of.

I don't know how to answer this. The API changes are basically the difference between this: PositionEntity() And this: entity->SetPosition() But of course there will be lots of little things that add up.

I estimate with pretty good confidence that the majority of times a Leadwerks game is or will be run on an end user's computer, it won't involve an installer at all. Someone will email a zip file, or it will be downloaded through a web browser plugin, and no traditional installer program will be used. In any event, when that doesn't work it falls back to me. The OpenAL installer alone has caused me a tremendous amount of problems. It's hard for a technically competent person to understand, but the Windows installation method is utterly broken, for your average consumer. It's safe to say the average consumer doesn't even know how to install a program, and if they did they don't want to, for fear of viruses or crapware. You have to understand, the normal usage model for most people is to purchase a low-price laptop, never reformat or maintain, then throw it out after 12 months and buy another when performance slows down. Therefore, every program they install carries a financial risk because it can make their replacement cost come sooner. I know it's idiotic, but that's really how people are. A lot of people don't even realize you can install a game on a PC and play it. To them, PC gaming = Farmville. I reformatted my neighbor's computer a couple months ago, and now it's covered in Ask.com and other crapware again. I gave up and told her to buy a Mac. Overcoming the barriers to getting a game on the consumer's hard drive is hugely important. It shouldn't be this way, but it is and we have to deal with it until a better system comes along.

I believe there's a significant number of computers that don't have the VC 2010 Redistributable Package installed.

It's pretty amazing how long the materials, textures, and shader system is taking, but it encompasses a lot of areas: Automatic asset reloading, autogenerated shaders, GLSL syntax highlighting, texture conversion options, and more. All this attention to detail is shaping up to create what I hope will be the best art pipeline, ever. The Asset Browser displays all files in your project directory. You don't have to use Windows Explorer at all anymore. You can rename, move, copy, cut, paste, and delete files, without ever leaving the editor: All recognized asset files are displayed in the editor, including materials, textures, shaders, sounds, scripts, models, and fonts: You can edit textures, materials, and shaders, and see how your changes interact in real-time:

We use Visual Studio 2008 for Windows, Xcode for OSX and iOS, and Eclipse for Android.

What will probably end up happening is I will expose various hooks and events, with the disclaimer that the system is completely experimental and could change at any time. Then after a long period of trial and error, the system will be finalized and become a real supported feature.

Eventually, I intend to have an editor script system that plugs into editor events and can control objects in the engine. As for letting entity scripts themselves access the editor, that seems difficult, because they would need to run with and without the editor. I am not going to include any plugin or editor script functionality in the first release because I can't design a system to solve an undefined problem. I'll let people use the editor for a while, find out what kinds of things they want to do with it, and then design a plugin system with that knowledge. If I tried to design that now we would end up with a system that doesn't really work.

That's something else I don't like. I have to continuously decide which languages warrant a separate subforum, and people form camps and start holy wars over it. I have declared repeatedly that all programming languages are terrible, so I don't understand what the fuss is about.

If your texture really only needs to be white, blue, or red, the entity color will work for that.

I can output Visual Studio help with this. Is that the same thing?

It's only useful if you are consistently checking for new content every 24 hours or so, or else you will be reading through multiple pages of content.

I sent you a link. It's normally not accepted because it's bad for digital goods, and even worse when I act as an intermediary, as I do with the Leadwerks Asset Store.