Josh

The ordering system problem has been resolved. -The ordering process features 100% SSL-encrypted content, which will display in the browser. -Customers can enter the CC info right on the site and order through our merchant account, instead of sending a PayPal payment. -Customers can order with an account balance, and the seller can still request a payout for the amount earned. -Sellers are protected from refunds because the transaction is governed by the same rules as a regular credit card purchase. Only in case of proven fraud is a refund issued. By contrast, a PayPal account lets the buyer requests a refund within 30 days for any reason, or no reason, and since no UPS tracking number can be provided, the buyer automatically gets their money back. The Leadwerks Asset Store will be launched August 9th. I am composing a press release which will be sent out to tech magazines, bloggers, and journalists so we can maximize your exposure. We’re also launching a promotion for the month of August. All new licensees will receive $20 account credit in the Asset Store. They can use this credit to purchase your assets, and you can request a payout in real money for your balance earned. You may begin submitting your models now, and they will only be visible to you. On August 9th your paid items will all be approved for the launch. If you need to review the terms of the merchant agreement, all information on this program can be found here: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/merchants

I've done stuff like this before. Basically, anything that uses the normal to change the shading will break up the flat look.

It's not an "optimization", it's backwards technology for obsolete hardware. Ah well, at least I still get my hardware tessellation...

I seriously doubt you would need to do any of your own culling techniques like this. If a light is hidden behind a wall, it won't be drawn. The cost of each additional light is very low. The shadow rendering optimization in LE is very advanced. There's an article here that explains how to get the most out of it: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/Documentation/LE2/tutorials/_/artwork/tools/indoor-lighting-optimization-r18

Occlusion culling is already used on lights and animated models.

Use Visual Studio 2008: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/files/file/215-visual-c-2008-express-edition/

The problem with that is it's never enough. Any time I have released game examples of what you *could* do, they get treated like they are chiseled in stone, and then I get complaints that my example doesn't support X feature. What's needed is a complete rethink of how games are produced, because it's obvious that programming has failed as a design method.

There are ways to do simple water. We made a custom stream shader for the GDC2010 video. It's not that hard to do with refraction or a cubemap for reflection, but it's not supported "out of the box".

You actually can search the documentation, but it's not as simple as I'd like: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?app=core&module=search&search_in=ccs The index here lists every page: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/Documentation/le2/_/index/

The command reference is here: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/Documentation/le2/_/command-reference/ We're not ever going to use CHM again, since it's Windows-only.

Water in LE3 will be done using CSG solids, so you can create multiple volumes of water.

Your card should support occlusion. It will also say so at the beginning of the program .log file. You can turn on "extra statistics" in Options>Display. This will show the number of polygons drawn, so you can see it change. I just created a box car and hid behind it, and I could see the polys rendered decrease.

I just didn't think it was that relevant.

You're aware this is supported now?

I get some different results with the ATI 3870 in the machine I am on now. What GPU do you have? The performance seems very slow for such a simple scene, which makes me think it might be a SM3 card with no support for occlusion queries?

I can't guarantee a date it will be ready by, so I would not make any commercial decisions based on this. I wanted to see how much interest there is in this sort of thing, and apparently there is a lot.

The water plane uses occlusion culling. If the waterplane is hidden behind terrain or anything else, the reflection won't be drawn.

That's not a bad idea, but I don't have time to devise a bunch of rules right now. This is more just me saying "This is something we want to try, and if you're interested I'll try to help your game be successful".

You just render the shadow caster to a color texture and draw all brushes it intersects, with the texture coordinates calculated from the shadow rendering position and angle. It's basically primitive forward shadow mapping, with no depth information.

I would just make an LE2 game and then I will see about getting it to work with LE3, with different kinds of input. I think it will be easier if people start coming up with ideas now, rather than waiting until it's completely ready and then having a long delay before anyone has a game.

Yes, that's easy to do. Remember, I am interested in Lua. It's a lot easier to publish than messing with Xcode/Visual Studio/Eclipse.

LE1 had real-time projected shadows, basically a forerunner to shadow maps. They'll be that Half-Life 2 style of shadows.

If you have the ability to produce simple mobile-type games in Lua with LE2, I am interested in porting these to LE3 as soon as possible. A Lua program in LE2 will work in LE3 with a minimal amount of changes, and will be the easiest to publish for both iOS and Android. If you're interested in this, post about your game on the forum and keep us updated. There's no pressure, we're just developing our mobile strategy, and if this is something you are interested in I would like to work with you to get your games out.

I have it set to $0.05 per transaction. So if you sell an item for $0.99, your account credit is 0.99 * 0.7 - 0.05 = $0.64. Obviously, as item price increases, the fixed cost of transactions lessons as a percentage of the total. $0.05 of a $0.99 transaction is more than 5%, but on a $20 transaction it's a negligible amount. The fixed transaction cost is something we must pass on to you, or we will actually lose money on $0.99 transactions. If we are able to negotiate a better rate in the future we can lower this fee for you. I don't know whether model packs or small individual items will sell better. We'll leave that to the free market to decide.

If you set an item's price to $20 you will get $14 every time a sale occurs, minus the per-transaction cost. A range of possible values for this is specified in the merchant agreement (It's something like $0.00 to $0.40, and may be adjusted as our transaction costs change). This is basically just so $0.99 items don't end up being a negative balance for us, since we pay a per-transaction fee. Fortunately, the cost of transactions on our merchant account is much lower than what you would get with an online payment system.