Josh

Intellectual property is certainly a convention like a patent or trademark is, and not the same as a physical object. However, if you want a market for software to exist, it is necessary to adhere to and enforce this convention.

Directional lights render the scene 16 times??? The directional light texture used is twice the dimensions of the shadowmap size you specify, so the multiplier would be four.

No, this was fixed last week and uploaded.

Not only does piracy result in a loss of potential sales, it also increases my time spent supporting the product, because pirates tend to be some of the stupidest users.

Where are you getting ten from?

There is no reason I know of that Vista should not be able to run 3DWS.

Your performance actually seems pretty good considering the card. You're rendering about 500,000 trees at 30 FPS with dynamic lighting on a GEForce 7? How is that bad? I can't really comment on the load times. It doesn't make sense to me why that would be slow. Perhaps the card has a low memory bandwidth, in which case the best thing would be to lower the texture quality and reload the scene. This is a sort of related topic, although I don't think multithreading would do anything for your performance on this machine: http://blitzmax.com/...php?topic=88306

4 bytes per pixel x 4096 x 4096 x 6 / 1024 / 1024 = 384 mb.

A 4096 sized shadow map on a point light will use 384 mb of video memory.

That's easy. Render straight to the back buffer with no lighting. It will look terrible, but it will be fast. I'd be interested in hearing some definite framerates on your machine for the editor with one of the included scenes opened, at the default window size.

I uploaded a slightly modified version of hooks.lua.

That blog is just speculation, and some of the things he says are very incorrect. For example, he is suggesting the large world was achieved by combining one super low-res heightmap with a high frequency detail heightmap.

The way we are handling the forum now is a big improvement.

I updated the file. It's 21 pages now and growing. So far it covers all aspects of scripting, and next I will write about integrating Lua with other languages.

I am adding to this lesson. It's getting quite long, and talks about all aspects of the engine and Lua.

If you just loaded a model and set the target it would actually work automagically.

I think by "procedural" they probably mean they have a series of connected nodes the artist places, and the engine builds a mesh at runtime, sort of like how ours work.

Let me know if you find any other problems. I am going through the scripts looking for any errors. This is a good practical lesson in the importance of consistency. B)

This should work to set globals in the Lua virtual machine: Function SetScriptObject(name:String,o:Object) Local size:Int=GetStackSize() lua_pushbmaxobject(luastate.L,o) lua_setglobal(luastate.L,name) SetStackSize(size) EndFunction Function GetStackSize:Int() Return lua_gettop(luastate.L) EndFunction Function SetStackSize(size:Int) Local currentsize:Int=GetStackSize() If size<currentsize lua_pop(luastate.L,currentsize-size) EndIf EndFunction

It may be invisible, but it will still be stored in memory and in the lua object table. The class will never get freed either.

I usually like to have a lot of extra checks: function class:CreateObject(model) local object=self.super:CreateObject(model) object.cube=CreateCube() function object:Free() if self.cube~=nil then self.cube:Free() self.cube=nil end self.super:Free() end end Don't forget self.super:Free()!

Yes, just apply a different material. I fixed the math function name thing. It's in the sync folder.

Nope. The terrain shader doesn't use a matrix multiplication, for better speed.

Turn on trilinear filtering and set anistropic filtering to 4.0.

You can do quite a bit to the 2.3 editor with scripts.