[Moving forward with Leadwerks Engine 2.4 and Leadwerks 3.0]

i don't think it's possible to do a project of this scale without funding. but it will go a lot smoother if i lay some ground work first

[Moving forward with Leadwerks Engine 2.4 and Leadwerks 3.0]

Version 2.4 is a free upgrade from 2.32.

 

My goal is to reduce risk before external funding and additional programmers are added into the mix. It's like the difference between the people who experienced the teething problems of ~2.22 and the developers who joined after the much more stable version 2.31. It's easiest to add people to an already establish structure, where they each have their own subsystem to work on.

 

My estimates for porting the source to C++ have ranged from 6 weeks to 9 months. I have no idea how much effort it will be. I could estimate it, but any arbitrary number would be as valid as another. Therefore I think it is important for me to make some headway on this myself before involving anyone else.

[Leadwerks Blog Post 09: The Beginning of the End]

Some of these assets will be available for use with Leadwerks on the main site. I am setting up a store for content packs.

[Leadwerks Blog Post 09: The Beginning of the End]

It's interesting that this scene is unplayable without LOD models, but runs fine with LOD.

[The Zone video (take 1)]

You can thanks Rich DiGiovanni for those. I have a whole set of train cars, but haven't found a use for them until now. I'll need to clean them up and offer them in the store.

[OnLive Lives]

I don't mind the lack of ownership so much, but they are still charging for the service as if you are buying something. That doesn't make sense. What if you had to pay a fee to "turn on" every TV show you wanted to watch? How many shows would you end up watching? Probably not many. You just wouldn't bother.

 

How many games do I expect to buy in the next year? Unless I have to get anything specifically for research, maybe 1-2. And they will probably be on sale on Steam. So my expected spending on games over the next 12 months is probably about $60. If I could get a wide selection of streaming games, I would be willing to pay $29.99 each month for that. My expenditures then rise to $360 for the next year. That's six times what I would spend on individual games. Getting the customer to spend more on products would be an advantage for them. The per-game fee inhibits purchases.

 

What they have is a cable service for games, but they are selling it with an old outdated business model. They should think of it more as interactive cable television.

[OnLive Lives]

They don't need publishers. They only need game developers.

 

I think it would have the potential to be a lot more profitable for developers. Currently, game development is a game of working two years and investing millions of dollars in a product, and then either recovering or going bankrupt in the first two weeks after release. Long-term recurring revenue streams are much better. Developers could spend their time adding new levels and features to an existing game, instead of going back to the drawing board every two years they don't go bankrupt.

 

Because the incentives would be to create games with high replay value, quality would increase. I can't imagine a more direct way to reward good games than to pay the developer based on how much people play it.

[The Zone Blog 08: Fire in the hole!]

Hilarious and inspiring, at the same time.

 

The sickle and hammer is one of the focal centerpieces that really ties the whole thing together. Signs of former industrial might, now decayed. What mysteries lie in the ruins of the zone?

 

I wonder if we can get GSC to use Leadwerks 3.0 for STALKER 2? Wouldn't that be cool?

[Drivers again]

Sounds like your Apache material may have an invalid shader definition, like using the diffuse texture vertex shader with the diffuse+bumpmap fragment shader.

 

I strongly recommend you have an ATI card for testing because they are more strict with the requirements. NVidia cards tend to silently fail if a problem exists, while ATI cards let you know immediately something is wrong.

[Mipmaps caution light. Check your drivers, sir!]

There are about three different ways of generating mipmaps on the GPU, and they all have their own individual driver issues. This is one the reasons I opted to support DDS textures exclusively, with their pre-calculated mipmaps. I recommend calculating your mipmaps on the CPU because I think the GPU-based methods are unreliable.

[Bug-fix week begins!]

You're probably right about that.

[Hara forests]

Is the second image a photo or an in-game shot?

[Some hints of 3.0]

I think we can satisfy both groups. By providing more high-level structure, we can help programmers to make scripts and programs that the rest of the community can use.

[Some hints of 3.0]

What kind of term do we have think about? a year from now or longer/sooner?

Once we are able to start in earnest, I will have a better answer than that. There's a lot of groundwork to prepare.

[The Rumors of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated]

Pretty cool! Reminds me of a derelict asylum I visited a few months back.

How long were you in for?

 

If you use the near view distance setting, all these little objects will cost the renderer nothing when the camera is far enough away.

[Persistence]

I don't think we'll need to go above 2.40, and that's with minor updates.

[Firefox Explorer]

The ribbon? Lots of people hate the ribbon.

[Everything in its place]

Thanks for the Filezilla tip. This uses a classic XP interface and is nice and simple. I'm trying to migrate to free software so I know how to use it in case I have to get a lot more machines.

[Avionics and cockpit update]

No program should overheat the GPU, ever. The driver should be self-limiting so that the card never gets too hot.

 

I experienced this with some drivers with an nVidia GEForce 9800 GTX. If it continues to be a problem, using Flip(1) can prevent this, but it's really a problem with the driver, and should not be happening.

 

If this does occur, you will know it because the screen will go black and a notification will appear in the system tray saying that the display driver crashed.

[Sunrise, sunset]

I'd like to see a working demo.

[Sunrise, sunset]

The Simul demo just produces a black screen.

[Don't you just hate it when that happens ...]

Are the player and bugs both extended from a root "actor" class?

[Lua Debugging]

I haven't done anything to that, but the highlighted words are all contained in ui/commands.txt.

[Lua Debugging]

I'd prefer to stick with plain Lua for now until we are certain everything is stable. But yeah, we'll add it eventually, with an option to toggle the compiled code on and off.

[Lua Debugging]

My bad, it's LuaJIT version 2.0.0, and the 64-bit version is up to 102 times faster.