[God Rays ?]

That looks amazing shadmar! You should put it in the Workshop and bump off all the recent comment spammers there! XD

 

No, but seriously, it looks amazing!

[Tutorial poll]

I am getting a lot of feedback from people. Some useful and some that make me annoyed to some extend. (Why do your tutorial not teach how to place blocks. YOUR F*CKING VIDEOS SUCK)

 

People need to be more appreciative! You're generously spending your own time to help others by making these tutorials! On top of that, they are excellent (or at least the ones I've seen). Thank you for the tutorials you've make and continue to make and for setting up this poll!

[Leadworks app not responding]

Personally, I also think it would be good if the engine just loaded things as needed because the load times can be extremely long.

[Can I sell games made with Leadwerks on Steam Store?]

It will have to become official feature incorporated in the engine like do other 3D engines.

Until then, no one using LE3 Steam edition will be able to publish anything.

 

That's not true at all! While I agree this should be an official feature for all versions, there are ways to publish without it. First of all, you don't need protection if your project includes assets that can be freely distributed (such as public domain stuff or stuff you make) and you are fine with users having access to that stuff. Second of all, there are tools out there that specialize in asset protection such as Smart Packer Pro.

[Seeking character artists]

That may be true, but I also think in the long run, if you look at what Unity was able to do, you'll see that a large share of their business comes from their asset store. If you give asset developers more of a cut of the profit initially than Unity does, it might actually be beneficial financially for Leadwerks. I know you already have connections with Arteria3D, and a bunch of other sellers go on the promotions forum, so that might not be a bad place to start if you tried this.

[Lua Execution Order]

Well on the backend, how are the scripts run? Surely there is a list of scripts that are iterated through right? Or are they handled on different threads?

[some suggestions]

Hi ArtistDesigner, welcome to the forums!

 

You may want to take a look at this and vote for the features you want if you haven't because a lot of what you suggested are already listed:

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/10381-requested-features-and-improvements/

 

The light intensity and the shortcuts sound like good ideas though! I'm not really sure how useful UV mapped physics would be (or even what that means), because right now you can apply a force on the surface of a mesh.

[Calling SetPosition() expensive?]

I think I might be confused also, but if you are moving the terrain with the camera, then what is the purpose of mesh patches? I get that you want certain parts of the terrain to be more detailed that others, but this sort of defeats that purpose.

 

Could you maybe post a screenshot?

[Vibrating player]

This is what is probably going on. You are grabbing the entity's rotation before the next physics update. Physics I think is run on a separate thread, so by forcing VSync(), you are allowing more time for the physics to update, but this may not always be the case.

 

You'll probably get better results if you put your methods in the UpdatePhysics function. However, I think you'll need to place this script onto an entity because I don't think that the App "class" has it, but I could be wrong.

[Lua Execution Order]

Quick question, what is the execution order of Lua scripts? For example, if I have a scene with 3 entities with Lua scripts, is the Lua script of the entity that is listed first always called first?

 

I apologize if this is a repeated question since this sounds pretty basic, I tried searching but I couldn't find anything

[Square Root Function]

That's a good point Naughty Alien, because from a machine standpoint, a Taylor series is usually used to compute more complex mathematical functions (not too sure about square root, but I would guess so).

 

Would it be much slower for Lua? I would suspect that since it is a built-in Lua function, the interpretation would call the machine code for computing a square root. I feel that the interpretation overhead wouldn't come close to the calculation time. I might be wrong about this though, I just like to learn about these things!

[CSG tools when ?]

Actually, wburton72, there can be things wrong with using external programs. For example, CSG brushes can improve performance (by taking advantage of instances) and help relieve physics issues generated by polymeshes. Also, CSG modelling is arguably quicker and easier for creating environments on the fly since you see the results instantly.

 

Don't get me wrong, using external programs like you suggested are great in many situations, but so is CSG. That's why there is a demand for it.

[Easy Character Creation Tutorial]

Thanks Ma-Shell! I'll have to read that link and see if I can do it with the MakeHuman plugin.

[Easy Character Creation Tutorial]

Ok, after talking to Haydenmango, I found that using these export controls cause the animation issues, so don't use them.

[Easy Character Creation Tutorial]

Actually, I don't use either of those two options. Does it animate well in Blender?

[Easy Character Creation Tutorial]

Yeah sorry about that TattieBoJangle, I wish I had one too!

 

Haydenmango, are you setting the animation frame when you update the game? For example, in Lua there is a command called SetAnimationFrame() that you need to use in one of the update loops. I got tripped up by this two the first time I animated because I thought animation was automatic. The argument for SetAnimationFrame() should be a time variable or something like that so that the frame changes (if the argument is a float, then the bone positions interpolate, which is useful as well). Tell me if this works, if it doesn't then I'll see what I did to get it to work that's different from what you did.

 

Also, the clothes shouldn't matter, I got my character to work with a bunch of extra stuff. As long as the materials have an animation shader, it should work fine.

[Easy Character Creation Tutorial]

Nice Tutorial do you happen to have a script where all i have to do is add the animation frames in like 44-65 ect as i have a load of characters i want to bring over to leadwerks.

 

What do you mean by this? The tutorial only goes over how to use MakeHuman and CMU animations. I don't think it would work with other characters (maybe I'm wrong though). Combining animations is something that I know how to do only with bvh files, as other file formats become more complicated. If you want to select a certain amount of animation frames, the BVH Hacker tool allows you to do this.

[Easy Character Creation Tutorial]

Hi everyone! Just wanted to share a video tutorial I made! Sorry about the video quality, I'm really bad at making videos, better stick to game development . I hope it's useful!

 

 

Notes:

-In the Lua script for the animated model, you MUST use SetAnimationFrame(), as the model for some reason doesn't automatically animate.

[Atlas Texturing, Draw Calls, and Performance]

What's considered identical? For example, if an object has the same mdl and mat files, is it identical another object or are there other variables that come into play?

[Atlas Texturing, Draw Calls, and Performance]

Thanks for the explanation. Anyway, I guess that would make sense since Unity also has a big mobile department. I guess I'll probably concentrate less on atlassing, but as Flexman said, for smaller objects I suppose it would be good just to reduce the number of draw calls.

[Enemy Ai and melee weapons?]

Well, it's a bit difficult for me to point you in the right direction because I don't know where exactly you are stuck.

 

However, Aggror makes great tutorials, and one of them deals with setting up a simple AI that you might find useful:

 

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=215796090

 

I terms of a melee system though, there are various ways to approach this, some more trivial than others. I would recommend just treating the melee weapon as a gun, and then just check the distance of the raycast (should already be in the FPSPlayer.lua code) and if it's less than a certain distance, register a hit.

[Vote: Requested Features and Improvements]

Thanks gamecreator for creating this! I hope there is a very big turnout!

[Atlas Texturing, Draw Calls, and Performance]

Thanks for the link gamecreator! What I was really wondering wasn't so much about megatextures as it was about using many small textures in one big texture. What I mean is that if you have a few small props with individual UVs and separate textures, then I think you would get better performance if you combine them into one texture. If you Google search "atlas textures" you should see what I'm talking about.

[Atlas Texturing, Draw Calls, and Performance]

So I was reading a something from a post on one of Unity's forums (I'm not interested in the engine, but some of the discussions there are helpful), and atlas texturing seems to be a big thing there. I had no idea that one large texture that combined multiple small textures could improve performance substantially.

 

Anyway, how does Leadwerks draw textures under the hood? Does it go through all draw calls like Unity (and thus atlas texturing is important)? Also, are textures dynamically freed when the last instance of a material is hidden from view?

 

Thanks in advance for any feedback! I'm trying to determine how to best achieve certain levels of performance in the long run.

[Requested Features and Improvements]

I think, this would be the root of all evil. You would have to check all strings from the code, because you can also load assets by code. Also what about assets that aren't even specified at compile-time? You can dynamically modify those strings, like e.g. in a LOD-system where you would e.g. name one level of a model barrel1.mdl and the other LOD-levels would just increase the number, like barrel2.mdl, barrel3.mdl etc. and the code would just take the model name and increase/decrease the number. This would not even be possible to be detectable.

 

I think at that point, Leadwerks would only be responsible for anything either loaded in the editor or static names through code (or both). I think a better design would be to require that the dynamically loaded objects (such as barrel1.mdl, barrel2.mdl, etc.) be added manually since there is no way to predicting this. Also, on a related note, I'm not a huge fan of the editor loading everything each time you start up. My start ups take a while, but I like keeping assets on hand in the menu and only loaded when needed.