[What are you going to make with LE3?]

I've been using Unity for the past couple of months...and I don't know if I'll even bother with LE3 by the time it hits. :/

 

We'll see.

[Wow! Ouya Android Game Console]

Here most of your retail shops like Target, Walmart, etc are really dropping their space for PC gaming (console gaming is getting more space it seems). I'm betting in a year or so these types of stores won't even carry PC games anymore.

Indeed. Most recently a national retail chain here in Australia called **** Smith completely shut down their video games section. The whole lot - Consoles to PC games.

[Anyone successfully implemented model texturing using vert coloring?]

From what I can see the default LE terain shader uses 16 textures, but you can't use all those for different stuff like rock,grass,snow,sand etc..

 

So basic RGBA blend is used here too.. I would guess with accompanying bump textures, and base color texture.

 

These are the textures fetched in terrain.frag :

 

uniform sampler2D texture0;// texture0
uniform sampler2D texture1;// bumpmap0
uniform sampler2D texture2;// texture1
uniform sampler2D texture3;// bumpmap1
uniform sampler2D texture4;// texture2
uniform sampler2D texture5;// bumpmap2
uniform sampler2D texture6;// texture3
uniform sampler2D texture7;// bumpmap3
uniform sampler2D texture8;// texture4
uniform sampler2D texture9;// bumpmap4
uniform sampler2D texture10;// basetexture
uniform sampler2D texture11;// tilemap
uniform sampler2D texture12;// colormap
uniform sampler2D texture13;// alphatexture
uniform sampler2D texture14;// normaltexture
uniform sampler2D texture15;//heightmap

 

How is it able to use so many textures with RGBA texturing though? Can it be extended further?

[Wow! Ouya Android Game Console]

Not really. If there was a cap to the royalty fee the yes it might be ok. Imagine about the people that would also use a royalty engine. That's 60 percent gross profits gone right off the bat.

Well yes, that IS what you get when the majority of your distribution (steam, Ouya, etc) and game framework (engine of choice) are done for you.

If you want more profit then you need to work harder and DIY these parts of your game or find a company willing to accept a one-time price (Eg Leadwerks).

[Wow! Ouya Android Game Console]

Now this makes perfect sense. I knew that they would have to make money on the back end somewhere. Well in my eyes this is worse than requiring a dev kit license. If you make a successful game. The 30 percent will no doubt cost more than any dev kit out there. It is no different than the free at first, then pay an arm and an a leg game engine.

This business model works perfectly for the mobile eco-system as well as other distribution methods such as steam. For 30% of your profits you get an entire marketplace, hosting for your game, sales system, etc. I think you'll find its very competitive to what is out there right now.

[Wow! Ouya Android Game Console]

Just wanted to note something I think everyone is missing here: Their business model doesn't revolve around making money off of the hardware. This is why they will be able to get away with a $99 price tag on the console - They don't intend to much if any margin on the purchase. The business model resolves around the 30% they get from game and application sales. This is where Ouya differs from the existing consoles.

[LE3D GUI Support]

Right, but the next step is an actual HTML-based GUI. So it's not a complete solution at all, just an extra step that might lead to a solution.

Is it? Looks like a pretty complete solution to me.

I'd interested to understand whether you intend to build a GUI system from scratch yourself or not, as from my limited experience cross-platform GUI frameworks are actually fairly complex and full of many corner cases. Not sure I would be very happy personally if you decided to postpone such a critical feature because you want to develop it yourself your own way, despite how good it may be in the end.

[Anyone successfully implemented model texturing using vert coloring?]

I haven't studied the terrain shaders that comes with LE.

No lesdk on my phone (on vacation) :-)

haha no problems mate. Would love your advise once you're back from vacation though.

[Anyone successfully implemented model texturing using vert coloring?]

It's simple to do RGB plus A for the fourth, but if you need more than 4 it gets complicated since all colors consist of RGB.

You need to have layers of multiple RGBA maps blended with a mask. I don't think you can't have vertexcolors only then.

Ah I thought that was the case. What are my options Shadmar? What do the LE terrain shaders do to achieve 16 texture layers?

What about using UV channels?

[Anyone successfully implemented model texturing using vert coloring?]

Are you trying to make a texture splatting shader from rgba vertex colors for terrain?

More or less exactly that yes Shadmar. However I'll need more than 3 textures (pure R, B and G).

[Anyone successfully implemented model texturing using vert coloring?]

"fragcolor" is what you're looking for.

Thanks mate. I'll do some research around that when I get home. Would love any examples too though.

[Anyone successfully implemented model texturing using vert coloring?]

I appear to have been able to import a model with vertex coloring - The untextured model itself has the colors I specified.

Now I need to work out how to access these colors in a frag shader and apply blends between textures. Any ideas or resources to check out?

[Implementing Leadwerks Vegetation via code?]

So, even if I was using terrain properly, I still cannot use vegetation at all without the editor?

[Implementing Leadwerks Vegetation via code?]

I'm not sure I understand what you think you are doing in that code.

 

You have loaded a model and created a function thats designed to convert a model into a terrain? If this is LEO I guess you just created an instance of a Terrain Class based on a pointer to a loaded model? Maybe you'd like to elaborate?

 

The constructor for Terrain is able to take an instance of Entity. So, I'm assuming here that if I pass it an instance of Model it'll allow me to apply and use some of the terrain features to the model. I think only Josh could tell us whether this sort of thing could work. Or I could just try it.

Any idea how I enable vegetation over a Terrain in C? I suppose I'll just try it and see what happens.

[Implementing Leadwerks Vegetation via code?]

So, I haven't tried this at all but it does compile:

 

Model m;
m.Load("oildrum.gmf");
Terrain t(m);

 

Any reason why this might not work?

[Implementing Leadwerks Vegetation via code?]

Are you saying that the grass in Leadwerks is hardcoded into the terrain entity type and is impossible to deploy anywhere else?

[Anyone successfully implemented model texturing using vert coloring?]

I'm about to attempt to create a simple model in Maya 2013 and texture it using vertex coloring. What I want to do is be able to procedurally texture the model via code and a shader using vertex painting. In Maya I will define the color of the vertex's and then supply the textures in the shader at runtime.

 

For example a 2D plane model:

x = a vertex

x---x---x

| \ | / |

x---x---x

| / | \ |

x---x---x

 

I want each of the verts to have their own color that I can assign a texture to in runtime.

 

In this thread I'd like to ask if anyone has been able to do this successfully from Maya?

 

Any other advice?

[Implementing Leadwerks Vegetation via code?]

I'm currently using models rather than a 'terrain' mesh to make up my various pieces of environment and I'm wondering if anyone can give me any advice on how Leadwerks implements its vegetation system, specifically the grass.

Do I need to add a shader to the mat file of the material I apply to the model? Do I need to maybe generate a 'grass mesh' on top of my models, sort of like a decal?

Any documentation or advice would be appreciated.

[GeForce HDMI with sound?]

This is for your HTPC no doubt?

 

Indeed Windows is fairly limited in this area. If you're interested have a look at Raspberri Pi. Pretty cool stuff.

[GeForce HDMI with sound?]

Graphics cards generally don't come with a dedicated audio out because it comes through HDMI. If this is your first time pushing audio through a GPU then you probably need to jump into the BIOS and enable it, as is sometimes required. Check you've got it as your primary audio out in your OS too. I know NVidia have pretty subpar Linux driver support so consider testing this is Windows if you aren't already.

[.fbx to gmf filesize 1k]

To be honest, I don't know anyone who has bought UU3D who hasn't found it one of the most useful purchases they ever made, and I have yet to find anything that failed to convert using it's gmf converter, where-as I fully agree I have found quite a few in the past that failed using the provided converters.

 

Vertex color is preserved as far as I'm aware using most of the converters and is an export option in UU3D. I have used vertex color successfully in the past on gmf models.

 

In terms of the mat file naming convention, you need to create a mat file for each material referenced in the gmf file with exactly the same name. The gmf material names should reflect those used in your modelling app, but you can open the gmf in a text editor and search on 'material' to confirm.

All perfectly fine Pixel, but I just don't like the idea of having to purchase UU3D as another step in the art pipeline of LE. I understand the argument that one should probably have UU3D as yet another defacto application in game development. I just don't like the situation.

 

Also, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure the GMF file format is not human readable due to the compression?

[.fbx to gmf filesize 1k]

Would you mind reporting a problem if you encounter one? I am not aware of any problems with the FBX to GMF converter. Brad is probably the world's authority on 3D file formats, so there's no reason to hold back.

I suppose I could, next time I come across it. But its still quite a bad pipeline. I still don't really understand how it works in regards to renaming materials - Do I need to set the name of the material in my modelling app to be the same as the .mat file I make for LE? In the past I've had to do a lot of back-n-forth on naming.

At some point in the future I'll be attempting to use vertex painting on my models and then use shaders in LE to texture them appropriately. I worry how well this'll come across in the conversion to gmf.

[.fbx to gmf filesize 1k]

I've found the gmf converters in the LE tools to be complete rubbish over the time I've used this engine. Just recently I spent quite a bit of time trying to convert a few models with mixed results.

Josh I honestly hope you've got the art pipeline sorted in LE3D because I know I've personally had serious issues with gmf conversion on more than one occasion. I really hope we don't all have to continue to buy third party software (UU3D) to support lacklustre conversion tools.

 

In regards to the issue at hand, I've found I've had good results if I play around with the export options in Maya/Blender/3DS. Only export the complete minimum required. Also just try a different export format and use one of the other gmf conversion tools.

Finally, buy UU3D...if you have to.

[Physics in Leadwerks3D]

This sounds like it's in the building blocks of the engine but it doesn't seem very intuitive. Maybe it's just me, but this seems very odd design from the user perspective.

 

Agreed Rick. I suppose it gives more control over what's going on though. Looks like BuildShape() attempts to make a more clean interface for it though.

[Applying Tri-Planar Texturing to a Mesh]

I'm currently prototyping some procedural mesh algorithms and I'd like to apply tri-planar texturing to my meshes. I'm wondering if LE2 has a tri-planar texturing shader available already or whether I need to create my own?

 

If I need to create my own, I'd love some guidance on how I, in C++, apply a shader to my Mesh objects as well as pass textures and the mesh object properties to the shader.

 

Thanks.