Scott Richmond
-
Posts
422 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Blogs
Forums
Store
Gallery
Videos
Posts posted by Scott Richmond
-
-
Windows 8 is actually really nice and is fine for power users as well. I've had it installed for the past week and there are a lot of noticable core improvements in it. I don't use the Metro interface as pictured in the original post. You jump into the desktop and its business as usual. No start button is actually really good since I NEVER use it. Windows Key + F opens up Metro for instant app searching. So you just hit that key combo, type a few letters, hit enter, and your back to desktop with your app loading up. Its clean and fast.
I see little reason not to upgrade from Win7.
-
Agreed Brent. I don't have too much more to add to that.
-
Since popular technology is moving backwards, this makes perfect sense.
How so Josh?
-
LE2 being obsolete is context sensitive - It is obsolete for me specifically because my current project requires texture arrays which are only supported in openGL 3+. This is something LE2 doesn't support and never will.
Apart from that I think we can safely conclude that LE2 is no longer in active development - What you see now is exactly what you'll ever get. No more no less.
As LE3D hasn't come out yet I'd say LE2 is immanently obsolete. When LE3D does come I see no reason why one would buy LE2 as LE3D is a natural and logical progression. That to me is the definition of obsolete.
I think it is important to note however that obsolete doesn't necessarily mean its no longer useful. Depending on ones needs it will still serve its purpose for a long time to come. My only concern there is that I get the feeling Josh intends to phase out LE2 in totality - Documentation is a bit broken for one, and I don't believe he intends to ever resolve that.
-
Chasing features is the worst thing I could do. It consumes an enormous amount of resources, increases the complexity of the system with each thing you add, attracts the most unrealistic dreamers, and you will never satisfy who you are trying to satisfy because their tastes change each week. With Leadwerks3D I am focusing completely on the user experience and the ability to create gameplay. The entire focus is on the core user experience and facilitating the production of games, since that is where most people have trouble, in every system I have ever seen.
You get severely diminishing returns as you add more and more abstract features, and if the core experience isn't easy and simple, you can never go back and "fix" it without starting from scratch. I am betting that a good core experience with excellent documentation will win based on what I have seen over the years.
I can't really argue with any of the above - I was never expecting LE2 to keep getting new features as it's scope was never as wide as that of UDK/Unity. However for LE3D I would worry that the product would fall behind again in ~2 years without any new major features, so I'm hoping you plan to continue to add to it.
It really depends on where you want LE3D to go I suppose - If you want to be among the market leaders then you will need to compete with their feature-sets. You can win that competition by first creating an amazing user experience and building upon that in an agile way. It sounds like that is what you're planning, however I'm unsure where you plan to take LE3D after release. The whole engine sounds very abstracted so I'm guessing it would be a fairly modular experience to add more features.
-
There is no question of whether the business model LE employs is good or bad - Paying $200 upfront once is actually the cheapest and most economical option there is. The problem is that somewhere like 70% of small businesses in general fail in the first 2 years. I'm sure the stats are even worse in the game industry because it really is just so hard to finish a full game let alone one that will sell.
So a business model that requires you to pay upfront is a real tough sell in this industry. Your engine has to be one of the leaders in the market otherwise I don't see how it could work for the engine developer or the indie dev (No community, etc). I believe LE2 was in that position some time ago, however I just could not recommend it to anyone these days. Its too old, too many missing features, etc. I believe Josh realized that way ahead of the curve too - Which is why its being sunset and we're going to see LE3 shortly.
-
OMG! $200..... the pain... What you want it upfront?? X| oh no I'm not going to eat for a month now.
Someone save me.... I don't think I can handle the the once of ever $200 fee which is the price to pay for royalty fee... Unreal and Unity could take millions off me if I'm successful but Oh $200 for life is way too much.
nah I'm done with this thread.
When you're a indie developer whose just finished their degree with no job and want to create a game full time over the next 6 months every dollar counts. Not only is $200 upfront for an engine you've likely never used before a lot, its also currently a waste of money in my opinion - LE2 just doesn't cut it as compared to other engines in the market at this moment in time. That said I am eagerly awaiting LE3.
Unity is somewhere around $3000 for the real thing and Unreal has been free since the beginning of time. That's how Red Orchestra came about. (And Counterstrike, with the Half-Life engine.) They changed the terms a bit and rebranded it, but it's the same situation that's always been.
Unity is somewhere around $3000 when you make $100,000, which I think you can agree is nothing and well worth it at that point. Also Unreal was never free until UDK. Until UDK you were making a mod. And MAYBE you'd get picked up by the engine developer to commercialize the game. Like a total of 5 mods got that opportunity back in those days.
-
$200 is extremely expensive when the top 2 engines available right now (UDK, Unity) are both FREE. Both engines are much better than LE2 in almost every way. Any indie dev would need an extremely good reason to drop $200 up front for LE2 when they can go use UDK or Unity completely for free until their product is successful enough to start paying royalties. At which point, as a company, you might re-evaluate your engine choice to a more economical one which may include LE3.
LE2 is actively being sunset by Josh with the imminent release of LE3. So I'm not surprised LE2 is beginning to get bad reviews - $200 is a lot to ask for what is now truthfully an inferior product within the marketplace.
-
Just don't do it. Its common knowledge that DRM does nothing to help sales these days. You're much better off spending the time you would otherwise perform integrating DRM on thoughtful marketing and community interaction.
-
That said, LE2 is really is extremely far behind the modern day competition these days. That itself shouldn't garner negative reviews. But I think people expect a lot more from an engine these days, especially one that asks for $200 upfront.
-
Can I somehow disable culling or improve this specific case then?
Yes, you can:
Framework fw(CREATENOW); fw.main.world.SetCullRange(20.0F, 250.0F, 500.0F); // Near, Medium and Far view ranges for(int x = 0; x < 100; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < 100; y++) { for(int z = 0; z < 1; z++) { Model *model = new Model(); model->Load("abstract::oildrum.gmf"); model->SetViewRange(VIEWRANGE_NEAR, RECURSIVE); model->Move(x, y, z); } } }That'll spawn 10,000 oildrums and only render ones 20 meters around the camera. Seems to work fairly well for me.
-
1
-
-
Occlusion Culling: http://www.leadwerks.com/wiki/index.php?title=OcclusionCulling
Its a pity the forum wiped because I sorted all this out in a thread once. Pretty sure the idea was that you group models together (model.group(parentmodel)? ) and then turn on OC for the group itself. What this would do its cut down on the number of objects OC had to iterate over massively.
-
You should also consider grouping models into 'cells' of say 16x16 tiles. I notice your cull time is the same as it takes to render. It will probably increase the number of things its rendering but reduce the time it takes to iterate and cull entities. As your map scales or you include more models this might be a good options.
Its a test and see what happens sort of thing.
-
If he implements the show/hide functionality using AABB maths then size doesn't matter. It should scale to infinity.
-
Leadwerks already implements a really nice culling algorithm with octrees. Unfortunately it just doesn't seem to scale well with huge numbers of objects. The simplest fix is to just disable it and write your own one using AABB.
-
Don't loop. You'll need to keep track of whats entering and leaving your area. The most simple way to do this is:
- Place all viewable tiles into list 'prevTiles'.
- If player position changed,
-- Place the new set of tiles into list 'currentTiles'
-- Compare the 2 lists: prevTiles - currentTiles = newTiles; currentTiles - prevTiles = oldTiles;
-- Hide oldTiles
-- Unhide newTiles
That ways is really hacky, but its 'easiest'. There will be a nice way to do it mathematically with AABB 2D box comparisons or something like that.
As for OC groups, do some searching on the forum. I swear I even started a thread on it awhile back. I think these days all you need to do is use general model groups.
-
Hey Rick. I recently went through the exact same situation. Your FPS is being eaten up by Occlusion Culling and there are two ways to fix it:
1. Know when tiles are entering and leaving your field of view and hide/unhide all models on those tiles.
2. You can effectively disable OC by putting ALL your models into 1 OC group.
-
Woah slow down there turbo. If you've recently bought LE2 and still don't appear to have full access to the forums then message Josh directly for help. He should be able to sort you out pretty quickly, and then you can get to coding.
-
Ivy
in Programming
You should be able to get decent performance with instancing. You'll just need to make sure you disable/group occlusion culling as it'll take up a lot of time, more than it would to just render.
-
Fair point Josh. Personally I think you should just directly contact those devs you see have potential and ask them to write an article on it that you can place on Leadwerks. How are we meant to elect candidates if, just like you say, they don't pop their heads up here often?
-
Wow really nice work! Any more information available?
-
Projects in an advanced state of development already have their own web pages, where they try to gather and build their own community around..
I think it would benefit the smaller/beginning projects more, since this site is probably visited mostly by game developers, it would help in gathering some input, help, etc, maybe even new team members.. And I think it's more relevant to them/us anyway, the end user is mainly interested in the release date, pricing and future plans.. It might not necessarily make your product look as awesome to the casual visitor though, so I think I know where you're coming from..
He has a good point. To me this idea currently sounds like you want to increase visibility and SEO rankings of Leadwerks more than anything. There is nothing really wrong with that but honestly I see no reason why a developer would entertain the idea of fragmenting their community and project into what they have on their website and what you're trying to offer as a service here. If were you I would focus on some ideas around helping developers and in return getting extensive blog posts and/or open source demos of parts of their game.
The UDK engine has done that to great affect - There are some really nice tutorials and guides from professional indie developers who've used UDK and gone on to finish a commercial product. Some, like Dungeon Defenders, actually have a fully functional open source demo produced during earlier phases of development.
-
Most companies will include provisions in your employment contract that stipulates that any ideas, designs, products created that could impact an industry your employer participates are their IP, and not yours. That's standard.
It is of course something one could have a legal battle over and succeed under the right circumstances. But most will realize that doing so would very likely burn way too many bridges to be worthwhile.
-
That's a good point. LordHippo - Consider writing an in-depth technical blog post about the shader and only release snippets to explain the core improvements?
Best visual quality
in Tech Talk
Posted
I voted for BF3. The game has some amazing shaders and the visual FEEL of the game really locks it in for me, as opposed to postcard visuals some of the other games here provide.