xtom

That sounds like a good and fun idea. Maybe we should start a game art thread on a particular focused theme and different people can submit there objects, textures etc. and after a while you would have a free community pack. I'd be happy to try my hand at some basic models like rocks or something.

Yes some terrain packs with different themes would be good. Snow, desert, forest, jungle etc.

Looking good, top screenshot is very nice. Looking forward to the playable prototype.

Yeah I'm going to do some frame rate tests later. Really I would like to see csg performing better because it's just collapsed geometry and not even treated like an entity like the way models are. I would have thought it should be faster but it seems no matter what models are faster in every scenario?

The zombies don't seem to be impacting the fps too much, it's more the buildings are still my fps problem. If I remove all zombies I get average 10/12 fps and if I add 20 zombies I still get about the same 10/12fps. I'm already hiding interior building objects by using the view range setting on the models, lots of them are set to near, but I might have to spread out entry buildings with non-entry buildings or something like that to help more. For example if I walk away from the buildings far away around a mountain the fps goes back up.

It would be good if you could rename the layer names and/or have bigger thumbnails. It's hard to see what each texture is. Or maybe if you hover mouse over the thumbnail it shows a bigger version.

Yeah with some objects like the doors and windows I exported as obj from leadwerks into blender. It's easier for me this way to test and get the size right and then I can add details if I need to. I think my most complex thing I've modeled so far from scratch in blender is the door handles. I was pretty chuffed with them. The map is still very barren at the moment, lots more needs adding but my frame rates are worrying me with what I have already.

Since my last blog update I’ve spent the majority of my game dev time working on my map and in particular the buildings. When I say buildings I mostly mean one in particular which is a house that I’ve been working on for a good while now. The house initially started out as 100% csg but after memory issues in the editor and feedback and advice on the forum I decided to re-do parts of the house as models. This meant I had to use blender more than I would have liked but the good thing is I think I am getting a bit more used to it so I guess the learning experience is good. So now my doors, door frames, windows and light fixtures are all models instead of csg. The advantage with this it seems is that the models are instanced automatically by the leadwerks engine and can be used over and over without increasing memory usage too much. The other advantage is it allows me to set the view range on the different models, something that csg ignores, maybe because it doesn’t need it so much compared to complex models. So for example by setting my ceiling light models to Near they aren’t rendered far away so I am hoping this will help speed up game performance too. I also removed the csg skirting boards along the walls in favour of wall textures with skirting on. The look is just as good but more importantly again it should hopefully provide better performance. In general I’m wrestling a lot with performance as I go because my pc is not high end. Before I renovated the house building a street with 10 of them was giving me about 5fps but I’ve managed to bring this up to about 10fps and I still have some more improvements I can make. Although for every improvement I make I’ll want to also be adding some other stuff in so it might cancel out each other in the long run. Will just have to see how it goes. The floors and walls in my buildings I have left as csg, the advantage I see with this is I can easily apply different textures to the walls and floors in the different buildings to add variety. And I can easily adjust building layouts in the editor if I need to. If I have to convert these to models for performance then I’ll probably wait for a csg to mdl conversion because it would take me ages to re-texture it in blender. Lights I added workable lights/light switches - This was pretty quick and easy to do thanks to the flowgraph which I used for the first time and switching the lights on for the first time was a happy moment. I’m not sure about the lights yet I’ll have to see how they effect performance before I decide on which ones to have. Right now they are all in there for now but are hidden. Doors So the next thing to add was doors which turned out much trickier than the lights. I used the default swingingdoor.lua script but their are so many little things to consider that it took a while to get them working right. And then the zombies wanted to walk through them when closed, which took another while to figure out. Zombies During the steam sale I picked up the zombie pack and the fps pack and I’ve been testing them out. I’ve changed the default ai a bit so there are fast and slow zombies in the game and also they can re-animate (as in come back to life) a number of times after you kill them. So watch your back when you kill one You can run into buildings and close the doors to try and evade them but be careful as they can sometimes muddle doors open, so again watch your back I’m having a blast at the moment now that there is some actual gameplay and managed to scare myself a few times so that’s a good sign. I’ll probably do a dev log video soon but for now I will finish this blog post with some screenshots of a test zombie horde. This actually had very little impact on my frame rate which I was happy to see.

In the script editor highlight some text then click and drag to move it. While still dragging the text press Esc and it crashes the program.

In the swing door collision script I've set it so the monsterai is set to idle mode so he waits at the door instead of walking through it. entity.script:SetMode("idle")

I'm just using the default SwingingDoor.lua on the door model. The good thing about the physics on the door though is that it pushes the player or enemy out of the way when it opens/closes which I like.

The strange thing is before I had buildings and walls with navmesh running right through them and the monster couldn't pass through the walls even though the navmesh passed through. It just kept walking into them which is what I was hoping for with the doors. I'm not sure why it's behaving different. I'll do some experimenting and see if I can make him make him hang around the door instead of walking through it.

I have a problem with monster walking through closed doors. The collision stops it sometimes but then sometimes he just passes right through. I thought maybe the MonsterAI speed was too high so I reduced it from 6 down to 0.7 for a slow walk speed and still he can pass through the door. The door and frame are models and the walls/floor are csg. I thought maybe the collision shape on the door was too thin but it's about the thickness of the 16 csg wall so I'm not sure why it's happening.

Those characters are looking cool.

There's lots of cool post process shaders already available in the workshop so make sure to check them out. It's just a simple drag and drop to add them. A vignette might work well for a cutscene, maybe a little blur, it depends what you want but it's pretty quick and easy to experiment with them.

Holding Alt+Arrow keys (or something similar) to nudge selected objects position 1 grid spacing.

Depends how you want to display the cutscene graphically but I think you could just create your burning town in leadwerks as a map and then position a camera in good position and then add the scrolling text. You could also add some post effect shaders for for extra effects. Then once the text has finished scrolling or the player skips it load the actual level map after it.

So you can set a point light to hidden to turn it off and the icon is still shown in all views. I think it might be good if you could still select it in the views even though it is hidden/off.

For example you want to delete a model or prefab and replace it with different one. By copying position of the old object and pasting position onto the new one it would be quick to move new object into position. Could possibly have similar for rotation and scale.

Don't know but maybe you could make some invisible steps and see if the navmesh follows it. I think I saw something like this in a video. Probably not the best if you have a lot of steep ramps though.

Yep general ideas sound good. I think re-growing trees might be a bit unrealistic as they would take years to grow. Maybe ensure that each tree can give plenty of wood so you don't need to chop down so many. So maybe in 10 chops a pickup log is dropped but the tree is still standing and you can repeat this 10 times or so before the tree disappears. Better for the environment too!

Sounds like 3.5 is going to be awesome I think most new users will just fire the editor up and skip straight passed the help popup and get stuck into playing with it. Then when they get lost they probably go to the forums or search the web for tutorials and videos etc. Then when all else fails, "oh yeah let me have a look at the official help from within the editor". - well that's me anyway I just had a look at the tutorials page and at first glance it looked like there were only 4 tutorials. Maybe have some intro text at the top with instructions to use the category links on the right for more tutorials to be sure people can't miss them.

Looking good. I didn't see any jumping, I think some jumping would add some extra fun to the movement. I wonder do beavers even jump?

On that page it says Display Driver ver. 14.501.1003 under Omega (14.12) but the release dates are 2014. Is it new or old? I'm reluctant to try it. I've had to roll back twice and I hate messing around with drivers too much.

What's the file access limitation? Can you not write to file for eg. save game?