Archon

Does this no longer work with the latest SDK?

This is most likely directed towards Josh... but seems like many of you practically work for Leadwerks so you may know, lol: How does minor and major updates work toward the SDK owners? From a previous post it appears that minor version updates were free, while major versions incurred a small fee. Will this be the case for future revisions of the SDK? I am especially curious about the 3.0 update to Leadwerks if I was to purchase the current version (2.32) now.

Yes, I can get to the Wiki. I just wasn't sure if that was the entire API.

The Leadwerks community almost makes buying this product necessary; it seems like something I would like to be part of... But for myself as a professional software engineer - timeis what is important (damn over-time). In the days of high school and college you don't have much choice of utilizing free/cheap software. Now that penny bank isn't so tight, so paying that extra cash for a nice GUI or Networking layer is highly worthwhile. While using third-party software is a possibility, the integration often generates more work and problems. If someone has worked out those issues (such as CEgui), then thats one step closer to ideal. But, if I find a solution that has CEgui (or another) integrated nicely with an editor, well I may very likely open my pocket book to take advantage of doing less work for myself. I also fully believe in focusing on your core features - better to have a few that stand out then a bunch of mediocre capabilities. Products like Ogre take a stance on only being a rendering engine - thus focusing on what they do well. This product states that it is a game engine, so from my perspective those core features include networking and GUI - which seem to be a bit lackluster. Don't get me wrong - the presentation of the product, marketed features (rendering, lighting, etc.), tools, and the community do make this a great product. The less time I have to invest on working on the engine and more on the application - the better. Is the documentation of the API publicly available? I didn't come across it on the Wiki/Support pages.

So, I came across this site from a gamedev.com review - and was pretty impressed with what the website was selling. The evaluation kit worked wonderful so I'm almost sold... Two big-ticket items I noticed the website doesn't really talk about are: GUI and networking support. I do see a few community projects that are creating their own GUI system (luaGUI) - but was really hoping that the engine (or library as some have called it) provided something working out-of-the-box. How much work is entailed to get up a simple GUI. I classify simple as supporting your common controls: button, text, radio buttons, check boxes, slider bars, images, etc. I've come across a forum post talking about the Leadwerks limited networking capabilities. The post mentioned that it could be adequate for up to 64 people - are there any benchmarks or statistics to enforce that? Does the engine provide sample client/server code? I would investigate this myself - but I do not believe the evaluation version gives access to the project creation tool. I did come across the Wiki, but I am hoping there are more built-in capabilities than just "2D Drawing".