[iOS 6 Blues]

The sad thing is, the Apple fans don't care about critics and facts, they just demand that every app should work fine. So far S2 has worked very well for me, very fast FPS with realtime shadows and hundreds of drawcalls. The mobile business is getting like the PC business, there are the GeForce 8800 phones (old, but highend), and there are the Intel GMA phones.

[Not So Fast]

Of course, if the real file name does not matter to the user, it can be anything. But maybe sometimes some debugging is needed, and then a human-readable filename hint would help a lot?

[Not So Fast]

Extension is just a part seperated by any character. Nowhere it is said you should use "." as extension seperator, but you could use as well "-" or ":", etc....

So "goblin2_tex", "goblin2#tex" or "goblin2@tex" should work?

[Not So Fast]

Sounds good.

[Left 2 Do]

It was really just a youtube video, he never released the source code.

[Left 2 Do]

I was hoping it could help with destructible physics objects, but maybe it can be done manually also, like Paul did with his wood logs.

[Left 2 Do]

If you have brush rendering batches in Editor, does it mean the engine does not have them, i.e. does the engine not have dynamic brush commands, like LE 1.0 did? It had commands like SliceBrush(brush,plane,newbrush1,newbrush2).

[Rewerking the Asset Class -or- Back that Asset Up]

Since there is no "new" needed, there should be also no "delete" needed. The worst would be if you mix "new" and "delete" with ".Create()" and ".Release()". But since ".Create()" and ".Release()" can have much better error checks, and it looks also much more intuitive than "new" and "delete".

 

I don't want to make a "new" texture, but just load my old texture from disk. Also I don't want to "delete" my texture from disk, but just unload/release it from memory

 

After all LE3 is an 3D Engine, not a C++ programming language, and it should have context related commands, not C++ commands. And by using engine commands only, all the C++/C#/Java/Lua/etc... game source code would be indentical. You can use whatever language you like, and it's exactly the same source code! That's what I call cross-language compatibility

[Rewerking the Asset Class -or- Back that Asset Up]

I prefer that every definition, type, function, class and method are tailor made for the engine. That's how professional libraries do it too, and rarely depend on C++'s native functions and methods. In Qt it's actually done a bit clumsy, and it's kinda annoying that you can't use std::string with Qt, but you have to use QString. So, keep your own classes and methods still compatible with STL classes.

[Lua delta time milliseconds style]

Yesterday I needed again an accurate nanosecond timer in C++, so I found my old post in the Forums which had this code. It works on all platforms and doesn't need Boost:

 

#include <sys/time.h>

#include <stdio.h>

 

long timeGetTime();

long system_starttime=timeGetTime();

long timeGetTime()

{

struct timeval start;

long mtime;

gettimeofday(&start, NULL);

mtime = (1000*start.tv_sec + start.tv_usec/1000.0) + 0.5 - system_starttime;

return mtime;

}

[How to be a great programmer (or whatever)]

If that's the case, I don't smoke so I should get 10% off of LE3! I'll pass a physical if that'll help get more % off.

That's a common misconception of non-smokers. In real, the smoking breaks can often relax the mind and suddenly you find the solution to some difficult problems. Besides, non-smokers don't need so much money, since they don't smoke, so smokers should get more salary, because they have better ideas and use the cigarattes as efficient working tools. And finally, smokers also die younger, so they don't waste so much taxes for retirement, so they should have to pay less taxes than non-smokers.

[How to be a great programmer (or whatever)]

Also avoid energy drinks, they are very bad for teeth. Beer gives a lot of energy and keeps you awake until 6am if needed.

[Leadwerks 3 begins closed beta test]

Why didn't I get beta invitation, I even bought the source version, and I have a Galaxy S2 to test it too!

 

Oh well, I guess I will beta test it when it comes out then, like always. Testing is my speciality, I test everything, over and over again.

[The path to becoming a Visual Studios 2010 "Expert"]

Visual Studio 2012 is also out. I would either use 6, 2008 or 2012, don't see a point in 2010 anymore.

[One of the weirdest bugs of my life]

In C++ one should always use their own typedefs for all types, because the core types may vary between OS and different C++ compilers. Sometimes the dynamic behaviour is also wanted, and then you should use the native types.

[One of the weirdest bugs of my life]

Maybe your Mac has a 64-bit OS, and you are still using a 32-bit Windows?

I am using 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux, so I hope LE3 will work with them too.

[Preparing C++ Projects]

I think it's a good idea to make a game with LE3 before releasing LE3, because that way you can really test that it has no bugs or lacks features which prevent making games with it.

[Building Deployable Projects]

Many users don't even want to install the VS redistributable. I have some friends who refuse to install it. In that case you can still create a folder and include the VS redistributable as pre-packaged with your game, so there is no need to install it. Which is much cleaner IMHO, since it doesn't clutter your registry settings and program list. Even better is of course to use MinGW and create a single exe game, which is not possible with VS (it was only possible in VS6).

[Lua Interpreter on OSX]

GLFW has both Cocoa and Carbon source code (7 files for each), and it supports OpenGL 3.2 contexts on OS X Lion. But if you got it working, then you probably don't need it anymore. Since the source code of GLFW is so tiny, you might find some useful code chunks in it though, just for reference.

[Lua Interpreter on OSX]

Take a look at GLFW, it's a very very small library (only 20 C++ files) which gives the basic function to create a OpenGL window on all platforms.

http://www.glfw.org/

[Visual Studio]

Actually I think that Win7 64-bit is faster than Win7 32-bit, especially if you have 16GB RAM. It will affect many things when you have enough RAM and 64-bit, and considering that 64-bit gives more CPU registers (and other CPU benefits) will add even more to the speed boost over 32-bit. It might be around 3% slower than XP, or even faster than XP, especially if you use the Windows 2000 theme and disable all services

[Visual Studio]

What do you think? Should we make the move to 2012, 2010, or stick with 2008?

We should move to CodeBlocks and MinGW.

It should be possible to use Leadwerks 3 like a complete game development environment on all platforms, and Visual Studio doesn't work on Linux or Mac. CodeBlocks works on all platforms and gives the same pipeline under each OS.

[An Opportunity to Revolutionize Web Presentation]

I tried three3d.js, but it's a bit slow when you add physics to it, because after all it can only use the speed of javascript to process physics. And a single exe file is much easier to run than to install a WebGL capable browser, or some web browser plugin.

[2 Leadwerks vs BlitzResearch - Unique But similar directions]

I have made already a Monkey target for LE2, and it can be done for LE3 also. With LE3 you then have different Monkey targets like "LE3 Windows", "LE3 Android", "LE3 iPhone", etc....

[Amazing Tools]

I am toying with the idea of allowing physics at any stage in the hierarchy, in which case the parent motion would get ignored by the child.

I hope it can be disabled to ignore the child, because I would really like that if someone pulls on an arm, the whole body would follow the movement.

There shouldn't be a problem when multiple force sources affect a body, because naturally all the forces just add/substract on the body.