TheConceptBoy

Ok, so could please clear something up for me as now I'm confused.... What in the world is this? https://www.leadwerks.com/5 and What is the difference between this? I'm genuinely confused. I thought Leadwerks was the one being retired to make way to Turbo Engine...

I see. Well in that case, how much of Leadworks functionality is currently in Turbo as of right now? 3D Mesh with Bones, Physics, Audio? What's missing that Leadwerks has?

Oh I'm solely concentrating on C++ actually. It is why leadwerks caught my attention in the first place. Getting started with a C++ 3D priject in Leadwerks is infinitely less complex than in Unreal. That's what appealed to me. I wasn't thrilled on the lua side, however when I found out that the Pro edition had C++ api, that's what sold me on it. How's the documentation for Turbo?

I see. It makes sense from both of our perspectives. No sense in making a game in an engine to become obsolete, especially when the course would come out by the time the engine is nearing the end if it's life cycle. Is there a roadmap available yet for Turbo? Pre-production of a game takes mostly outside the engine, so I don't have to commit to Leadwerks at this stage. When, in the ball park of dates, would you say Turbo would be ready to be stable enough for commercial use? I'd imagine after a certain point the changes to the engine stop being so drastic the that any project made in it would require sever re-writing of it's code?

It seems like current Leadwerks in receiving some pretty big updates still, Multilayer and what not. So should I be comfortable thinking that the next engine you're working on will use the same command set? (Aside from the graphical overhaul, which you've mentioned). You see, here's the deal. While I'm working on the game, I'm also making a record of everything I do. I record the programming, concept art, animation and modeling process. The reason being is that after the game is done, I edit the footage and publish it as a game development course on my platform. Believe it or not, the course is the key component here. Of course the better the game plays, the more appealing the course will be, so it's in my best interest to do a good job. The only problem is that by the time the course will be done, the engine will be pretty much at the end of it's life cycle with Turbo coming out soon after. So how grade-able would you say a Leadwerks project be towards the Turbo Engine?

This is just a feasibility question. Would you say it's possible to make something like this in Leadwerks? What would be your thought process? Mainly talking about the laser cutting part. From my experience I'd probably look at something like a mesh construction when the laser is cutting and swapping out the model of a completed place with a created mesh of a cutout,

Subscriptions make sense. It's a more sustainable model and to be honest, you get continued financial support to keep the project going. You'd have to charge much more for a single time license to keep the doors open on a studio that is developing a product to complete with Unreal and Unity.

I'm just looking in for research. I understand it's just a beta in the works. Is the subscription model going to carry over to the full release or are you planning on a single time fee? Game Maker has a nice one that offers a basic export to Win, Mac and Lunux. And all the console / Web and Mobile exporters are extra.

So is this the engine we're talking about?

Alright then. We'll see how it goes. To be honest, if I do get to the point where I produce something nice that you can use to showcase the engine capabilities, it would be a shame if the showcasing would be of leadwerks instead of the next rendition. Is the rendering core and level editor the same as leadwerks, how compatible would the level files be?

Also any plans for multi-platform delivery?

Well I know so are we talking 2019? or 2020? ish because 3D game development of the size I usually conceive don't get produced in under a year either way.

So With Game Maker Studio, I had a project made in Studio 1.4 that was pretty far into development. When Studio 2 came out, it offered a plethora of new features that would make my level design in game maker much more streamlines. Converting the Studio 1 project to Studio 2 was as simple as importing the project and the engine would go through the code and apply compatibility scripts in places where I used functions which became obsolete in studio 2. With App Game Kit, it was a bit different. App Game Kit on it's own works in Basic, but it also works in C++ as an API. Converting a game I was working on in basic was just a matter of going through the code and converting things like if statements and for loops from a basic syntax to c++ syntax. And all the engine specific functions just had the agk:: namespace in front of it. How difficult would it be to do the same with the next rendition of your engine if I were to start a project now?

Hmm... and here I just bought leadwerks...

Is Turbo going to be a next rendition with an ability to upgrade? For example if I start a project in Leadwerks, can I continue it in Turbo? Otherwise starting a project in leadwerks now, for me would be pretty redundant.

Ow Jesus. I was afraid of that.... Can we get something similar for firing up C++ functions perhaps? @Josh or that 0.0 - 1.0 animation solution starting to sound pretty suitable?

Good day, everyone. I'm trying to get a hang of the animation function set and I'm trying to figure out how to use the endhooks in C++ From what I understand, it's a function that gets triggered once the animation has ended, however there are no example codes in the docs that actually show how that is written. Thank you.

I ended up just writing my own lerp function for the time being: float lerp(float start, float end, float amnt) { return start + amnt * (end - start); }

This line: Math:Lerp(revolver_x, revolver_ir_x, revolver_amnt); In C++ returns a (Identifier is undefined) error https://imgur.com/a/fEcr68R I'm not entirely sure how much of surrounding code you need, this is located in the App:Loop

I think we need to somehow know the relative position that an animation is in, relative to the start or end of an animation. Then we can trigger events based on it. And that's why I would propse the 0.0 to 1.0 float range for start and end of an animation. This way, regardless how fast or slow an animation is, triggering things would always happen on the same place in the animation cycle. Leadwerks already knows what an animation start and end IS, since it has the ability to loop an animation, and for that it needs to be able to track the first and last defined position and something needs to trigger to go back to the first bone position. I feel like a Frame Event is pretty much the same as the main game loop. And we already have that by default.

I know this is an old subject but I wanted to pitch in my 2 cents. I think we do need something like that but @Josh is correct. There's no such thing as Frames with 3D. There are just static bone positions that get blended between. If you have a hand animation move from left to right, It can take 60 proverbial "frames" (like in-game FPS Frames) to blend between one position and another or you could slow play the animation at 50% the speed and now it takes 120 in-game frames. BUT Something like this would still indeed be useful for stuff like, when you need to sync some events with the key positions of an animation. For example without using the term "Frame", Say you have a character running animation, the point when the foot touches the ground, you put a trigger which does 3 things. 1) It plays the Foot Step Sound effect[ 2) It spawns a small dust particle as if the foot is kicking up dust. 3) It spawns a small decal sprite on the floor to make a shoe footprints or Bloody foot print if you stepped in a pool of blood. I would personally find it extremely useful for triggering sound effects. So what if instead of Frames we treat it as a float value? Have 0.0 being the start of an animation and 1.0 being the end. In this sense we are not dealing with any predetermined time formats like frames and if you decide to stretch the animation (By playing it at half the speed in Leadwerks) then techincally all your stuff would still be synced.

Unless I'm getting it wrong and I'm supposed to create a new class that has a function called EndAnimation(string animation) and Leadwerks would detect and trigger that function. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes, that's what I've ended up figuring out. I'm currently trying to figure out how to detect the EndAnimation call of an object in C++ so that I can switch to other stuff once a particular animation is done. I thought it'd be something like if (hands_revolver->EndAnimation("fire")) {} but there's no documentation example for C++ for this as far as I've looked.

To answer my own question: When exporting from Maya, all the animations are stored in one single long time-line. So I have to use the "Extract Sequence" tool in the Leadwerks model viewer to separate them into their own standalone animations.

Working on putting together a gun animation, when I found that Leadwerks has a handy too animation sets tool in it's model viewer. How does one separate the animations in Maya for Leadwerks to detect? This is a bone rigged pair of hands with a weapon. I'm working in Maya. Not sure if I've ever seen an animation set menu in here.