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ERKGames

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Everything posted by ERKGames

  1. Great news! We'll check the release as soon as it's available. We really hope that now that you've done a great job implementing the Flowgraph editor, you'll soon start working on realization a particle system. It's actually one of the few things we're currently missing to port our new game project to the Ultra Engine.
  2. ERKGames

    Finishing Touches

    I'm not going to say anything bad right now, please understand my words correctly. BUT it seems to us that your current release strategy is wrong a bit. I don't think it needs to be clarified that an early release cannot be called 1.0 and not have at least minimally functioning modules for developing something not only based on code, but also on GUI and game levels, especially after more than four years of development. Especially considering the emphasis on the new interface that you are promoting. And especially considering that the Leadwerks engine was capable (and quite capable) of doing all this, and it was an old engine of the 7th generation of game consoles. So how is this radically different from another intermediate update for monthly subscribers? And who's the potential buyer of the new engine, if even the old engine, which has been neglected for several years, is hardly known outside of this forum? People simply won't accept an unfinished product, and on platforms like Steam, it's important to show the best right from the start of sales, even if it's early access. The strategy you have mentioned will mislead people, and if they buy Ultra, they will definitely refund it within half an hour. Remember the experience with Ultra App Kit, which had serious shortcomings from the start and even with the updates made, it was not accepted by the Steam community: it seems to me that you gained absolutely nothing from its publication and mixed audience reaction, and now the situation may repeat itself with an even more negative reaction, including from the old audience, do you understand what I mean? It won't be interesting to new users in its current form, and the old audience, includes us, will remain dissatisfied that they were made to wait for almost another year. By the way, you mentioned March 2024. That's a long time, considering that everything can change at any moment. With the level of functionality that you propose for 1.0, even our team that develops and releases games on Leadwerks (and respects you and your team), won't be able to switch to the new engine before that date (we planned to do it as soon as possible) - because it turns out that we won't be able to continue working on the game without at least having the flowgraph editor! And a Vulkan benchmark with a new interface is unlikely to help us create something worthy of audience attention. But... Apparently, there's nothing we can do about it 🌝 Alright, then I have one last question: do you plan to follow your previously announced plans and release a major update for Leadwerks? At least before March 2024, if the answer is "yes". Because this engine REALLY needs an update, and we have already submitted the main issues related to its functioning in a bug report about a year ago: And by the way: Leadwerks, if it had a completed form, would be perfect for legacy development and would be relevant in this niche for many years to come. It has amazing features and compromised system requirements. Some of us are working on projects on older laptops, and it's still quite usable, if not for the annoying problems described by us and many others in the bug report threads. It seems to us that it's too early to write it off and radically replace it with something that isn't yet ready - it should at least be brought to working condition before that, because at least it ALREADY has a fan base.
  3. ERKGames

    Finishing Touches

    Can you please answer me: 1. Am I correct in understanding that you are planning to release a version called 1.0, which will have a minimally functioning engine, but modules for developing flowgraph scenes and particle emitters will be unavailable? 2. Will 1.0 also be released on Steam, or will it be an exclusive release for the website?
  4. Since we are getting close to announcing our new project and will be very busy with its development, we wanted to take a step back and "elevate" the quality of our previous project. The update ended up taking us two weeks of work instead of the planned one, but in it, we were able to implement so many exciting features and even bring back some previously unrealized content that we realized it wasn't just another update, but a re-release. Version 2.0. We are proud to present to you the director's cut of SALVATIONLAND. It includes new cutscenes, significantly improved pacing in the first half of the game, numerous stability, detail, and optimization improvements. - Added an alternative ending that is optional and unlocked by successfully completing additional quests - Added new cutscenes - Added new graphical effects (Depth of Field, Bloom) - Additional optimization work: performance increase on levels ranged from 25% to 50% - "Beginning" level: reworked initial scenes, added a new first-person cutscene, fixed errors, improved level detail - "Old District" level: removed guard, now the clinic area is accessible and leads to the "Clinic" location. Some posters from Leonid's subquest have also been moved to this area. - "School's basement" level: reduced size of one of the internal corridors - "Shopping District" level: increased tree density - "Shopping Center" level: reduced playable area size, decreased likelihood of crashes on low-end hardware - Added sound of shell casings falling when shooting firearms - Fixed an issue where dialogue text could overflow the window and be cut off at certain resolutions - Headshot damage multiplier for firearms increased to x2 - Grenades now dismember enemies' limbs - Improved quality of certain voiced lines, added voiceovers for some previously missing lines - Increased sprint duration and speed - Decreased rain volume - Added engine muffling sound for motorcycles - Added more collectible items on certain levels - Various level tweaks and detail improvements As before, you can buy the game in Steam using this link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807590/SALVATIONLAND/ We are also excited to say that the game soundtrack is now available for listening on YouTube. Just like the original virtual disc from Steam, it's divided into two "sides" - in one video, you can listen to music from the game by various composers who contributed to game creation, and in the second one you can enjoy ambient tracks written by the creative director of ERK Games: Thanks for attention! Enjoy the game and don't forget to leave your review. If you need a feedback, you can write here or in Steam Community: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1807590
  5. The implementation of Theora Video on Leadwerks was written by Niosop a long time ago, even for the 2.x versions of the engine. As practice and a HUGE number of tests and attempts have shown, it works quite unstably and requires significant additions as well as radical solutions to minimize crashes when playing videos (in particular, it requires low quality sound in the video file (96kbps recommended and 128kbps maximum) for more or less stable operation, and video resolutions no higher than 720p at 5000kbps (recommeded 720x576 for 16:9, which, you see, is rather low quality for 2023). Our first game on Leadwerks, SALVATIONLAND, uses a significantly improved Lua-based version of this implementation, but crashes still occur on certain hardware combinations. We were unable to identify their patterns or fix the C++ code, as Niosop didn't release the source code for the library. So, yes, I wouldn't recommend using this Theora implementation to ANY users of the engine. It's necessary to write video implementation from scratch, look for ways to do so. We're currently searching and have not yet found a solution. There was our attempt to attach some ffdshow components to the engine to launch full-screen video separately from the application process. Unfortunately, this caused a large number of problems and was a rather rough.
  6. Thanks! If you'll have a problem with passing first level, you must go to this house to complete intro quest (after police station). Many people can't find the way when playing first time (this is a screenshot from editor, so don't be surprised by the weird graphics here).
  7. We are back and we have some good news for you... First, we have released update 1.5.2 for SALVATIONLAND, which includes both various technical changes, as well as a very important improvement. And this improvement requires an advanced description. This month marks 6 years since the team and I launched Leadwerks Game Engine for the first time and started working on it. It's been a long time, isn't it? And during this time, we had a chance to conduct a lot of experiments and face both the pleasant sides of the engine and the very unpleasant ones (such as, for example, disappointingly unstable implementation of the Newton physics engine - but let's not talk about sad things now). Let's put it this way: Leadwerks knows how to surprise, and this is his feature of character, so to speak. And now I will tell you about one of those things that surprised us completely unexpectedly and... even too late. About the specific of Field of View parameter. The fact is that the engine has its own rules of the game in everything. And it is have his own measurements and proportions parameters. For example, we are used to the fact that FOV set to 70 in games is... FOV 70. And here it turned out, suddenly, that the engine value of 70 is equal to about 85 in other games. This is higher than any norm of any another First Person Shooter title, which FOV 70 or 80 (maximum) used as a standard! And it gives a lot of inconvenience to the player. In addition to the obvious fisheye effect at any 16:9 screen resolution and a too stretched image on the corners that breaks the feeling of immersion, we even have a performance loss as a result of a "stretched" frame with a lot of extra objects in it. In the course of finding a suitable smaller value, we found that the parameter 55 is approximately equal to the parameter 70 in other games (visually, at least). Having set this value, we were simply amazed: the game has changed significantly! Just compare two frames - the original Leadwerks FOV and FOV 55: The FPS count also increased noticeably, by about 2-3 frames on average. Of course, we hurried to add our find to update 1.5.2, which was already released at that time - we had to work its second revision. Of course, changing the FOV value caused the need to reconfigure the offset parameters for all weapons on the screen (which is always done in a rather uncomfortable way, through a boring reconfiguration and resaving the prefab many times) - but it was worth it! And it only took a couple of hours, after all. Another important innovation of this patch is that we have finally completed and translated the game manual into English. We cannot vouch for the quality of the translation as we are not native speakers, but we tried as well as possible. Apart from the information about the new patch additions (and our discoveries while working on it), the second news for today is that we have opened a page on the IndieDB website. Here's the link for our blog: https://www.indiedb.com/games/salvationland In the "Files" section you can find both manuals from the game and also a game soundtrack. All this is available absolutely free of charge and ready for download. I would also like to remind you that SALVATIONLAND is now on sale at a 50% discount as part of the Summer Sale on Steam. Hurry up to buy at a low price! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807590/SALVATIONLAND/ Well, the last news for today: we are developing something new. And the new something is... a sequel to SALVATIONLAND! This is not an official announcement yet, because we cannot show you frames from the prototype and share more information - the work on the early access version is in full swing now, any game aspect is still far from complete and can change at any time. Early Access, did I say?.. Oh yeah, we remain committed to this distribution model: you'll have the ability to buy the game ahead of full release and help develop it through testing! And, of course, we will continue to distribute our games through Steam. All links will be available later, the announcement will be soon. Stay in touch and thank you for your attention
  8. ERKGames

    3D CSG editing

    Yes, I think this is the right decision.
  9. ERKGames

    3D CSG editing

    I think you shouldn't change the interface much, moving away from Leadwerks standards further and further. I'm all for what you're doing in terms of moving the editor to a new framework with a dark theme, etc., but it seems to me (as someone who has spent over 5000 hours working on SALVATIONLAND in the editor) that the interface is perfect and as intuitive as possible. What I see in the screenshots only confirms that you are fixing bugs and making the classic fresher, but please don't go too far and don't change everything fundamentally. This is a dangerous path that can only make things worse. P.S. I'm sure you need to drop those wireframe icons on the right panel and go back to the color ones from previous Ultra versions. They look much better and do not distract the eye at all.
  10. Great, thanks for the reply!
  11. By the way, we are really looking forward to the release of a new engine. We're aiming to port a new project in development to Ultra Engine - yes, it will take a certain amount of time and push forward the release date, but I think it'll be the right decision if the engine is really better than Leadwerks in terms of speed and stability. We're especially excited about the new terrain creation tools and the 64-bit code that will remove memory limits. I know that this will be a bit offtopic, but can you tell me please, what is the state of the Lua wrapper now? The thing is that we have our own technical base, the code of which is 95% Lua code, and we would like it to be relatively easy to port to Ultra. This moment really worries us.
  12. Steam have a good online, so no matter how we all feel about this platform, we can use it to make our product more popular. A Steam release is the best way to "passively promote" an engine/software/game when the product is not very popular at start/doesn't have a huge advertising budget. Me and my team would like to see Ultra Engine on Steam, even though we're not a big fan of the platform, we (ERK Games) embrace the benefits that Steam provides. Fun fact: at first, we planned to promote SALVATIONLAND in our own way, but later we decided to use Steam Direct. And we don't regret this decision, especially considering how cheap it was for us at regional prices (the ENTIRE game budget is around $200 and I'm not kidding now).
  13. Release trailer of ERK Games' first indie-game, powered by Leadwerks. Annotation: Deciding to find the "city of dreams", young traveller from the wasteland named Victor went to northern mountains by the old railway tracks. The desire to find his place in the cradle of surviving mankind turns into a struggle against an evil mayor and transformation into a hero-liberator... Buy our game in Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807590/SALVATIONLAND/
  14. This update is the latest in a series of major updates. Now the game will only be supported with small patches as needed. We have come a long way together with you, dear players. Thanks for your support! Changelog: - Cleaned up about ~500 megabytes during resource check - Added junk buyer at the level "Gamsk - 2" - Police chief at the "The Beginning" level now plays an animation during his first appearing - Optimized game assets - Optimized levels - Added new character voice lines for several subquests - Updated Readme files - Fixed a number of minor bugs WARNING: It is recommended (but not required) to start a new game to apply all fixes. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1807590/view/3694679124144168413
  15. Huge Update 1.4 - Released! This update is the latest in a series of major updates. Now the game will only be supported with small patches as needed. We have come a long way together with you, dear players. Thanks for your support! Changelog: - Cleaned up about ~500 megabytes during resource check - Added junk buyer at the level "Gamsk - 2" - Police chief at the "The Beginning" level now plays an animation during his first appearing - Optimized game assets - Optimized levels - Added new character voice lines for several subquests - Updated Readme files - Fixed a number of minor bugs WARNING: It is recommended (but not required) to start a new game to apply all fixes. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1807590/view/3694679124144168413
  16. Huge Update 1.3 is available Despite the intensity of the final tests, at the launch of SALVATIONLAND we made several serious mistakes that led to crashes and general technical problems. With this huge update, we want to prove that we care about players' requests, and game development is not just a hobby for us, but a full-fledged, important part of life. In addition to fixing various bugs, we also made a number of major structural overhauls that changed the pace of the game in its first quarter, as well as added several training elements for new players. We hope you enjoy the result. Thanks for staying with us! WARNING: you need to start a new game. It is also recommended to run SavedgamesRemover.bat in the root folder and delete old saves to avoid problems. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1807590/view/3635005161222150540
  17. Despite the intensity of the final tests, at the launch of SALVATIONLAND we made several serious mistakes that led to crashes and general technical problems. With this huge update, we want to prove that we care about players' requests, and game development is not just a hobby for us, but a full-fledged, important part of life. In addition to fixing various bugs, we also made a number of major structural overhauls that changed the pace of the game in its first quarter, as well as added several training elements for new players. We hope you enjoy the result. Thanks for staying with us! WARNING: you need to start a new game. It is also recommended to run SavedgamesRemover.bat in the root folder and delete old saves to avoid problems. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1807590/view/3635005161222150540
  18. The "disc" is divided into two sides: the first contains music by various artists, used in the gameplay, and the second - author's ambient themes, recorded specifically for the game. Soundtrack is supplied free of charge. Enjoy! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2326950/SALVATIONLAND_Soundtrack
  19. SALVATIONLAND official soundtrack is available on Steam The "disc" is divided into two sides: the first contains music by various artists, used in the gameplay, and the second - author's ambient themes, recorded specifically for the game. Soundtrack is supplied free of charge. Enjoy! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2326950/SALVATIONLAND_Soundtrack
  20. Thanks a lot. Bad that we had to turn off the ragdoll physics at the last moment. Game randomly crashed with newton.dll. This game is sorely lacking in real physics. We even made a motorcycle based on a character class, as they would have done in the games of the 90s, to get around the technical problems of the engine.
  21. ERK Games presents the first open-world game powered by Leadwerks Game Engine - SALVATIONLAND. This is a story shooter with additional non-linear quests, stealth-action and survival elements, developed by members of former "Between the Realities" team. Game released in 15th February, 2023. You can buy and download game with 15% discount here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807590/SALVATIONLAND Official soundtrack available here for free: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2326950/SALVATIONLAND_Soundtrack If you interested, you can discuss game here. Also, if you found any bugs and problems, contact us here and in Steam Community topic: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1807590/discussions/0/3198118671848886939/ Please add to wishlist! We hope you enjoy the final result of our two years work.
  22. The game is released! Thanks to everyone who has been with us since Early Access started! We hope you enjoy the final result. You can buy and download game with 15% discount here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807590/SALVATIONLAND What will happen next? We plan to support the game with small updates, and in parallel with this... Let's just say that no one plans to stop at one game in the team. As soon as we have something to tell you, we will definitely do it in the Steam community. Subscribe to our Telegram: @erkgames And for those who played older versions, it is highly recommended to delete saved games AND configuration files using SavedgamesRemover.bat in the game folder before launching the release version.
  23. ERKGames

    defendTHIS! rev3

    It looks good. When you done your work, can you share this shader with community? In our SALVATIONLAND game we using Shadmar's dof, it works not accurate enough. We wants to replace it with yours.
  24. Yes, I use dualboot (Ubuntu 22.10/Windows 8.1) and can confirm that everything more or less works through Proton layer. I even made some edits for our project using Proton. I think that it's too late to fix the native editor and it doesn't make any practical sense, BUT I described the problems that are specific to running the Windows editor through Proton (point 10). If it is possible to somehow fix them directly from your side, that would be great (I would honestly even move to Linux on a permanent basis, since I only use the second OS to convinient work on project)
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