Alienhead

Fixed! tyvm

I've built about 20 different physics controllers for various vehicles in Leadwerks over the years and never encountered much of a problem... until now. I started last week making a tractor controller but I've yet to get it working 100% It seems I get random no-error-readout crashes when I collide with other objects or change elevation on the terrain , no real reason to explain this behavior, I have a golf cart controller that works just fine on the same map. My question is do you think these odd sized wheels could be causing my problem ? and if where would I look to correct this and keep the wheel sizes the same ? PS: If I rotate the tractor to anything other than 0,0,0 then when the controller starts up the tractor starts bouncing out of control until LE crashes, placing the tractor back to 0,0,0 rotation then it starts up fine.

Time to share again, this week havenphillip and myself worked on ssao and a new grass veg system, complete with path carving and regrowth, I implemented a node tree type system, to handle only small areas of grass per render, in the end I was filling the 4k terrain map up with millions of grass blades with no real hit to speed, although I wasn't rendering millions at a time. That's it for this week, next week Muddy roads and forest dirt paths.

A little experiment I've built many physics controllers over the years, but never one for a tractor. Why? .... why not...

It's quite simple actually.. You render out your tree in max or blender or whatever you use. Front side. You then create a 'T' plane stand, 4 polys. Map the render to it, size it to match the tree. Now there's several ways to control he plane, I happened to made a Tree manager that handles it for me, I rotate the t plane to look at the main directional light, then reset it's x.z to 0. Setting the material to alpha then using Paint.net ( which i use ) or whatever image editor, lower the alpha layer to something around 2.4, just enough where the shader still picks it up for shadowing, but not quite enough to be visible on the map, again unless your really just looking for it. For more complex trees you will want to add 4 more ploys to the top of the t plane with a straight down rendering mapped to it. But for most trees you can skip this step. Now instead of rendering 1000's and 1000's of individual alpha masked planes per tree, you are only calculating 2 to 3 plans per tree. After replacing the LE veg layers with this method, my fps rose by 100. And if your not really looking for it, you can't even tell there fake. This tree is over 12k polys, most of them being alpha planes. Leadwerks really excels at high poly count, as long as you keep your surfaces down. It's not a perfect method, but it's really allowed me to build some SUPER THICK forests with full shadow.

Havenphillip and myself have been trying some new techniques to render full time shadowing of alphamasked materials, the ole LE veg system is fine for a few trees here and there, but when you get some 10k trees with tons of alpha planes on it and you want distant viewing without billboard clipping - the veg system slows to a crawl. Enter a new technique silhouette shadowing. It's not full proof yet, but so far I have the process working with LUA . It needs cleaning and some optimizing but this scene was rendering at 12fps with the veg system, now it looks 100% better and rendering in the 100's. More later!

i do see a small increase in script memory.. sorry wasn't looking at that.

Works as it should on my system, no memory increase when i Pause.

I haven't tried this yet, but I'm wondering - I have created an 8k terrain heightmap. After importing it into LE and saving the map file back out; is it safe to delete the HeightMap.bmp? Reason I'm asking is the 8k file exceeds 300mb and I would prefer not packaging that with a release.

Aggressive settings : collectgarbage("setpause",100); collectgarbage("setstepmul", 100); collectgarbage(); Ooo sorry, garbage collection is LUA, not C++

Try calling collectgarbage(), right after you resume the time. See if it returns to the value it was at when you called a time:pause. HideMenuStart(); Time::Resume(); collectgarbage(); It sorta looks like to me you continuously calling ShowMenuStart(); Time::Pause(); Is ShowMenuStart() loading or creating anything each time it's called?

I generally put a manual GC in my loop, on a 30 second timer I call "collectgarbage()" .. but looking at your problem this may not help you as you have the symptoms of a genuine memory leak caused by some runaway code. Are you by chance using any Point Lights set to Static only ?

I'm out of town for a few days and I don't install Steam on my work laptop so won't be able to do anything until I get back, but I'll be glad to help ya on my return.

Okay I went ahead and did that part of my code. Is this kinda what your looking to do ? -- do a pick local pickinfo = PickInfo() local pickradius = .1 local p = window:GetMousePosition() if (cam:Pick(p.x,p.y,pickinfo,pickradius,true)) then enginepiv:SetPosition(pickinfo.position) self.player:Point(enginepiv) self.player:SetRotation(0, self.player:GetRotation().y-180, 0) end if your using a physics controller on your player you'll need to set the self.angle to Y rotation ( SetInput() ) and not use the Point() method as shown above. I have no physics on the ant so I used the Point() method but in theory it's the same practice.

I'm actually working on a 5-day game jam right now which does close to what your wanting to do.. if you haven't figured it out in a day or two then I should have some code finished that you could try out.

You'll need an unlocked mouse pointer.. preform a simple Pick to get the location the mouse is at and rotate the player to that position. leadwerks is a full blown game engine, it can do most likely anything you wish for it to do but you'll need to know the commands and their outcome in order to select the appropriate method. https://www.leadwerks.com/learn?page=API-Reference_Object_Entity_Camera_Pick pickinfo.position will contain the location you want, you could then place a pivot or whatever there then Point() the player towards it ( on Y axis only ) .

I'm not 100% sure what your trying to do there.. Traditionally there is no looked-mouse support for town down game. Are you trying to install point and click-walk ability? That would be pretty easy to without a controller just using LE's homebrew pathfinding class.. which by the way works pretty damn awesomally I might add.

Twisted Science introduces Tv Channels gameplay modes. Throughout the gameplay of Twisted Science you'll be directed to different Tv Channels, these channels will usually have their own events transpiring. Big time thanks to havenphillip once more for his shader help.

What performance? as far as I can tell it's negligible.

That's the LE vegetation shader with some custom modifications made to it.

And a variation of the cutscene theme set. This setting uses a glaussin blur, chromatic smudge on the outer frame and a light film grain over the top of everything. Thanks to havenphillip for his work on the gluassin blur and smudge filter.

You are soooo right about that. Notice fake ambient on grass

This is some cool looking grass.. I always love cool grass and environment stuff in games.