Roland

Koan said "plugin or a feature" So it may be a feature. When thinking a bit about this it may not be needed as long as LE3 can accept FBX files. Poser models can be exported to FBX.

Couldn't agree more

Will make a tutorial on that.

I do. At least for the pre-orders I have done for other softwares. Combined with a pre-order there is a discount on the price by most company's. But in this case I have to agree with Josh. Its way to early to set a price.

I have a model that will have quite a number of animations. There is no problem with getting the model with is idle animation into LE2. Now I want to add more animations by loading them from GMF files (same Model, same Rig, another animation). Those GMF files contains the animaton and the bones (no mesh). This is what I thought would work with this approach. TModel model = LoadModel( "abstract::mymodel.gmf"); // CountAnimations returns 1 LoadAnimation( model, "abstract::mymodel@walk.gmf"); // CountAnimations returns 2 LoadAnimation( model, "abstract::mymodel@run.gmf"); // CountAnimations returns 3 // ... more animations... // Main loop Animate( model, AppTime()/30, 1, curAnimation ) ; // where curAnimation = 0, 1, 2 The only animation that works is the one in the original model file ( curAnimation ). I have checked that each gmf-file has a working animation in the ModelViewer and they are all ok Where is my misstake ? Thanks Roland

Yes Josh. ToLua++ is a program that parses 'cleaned' header files and creates Lua-code from them. Does sound scary. It's a bit more work but not much. The cleaned files often just needs some very small corrections if any at all. One nice thing is that you can add extra things is those files to solve some things that is hard to do in a type LuaBind solution. The price to get more control is just the fact that you have to have a 'cleaned' header copy of the C++ header file. It's now a long time since I used toLua++, but either Lua or toLua++ seems to have changed to much since then. My son and I was writing a 3D Engine and like you studied various script languages and came to the solution that Lua was the way to go. It was fast, it was used as industry standard by many companys, it was stable. Then we tried LuaBind and came to the conclusion that it did not work as we intended when it came to C++. I now have forgotten the details, but it produced unnecessary code among other small things. There was something about the stack usages also which I can't remember right now. Anyway, after having struggling with LuaBind for a while we decided to have a look at toLua++ and was very satisfied with the result. It produced faster and simpler code, and also gave the opportunity to solve many things that was tricky with LuaBind. I don't have any samples now. That project died 4 years ago when my son got his own kids and did not have the time for the project any more. But our experience was that although LuaBind was very simple to use and produced what it was designed for, it did not quite got there when used for game code and C++. Of course this is just my personal view of it but thats was we came up to. I could have a look at produce a simple sample if you need that. Feel free to contact me in such case.

I'm in a standby position right now (making art and tests for my game, those tests are done in another engine). But my plan is to be back when LE3 is released and then see how it will work out. At that point I will not use any kind of wrapper what so ever. I will use C++ straight from Josh headers and go with that. The reason for that is simply. I know C++ and has no problems with that, also this way I will be in sync with changes without any delays or wrapper errors. I did abandon the C# LE.NET project as there was only a very few that liked it and used it. To much work for a few users. To those few users I apologize (again!), but in fairness I left a very stable C# wrapper source that those users should have no problems to update them self. All the tricky parts was done and at that point LE2 was locked for changes or news. So using LE.NET for the latest LE2 should be no problem. Personally I will from now on use Josh headers as this leads to less problems and C++ is a great game development language. Cheers Roland

Anyway. All is perfectly OK with me as long as there is a pipline that works for me. And now there is. I guess its hard to autogenerate materials. And the ADN Material Editor solved the problems, again...WHAT A GREAT TOOL! As I understand it, materials and edit of them things will be much better in LE3.

In fact you are both right and wrong at the same time. For models which have textures & normalmaps that are unique to the model (not tiled textures) the material is unique to the model as in my example (Although the textures in that simple one could have been tiled). In those cases the material could to be something thats generated more automatically as in 90% of the cases it is a color-map and a normal-map. For other models you can use tiled textures which are not unique to the model (like stonewalls etc..). In this case the material could be a material thats more generic (like stonewall.mat), which can be applied to different models. So in my view its two different kind of situations where the materials are used in different way. ModelMaterial - is unique for a model. Can be autogenerated with some effort. TiledMaterial - is a generic material which is non-unique and may be applied to any model

Ok. So its more complicated that one would ever think. Thats OK. But how can one handle resources in game with different levels. I want all but the player to be free'd up when a level is done and next one is loaded. Is there a way to do that ?

OK. So if I run free on every enitity in a scene there will be nothing left allocated then?

Finally got things to work using the ADN Material Editor... GREAT TOOL. 1. Model in Modo 2. Export to FBX 3. MakeDDS on Textures 4. UU3D conversion of FBX to GMF. Scale = 0.01 5. ADN Material for the materials (what a great tool!!!) Here is the result in the Editor. Thank's for your help

Oh.. I had forgot about that one. Thanks for that link Marley.

No there were no such options. However UU3D solved the problem. The pipeline is a bit to much "run this, then run that, and then run this" to be cool. But at least it works now Whats ADN?

I know that UU3D works. That's what was suggested and that solved the problem. So far so good. But still one has to run GenMat, MakeDDS and MaterialEditor for such a simple task. If this was some 'one-time' setup thing it would be nothing to mention. But this has to be done each time the model or textures are changed. If I read this correctly the pipeline is using UU3D for the GMF generation and not Leadwerks own tool. Isn't that kind of strange and leads to confusion. So this is the recommended pipeline then UU3D to convert FBX to GMF MakeDDS for each texture GetMat to create materials fbx2gmf is obsolete ??!!

Thanks for the suggestions. As there is no settings for 'not' export bones in Modo I loaded the exported fbx into uu3d and disabled bone and animation at GMF export. This worked. Good. I also tested with the skin shader as suggested but with no success. Although the UU3D thingy works I really think that such a simple thing as this has an terrible complicated pipeline, from fbx model to gmf. It would be so much better if there was a program that created the material, converted the textures to DDS and made the fbx->gmf conversion in one step. As it is now you have to go through 5 different tools (fbx2gmf, materialeditor, MakeDDS, GenMat, UU3D ) to get things done. Not good at all! This is absolutely no joy for the user.

http://vimeo.com/22841693 Texturing a simple mesh and get into the engine should be a simple task. But.... This video shows a problem I have with getting a simple mesh to show up in Leadwerks Engine followed by a question "What did I do wrong". Feel free to tell me what

Have no idea or experience of which is better. So I did not vote. Anything that Josh decides will probably be just fine

To bad. This makes load new scenes a bit hard to do. After a some new scene loads it will lead to having a bunch of non-used memory block allocated. Of course one must be sure to have free'd up all resources (except the player maybe) between scenes.

Sounds most unreliable. So thats another way to say that there is no working. FreeEntity :-S

Only god knows ( that's Josh But I would be very surprised if it didn't decrement the usage counter of all its used resources (textures etc) and same for all its child entities. The decrement of the usage counter is also just a guess, but somehow there must exist such a mechanism so a resource can be used by many entities. The resource will the be removed from memory when its usage counter becomes 0. Much guessing here

Hi Guys. After some thinking I have decided to make C# code generators for Leadwerks. There will be two versions. leSharp which is a C# version of the C-API leoSharp which is a C# version of the LEO wrapper. Both code generators will use the C/C++ headers to create needed C# code. This means that you will not need to get the latest code from somewhere, just run the code generators on updates and you are done. You can read more about this in my blog

Looks great Josh.

Hi Bill. This sounds very interesting. I have sent you a message.

I'm also available.