[Community Project?]

Has been attempted in the past and failed horribly. Many people with many different ideas and many different backgrounds can't work together over a forum without real meetings and very good project management. Thats why i voted with no.

[[Solved] More shadow than I expected, or maybe less. Anyway, somethings wrong]

Looks to me like your stairs are not casting any shadow. In your second screenshot a part of the shadow is red and if you look closer, the red part should be hidden by the stairs shadow.

 

I suggest you double check your material file.

It could also be that your stairs mesh normals are flipped and therefore the light shines through.

[skyboxes]

i do know now. I'll sue you to death

[skyboxes]

I would recommend to use Vue d'Esprit. http://www.e-onsoftw..._esprit/?page=0

There are versions which are affordable (same price as LE) and you can make amazing skyboxes with it.

 

I will make a skybox package sometime next week, when i have the time =)

[OpenGL and Assembler ?]

ASM is ok if you are writing an engine, but for a game...i guess you would be the only one using it.

Even the microchips in todays consumer electronics are written in C, just because it's much faster to write and easier to understand.

[phone scam]

What bothers me most about these scams is, that it seems to be a pretty well going business...worldwide. Which means there is a good amount of brainless people

[Improved water, fixing refraction and invisible waterlines]

That looks pretty good! Would be nice to see it in action.

[HDR Shader]

Way back in LE version 2.3 Framework was open source.

I had a look at the renderer code and found the following comment.

 

// Get average color for HDR exposure
// Draw the last stage over the old buffer with alpha blending, for a smooth brightness adjustment

 

That leads me to the suggestion that there is currently no way of adjusting the fade time

[..game web site screenshots test, please..]

Mozilla firefox here

[..game web site screenshots test, please..]

Here in Germany it works pretty well and also loads fast. There are no pictures missing.

The library looks pretty nice with the shadows around each screenshot

[Timage and reading pixels]

You might be able to use OpenGL functions on that TTexture. Haven't tried this myself, so it's just an idea.

 

There is also the possibility to use an external library to load images and read their pixels. I have used http://www.lonesock.net/soil.html in the past and it worked pretty well.

[Animated texture?]

Well you can animate a texture in two different ways:

 

1) All your animation frames stored in a single texture. That means you create a plane, use PaintEntity() to texture that plane with your texture and write a shader that changes the UV coordinates of your plane every now and then, so it only displays a single frame of your animation.

 

2) All your animation frames stored as seperate textures. Also make a plane and use PaintEntity() to texture it with the first animation frame. After a certain time you call PaintEntity() again, but this time you load the next frame of your animation. That goes on until your animation is finished.

 

From what i read, the second approach seems to be much faster.

 

Edit:

The spinning crosshair could be done using a plane with a crosshair texture and alphablending. All you need to do is to rotate the plane slowly over time. That way there would be no need for multiple textures and it would be faster and less memory consuming.

[Explosions?]

Hmm I don't know why the emitter crash my FPS down.I have an emitter with 100 Particles and when I stand near of it my FPS goes from 100 to 30 .

The explanation for that is fairly simple. The more pixels of your screen are covered by the emitters particles, the more pixels need to be calculated using alpha blending. Means the pixelshader has to do alpha blending calculations on more pixels -> more shader code to execute -> less performance.

I hope that sheds some light on this

[connecting problem]

I had problems connecting to the site for a few hours each day. My guess is that it had to do with some temporary internet files on my PC. I say that, because at the same time it didn't work for me, it worked for two other PC's which both use the same exact wifi connection than my PC.

[Motion Blur]

Would the best way be too load all my "Motion Blur" objects into a separate world and render this world to the BackBuffer after processing the blur effect?

Thats the way i do stuff like this and it's the only way i can think of.

[Using the Leadwerks support e-mail address]

Don't use LE on you windows drive. I had all kinds of issues which resolved themselfs after i moved LE to another HDD/Partition.

Everything was fine before i moved to Vista/Win7...so blame Microsoft and not Josh...

[Using the Leadwerks support e-mail address]

Thanks for telling me that. I'll try putting the extra files and directories in place. I don't understand why the .pdb cannot be found; it's in the debug directory. I didn't see the need for the extra files and directories mentioned in the tutorial for setting of Visual Studio, though. Am I looking at old set-up instructions? I will do what you say above, but can you show me the published script you followed to setup VS? I may be looking in the wrong place for setup instructions.

 

That just reflects what i found out while trying to get the engine to work in the first place

The safest method would be to place your compiled exe directly in the SDK folder (side to side with the editor.exe).

[Using the Leadwerks support e-mail address]

When I step across the Graphics call, I get the following errors.

 

 

First-chance exception at 0x01269f38 in FirstLEApplication2.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000.

First-chance exception at 0x01269f38 in FirstLEApplication2.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000.

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64atiglpxx.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64atioglxx.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64version.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64atigktxx.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64aticfx32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64atiadlxy.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64userenv.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64wtsapi32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64psapi.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64wintrust.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64crypt32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64msasn1.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

First-chance exception at 0x01269f38 in FirstLEApplication2.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000.

'FirstLEApplication2.exe': Loaded 'C:WindowsSysWOW64clbcatq.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

 

I copied the eight DLLs and the one .pak file to the debug directory under the project directory FirstLEApplication2. Is that correct?

 

I have used LE with VS2008 as well as with VS2010, but i never saw an error like that.

Apart from the dll's and the .pak you also need the Scripts folder and a noise.dds and wobbledot3.dds.

The dds files are located under Materials/Effects. This is the minimal amount of file to get LE running.

Note that you will also need the Entities folder located in Models, if you want to load an .sbx file that

comes with the engine.

[What method for adding a mini-map?]

Assuming you have a big texture which shows your map from above you could go ahead and paint that texture onto a plane.

You can move the texture around on the plane without any shader knowledge. All you have to do is to change the UV

coordinates of your plane's verticies via code. SetVertexTexCoords() is what you need for that.

Changing the texture coordinates like this has a pretty big performance impact, so it should not be used all over the

place, but i think for a minimap this is a good solution.

You can rotate the plane to adjust the map to the players view direction. To get rid of the uglyness of a plane you can draw

a nice round UI element over it, so that no one sees the edges and corners of the plane =)

[Hello... aaaaaand Good Bye probably...]

Sounds like you have written something strange. I have never seen Josh getting rude

[Projects Database]

I like the idea, +1 from me.

[Ivy]

My guess performance wise would be to generate a bigger portion of a vine as a single mesh. You can easily create an empty mesh with LE and then add surfaces to it, as your vine grows. That way a generated vine would be just one entity which will make it much faster to render. I can't comment on the OpenGL 3D line, as i never used OpenGL 3D commands directly.

[Pause Physics]

I wrote my own framework and i managed to pause the physics without any memory leak or other problems.

 

 UpdateAppTime();
   if (m_bIsPaused == true)
   {
    // Update each world with a stepsize of 0 -> paused mode
    LE2LayerPtrMapIt it = m_mapLayers.begin();
    for (; it != m_mapLayers.end(); ++it)
    {
	    if ((*it).second != NULL)
	    {		   
		    (*it).second->SetThisWorld();
		    UpdateWorld(0);
	    }
    }
   }
   else
   {
    // Update each world with a stepsize of AppSpeed -> running
    LE2LayerPtrMapIt it = m_mapLayers.begin();
    for (; it != m_mapLayers.end(); ++it)
    {
	    if ((*it).second != NULL)
	    {		   
		    (*it).second->SetThisWorld();
		    UpdateWorld(AppSpeed());
	    }
    }
   }

 

The "problem" here is that the game is still running and callbacks are still called. So it really just pauses the physics.

[Super High Res Texture Pack]

I must agree with Scott, they look a little washed out. Can you show some "ingame" screenshots?

Would be nice to see how it looks rendered with LE.

 

I do not need textures myself, bought Genetica for that job =)

[AppSpeed]

When using the curve function i do:

fMove = Curve ((float)(KeyDown (KEY_W) - KeyDown (KEY_S)), fMove, 5.0f / AppSpeed());

For movements i do:

float fMove = fMove * ((1.0f / 1000.0f) * AppSpeed());

After that fMove is measured in meter/second. To make it easier for me i made myself a macro:

#define M_S     (0.016666f * AppSpeed())