Pixel Perfect

Fluid physics would be nice but we don't have that. Maybe a series of particle emitters could be used and the direction modulated by the angle of the containing terrain. Again, this is where particle attractors and deflectors would be great! Even if this was just used as you suggest to provide an upper layer over a base water textured plane. If you were wanting to modulate a scrolling texture such that it reflected the turns of the river I feel the use of Shaders looming into view as the obvious solution. Damn ... shaders again lol

Sorry Rick, although I could understand the concept when it comes to shaders I'm as lost as you are. I'm guessing the above code is sampling the alpha channel (possibly where the depthmap is stored) and discarding anything less that 0.5 I wish I understood shaders better too!

Very nice demo, well done! That guy seriously needs to stop watching television though and seek medical attention

That's a great solution

So you can access particles individually in BMax then?

As far as I'm aware ... no, on the basis that the particles (quads) themselves are all internal to Josh's engine and are not exposed to us. You could write your own particle system

Nice idea. Any thoughts on how you would prevent the rain/snow when inside buildings or under cover? I suppose you could use line picks to detect overhead meshes or parhaps check for being inside model AABBs but then you'd still want to see it raining outside the window. Maybe someone has past experience of this out there who might like to comment.

Yeah, ideally it could do with a series of switchable options for the type and look of the water. That would make it pretty universal. Wouldn't it be nice to have flowing water as well though, that flowed at right angles to the normals of the enclosing terrain so it would look like it flowed round corners etc. I have no idea how we'd even start to do that!

I did just this back in the 2.1 days. I used the existing water shader and applied it to my own planes (non infinite). I had to adjust some of the settings in the shader I seem to recollect to get the scaling right and I did have some z order issues with the textures where the plane met the terrain; but it worked.

The fact that the pivots are parented to the sun or the planets does not preclude having independant rotational speed of the satelite objects to the objects they are orbiting as you can develop maths fairly easily to rotate an object about a given point in space (i.e. the pivot points). However, as Laurens points out you wont get elliptical orbits using this method alone. I had a play around with the idea of a solar pool game in the early days of Leadwerks and had planets on a pool table with orbiting satelites that you could roll down the table as the moons revolved on a constant plane. [edit] I found a vid I made of it at the time: Old Solar Pool Demo I abandoned it at the time because of problems with the physics and moved onto other things.

Sounds excellent Josh. It's this kind of 'behind the scenes' work that I appreciate ensuring that as our game level complexity grows the engine is tuned to better cope with it.

The alpha test shader will not give variable transparency, just full transparency for alpha channel values over a certain value. Rick appears to be looking for the full 256 transparency values to be reproduced. Your texture has no varied transparency set in its alpha channel, just the full on and full off values. He's looking for the equivalent of the alpha_blend setting we used to use in material files (which is presumably the alphablend version of the frag shader) but i'm sure they needed to be rendered in the transparency layer to work correctly, although I may be wrong!

I have a transparent texture working on a model in the Editor but again its just using the alpha test shader to allow complete transparency over the face area of a hair mesh . That's simply using the mesh_diffuse_alphatest.frag shader defined in the material file and it works fine. I just tried substituting it for the mesh_diffuse_alphablend.frag shader but that doesn't work, the transparent area shows up as opaque black!

I prefer the old one too (but at least we have the choice so that's cool). I prefer to have the 'Recently Added Topics' at the top though, as it used to be, rather than hidden away at the bottom.

I don't know what language you are using with Leadwerks but there are many free libraries available in C++ for reading and writing to ini files and I'd be almost certain that some must exist for BlitzMax too. This would probably be the easiest route. Failing that you could always write your own parser to read in the file and write it out again if need be. [Edit] Just noticed this post is in the C++ forum so I guess that's answered that Here is a link to one I've used successfully in the past: INI File Lib

ouch! wishing you a speedy recovery Josh

I'm surprised it doesn't use conditional compilation to avoid additional overhead! Thats how things like that are normally handled in C and C++. Exactly what is the additional overhead?

Sorry Omid ... not at the moment. I'll not be releasing any more footage until I have proper combat up and running which is a little way off yet

Yeah, it was Irishlostboy who first pointed this out and I've adjusted the weapon positions. Thanks for the pointers though

and it still does in 2.3 as far as I'm aware

The 25% offer discount problem is now sorted and the full discount is being given for all orders over 50 euros; for anyone who is interested.

Thanks Josh. I'd say a pretty good dictum to follow to keep your customers happy. As macklebee stated most of us understand that sometimes change is inevitable for the good of the product; but it should only be where absolutely necessary if it’s likely to break existing code and broadcast in advance of the update.

Great! Granted there will be limitations to what you can do with it but I'd love to play around with something like that and I'm sure it will increase the engine's appeal.

Sounds great. Can't wait to try this Tyler. Thanks

I generally agree. I think the problem just now is most people don't see a problem in performance because very few are pushing their game engine in any way. Once people have large amounts of NPCs, path finding and AI running against them they will start to realise just how precious those few milliseconds become per frame loop and how much more important optimisation and efficiency are. It's not till you get to these points that you start to appreciate the difference between languages. Multithreading and the ability to divide work across game loop iterations becomes important too as mechanisms to maximise use of the available CPU time without slowing the frame rate. I also agree with Theo's method of combining good coding practice with profiling, this is one of the most effective ways of streamlining your code.