Pixel Perfect

Looks great Andy. Nice work on the physics! I'm fascinated by the terrain and texture mapping used here. Am I right in thinking you are using a few high res textures for the grass and runway in the airstrip area and then a higher altitude photographic texture for the remaining surrounding landscape? It looks so natural and effective!

It's been an interesting experience applying AI and NPC movement to what I thought was a relatively realistic game level design and some of the pitfalls of using 'off the shelf' static and character models. Some of the issues that emerge are as follows: The realisation that no matter how nice some of these models or sets of models might look when you first see them and even place them in your level design, how fit for in game purpose are they really and have they ever really been tested in game? The reality I'm finding is that there are often inconsistencies or problems inherent in the design which produce problems when walking characters through my world. A typical one will be differences in door heights between buildings (even in supposedly matched sets of buildings that come as a pack). Another example is geometry that simply doesn't suit the physics. So you get steps deliberately modelled to look worn ... very authentic ... problem is, without a collision mesh there is no way your character controller is even attempting to walk up them, and of course ... no collision mesh provided! Walkways provided on walls which in practice prove to be too narrow for two NPCs to practically pass each other. Characters that lack certain animations which, once you actually have them interacting in the world, becomes blatantly obvious. Hey, even one character model I converted which seemed ideal for the part until till I discovered it had no Idle animations!!! It's not that any of these issues are insurmountable but they do cause a lot of additional work or rework and considerably extend the time taken to reach the desired goal! ... and the moral of the story is ... work directly in conjunction with an artist or artists where a coherent approach to style and requirements is established and issues that arise can be quickly rectified. Or pay big bucks to have bespoke work done where you can go back to the artist where issues occur.

That's a nice set of facilities

It is a nice touch .. please don't reconsider Yep, found that one

I'd say that's looking pretty darn good

Well that scene actually looks very cold (although the colors are warm) and not very apocalyptical (everything looks intact, not in a state of disrepair or destroyed ... but then maybe that's post-apocalypical) but if you are looking to recreate that type of atmosphere in the picture then I think you will need to construct your textures to closely match a suitably constructed color pallette and apply desaturation to the scene. With regard to the lighting ... to get that very bright slightly washed out look, that a really hot bright sunlit day gives, I find you have to raise the intensity of the directional light in Leadwerks from its default of 1.0

It's really most impressive tjheldna. The graphics and gameplay is really very polished and looks as good as anything I could compare it too. I have only played the first level so far on hard setting and chalked up a score of 24400 at the end. Will play the 2nd and third levels tomorrow. A couple of things I noticed right at the beginning with some of the introduction text: 'An evil wizard has cast dark magic to blocked your path' would be better English if phrased as: 'An evil wizard has cast dark magic to block your path' Likewise: 'only you have the power to undo it all of this evil work' is better phrased: 'only you have the power to undo all of this evil work' The only other issue was I noticed I got some corruption of the graphics occasionally when on the wooden platform by the bridges. The textures would sometimes break up. Might just be the graphics chip on my cheap internet PC. I tried to take a screenshot but it just came out black! Plays beautifully though on this low spec AMD A6-3500 APU with onboard Radeon HD graphics chip. My son (7 years old) is away for the weekend but I know will really enjoy playing this when he gets back. Look forward to seeing this finally released and I'm sure it will do well!

Cool ...will download and try it out tonight

Never played with that script but the first thing that comes to mind is no dynamic physics representation for the monster truck.

Apply the vehicles velocity to your model then, so its always moving with the vehicle, then add any local movements as additions to this vector.

There was a time a few years back that the Windows registry was getting so bloated that even Microsoft were starting suggest developers might look at using a revolutionary new mechanism called INI files (you have to laugh don't you). However, the Windows Registry is still the recommended solution for application configuration and installation data. People are free to circumvent that if they so desire!

Don't take offence please, lots of people pirate software and you are just exhibiting the typical tell tale signs of that even though you state you are not. I am always going to ask the question when I see those signs.

That's a highly specific question from someone who doesn't have a license. Any closer to deciding to buy one yet after 5 months of asking questions

I agree with Rick, no one currently capable of making an MMORPG would be asking such questions. Scale your ambitions right down and learn the basics by developing something far simpler! You will find that challenging enough but can then apply what you've learnt to something more ambitious.

I thought OpenCL was the standard and if this is simply being wrapped by Bolt then surely it's not device dependant! What is standard OpenCL? There is just OpenCL isn't there.

Sounds very interesting!

Looks great Chris!

I've used compression and it was fine for me!

Overall it's looking superb, just needs some more variation as already mentioned. Great work though! Few people have ever got a game in Leadwerks to this stage.

No, there is nothing wrong here. The gmf file you've produced will contain the various UV mappings and the references to the textures. Simply open the gmf file in Notepad and do a text search for 'material' to see your texture names embedded in the file! What Mack is trying to tell you is that Leadwerks Engine requires you to produce a mat file for every texture referenced in the gmf file which is the engine's way of determining which textures should be assigned (diffuse, bump, specular etc) and what shaders should be used for the material. This is in addition to the material and UV specifications in the gmf file itself. The manual in the link provided explains the basics of constructing mat files. They give you a lot of control over the texturing, application of shaders and other graphical properties of your models.

When buying nVidia cards if you want good graphics performance never buy anything in the GT series with less than the digits 60 at the end! So GT460 or higher, GT560 or higher, GT660 or higher ...

Using RotateEntity is far the simplest solution as Mack suggested

The ancient act of Gurning has been performed in Cumberland in the UK for hundreds of years:

I'm aware of the EntityQuat function that returns the quaternion for a given entity (and have indeed used it) but I'm not aware of any support for functions that act upon quaternions. Josh would be able to give a categorical answer as you never know he may have something hidden away somewhere! Here is a link to a Quaternion C++ class though which contains a spherical linear interpolation function definition ... Quaternion Class

The Leadwerks Editor uses it's own proprietary format and is not designed to be imported into other engines, just the Leadwerks engine. It's format is straight forward though so you could write a converter if you really wanted to. Why not just use the Leadwerks Engine?