Pixel Perfect

Good luck, the same guy that did the DVDs I mentioned also does a low poly character DVD specifically aimed at games, you might want to check that out too. Available from the same site. Dexsoft do some great animated models, I have quite a few of theirs!

I'd recommend the Blender 2010 Training Series from CGCookie.com. One of the best and most extensive walkthroughs of character modelling I've ever come across. They are not cheap but then little worthwhile is. At least Blender is free and you can apply what you've learnt to pretty much any modelling app then. It's a longer term goal though, I'd make do with bought models as placeholders for now if I were you.

That is so true cassius

You know, this is starting to feel like 'The Emperor's New Clothes' by Hans Christian Anderson. Summer's over guys ... get used to it lol Maybe 'Christmas is coming' should be the new mantra

Unexpected things like that are never nice, but as you've shown good troubleshooting skills should always reveal the cause. Good find!

The normal way of doing this would be to use the break; statement. This will leave the nearest enclosing loop or conditional statement in which it appears without exiting the program and continue program execution from there.

Actually, I really like that ParaToxic, it looks very subtle! Can't help you really with the integration into the framework other than using framewerk (where you have the code at your disposal and access to all the buffers). The problem with framewerk is it's not been kept up to data so lacks some of the current features.

Hi ChristianM26 and welcome

Ah ok, that bit of information makes all the difference. Static linking would appear to make sense under this situation as the users are almost certain to not have the required libs and installing the debug libs as DLLs would serve no other useful purpose. With regard to your comment Rick, that's perfectly acceptable. Basically it should always be the applications responsibility to install the runtime libs, either by simply including them, as in your suggestion, or by running an installer (often done silently). The only downside that I can see with your approach is you might simply end up duplicating the run time libs on the users system; but that's not really a big issue.

Many thanks Daimour, this definietely explains why it's happening in one of the the cases I was experiencing and quite possibly in both. It only happens in apps that have file open dialogs so it looks highly likely!

By default VS builds programs in debug mode, yes. They will run on other peoples machines if you deploy the debug libs too but MS never intended people to do so; which is why the debug libs are not included in the redistributable. Why would you want to deploy a debug version to the consumer which is far bigger and potentially slower, you'd surely build a release version!

I'm pretty sure in my case I don't have multiple Lua states but that code will be useful to see where it thinks it's looking for the scripts when these errors occur.

Thanks ChrisMAN, I'll take a look at that. Regarding my executables, yes I do the same, I build to debug and release sub directories but this occurs when the executable has been copied to the root directory of the application which contains the scripts directory! Clearly something is causing this, I've just not isolated it yet!

I get this error message frequently 'can't open scripts/class' in some of my builds, the bad news is it tends to be intermittent and I have never found a solution to it yet, not that I have been using Lua for long. My Leadwerks to EKI One executable always displays this error and my current Neutrino Engine Editor sometimes throws this error and other times doesn't; and that's on consecutive runs! In both cases the scripts directory is in the root of the application. I would be very interested to find the reason behind this too.

Cool! Any method that consistently gives valid paths is a valid method, the only concern then is the cost and it's ability to deal with realistic game geometry.

Nice work Rick. It looks good, sounds good and performs well. I agree with Josh that the user needs more involvement, I did feel a bit like a spectator. Being able to place the characters and possibly move them as well as choose the wizard type would add more to the game. But all in all, pretty polished Spec in signature below.

It has great facilities for scaling animated or non animated models which you often need to do prior to exporting into Leadwerks. You can run animations and it has some limited animation support. The material and texture handling and UV facilities are great. Functions for smoothing if you loose the smoothing on import. Great features for vertex painting (really useful for getting vegetation swaying nicely), in fact one of the most useful bits of software I have ever bought. I'm still finding new features I can make good use of.

In most games I play if you waited 6 seconds to hold a key you'd already be dead

Cool. I'll try it tonight Rick and provide some feedback.

I certainly hope this is what it's not doing. It should be using some form of spacial indexing (an octree for instance) to avoid having to do this which is very inefficient. But in essence this is correct, the functionality is to return all entities whose bounding boxes intersect or completely lie within a given volume

I wish you luck Kevin but the gulf between dreamer and achiever is massive. Ken said it all in his previous post, so no need to elaborate. The time to showcase is when you have something working and demonstrable, not when it's still effectively a pipe dream. Dreams are important as they serve as motivation and without motivation little is achieved, but motivation needs to be backed up by hard work and real skills. Use that motivation to acquire those skills first, then put those skills to work. Any short cuts in this process will lead to failure. It's easy to be delusional about what it takes to make a game, most of us are when we first start down this road because you have to get part way down the road to realise just how long that road is. But it's a great journey if you have realistic goals!

Looks great!

Here is an example of how to do it in a Lua script: require("scripts/class") local class=CreateClass(...) function class:CreateObject(model) local object=self.super:CreateObject(model) model:SetLODDistance(30,0) model:SetLODDistance(60,1) model:SetLODDistance(120,2) end Alter the distances or add more levels as required

There really is no such thing as C++ .Net. .Net is a framework whilst C++ is a language. You need to use /CLI with C++ to work with .Net I'm not sure that .Net is really aimed at game making, why not use straight C++?

Excellent example daimour, your tutorials are really clear and well constructed.