[3rd Person Movement & Animation Control Rig Test]

Great 3rd person animation. I'm quite jealous of that, one of those things on my to-do list I keep putting off and might drop. That looks pretty slick.

[Leadwerks on the iPhone]

I'm not allowed to use my Mac anymore, the kids took it over to play World of Warcraft :/

 

I too had a heck of a time sorting out the provisioning on the device and getting the certificate accepted. I aim to put together a simple 3rd person on-rails tank shooter for LE3 mobile, have the assets ready to roll out for that one. Little bit more complex than a spinning cube. I put together a little test in Unity that allows you to change play styles (weapon mode) by changing the screen orientation, hopefully this event will be available to LE3 but it's not a big deal.

 

A cool thing to do with your cube is to get some audio sampling done and blow to spin it.

[Part 3: extending not only .Net]

Blimey. The best thing since sliced bread for scene loading.

 

What is?...

  IntPtr CreateCubemap(int width,int height)

[Multiplatform Madness]

It will be nice to have easy access to a variety of scene stats for rendering and memory usage, profiling on these devices can be important.

[Multiplatform Madness]

We'll find a way to drain that suckers battery in minutes, just you wait

 

Unity iPhone has a lot of dead weight attached too, it will be nice to work on some of the the parked mobile projects we had.

 

I don't see having an extra texture conversion step for iOS as a problem at all. DDS is an n stage process so running a different tool for iOS seems like 6 of 1 and half a dozen of the other.

[extending LE.NET ...]

Yes. Configurable game input is a pain when it shouldn't be.

 

Most implementations of input libraries fall short, SDL uses the Windows Media layer which is a poor-mans joystick interface that can't address all the axis and buttons you get on high-end devices today. Documentation says you should be able to read up to 8 axis but in practice you can only read axis on drivers that map them to the WML interface, which is often only sub-set. Might be good for simple joypads and low end devices but useless for exotic controllers such as Thrustmasters and Saitek Pro devices.

 

Really need a good DirectInput interface/wrapper.

[extending LE.NET ...]

Some tools to get data into a game would be handy. An XML read/writer and/or simple SQL engine. Raknet intergration too.

[Smoke ribbons, when emitters are too slow]

There is if you use a lot of them. Have them on a reasonably fast recycle time and it's quire reasonable. You get better performance using your own quads instead of a TPlane.

 

This creates a simple two triangle square (like TPlane) and you can move and paint with your billboard material just like a TPlane and it worked out faster for me since I don't need any AABB updates from them. They are typically short duration meshes that are always visible if the parent missile is visible.

 

Every time I create a 'particle' I'm making a quad like this...

 

Self.Sprite = CreateMesh() ;
Self.Surface = CreateSurface(self.Sprite) ;

Local surf:TSurface = Self.Surface;
AddVertex(surf, Vec3(-1, 0, -1)) ;
AddVertex(surf, Vec3(1, 0, 1)) ;
AddVertex(surf, Vec3(1, 0, -1)) ;
AddVertex(surf, Vec3(-1, 0, 1)) ;

AddTriangle(surf, 0, 1, 2) ;
AddTriangle(surf, 3, 1, 0) ;

SetVertexNormal(surf, 0, Vec3(0, 0, -1)) ;
SetVertexNormal(surf, 1, Vec3(0, 0, -1)) ;
SetVertexNormal(surf, 2, Vec3(0, 0, -1)) ;
SetVertexNormal(surf, 3, Vec3(0, 0, -1)) ;

SetVertexTexCoords(surf, 0, Vec2(0, 1)) ;
SetVertexTexCoords(surf, 1, Vec2(1, 0)) ;
SetVertexTexCoords(surf, 2, Vec2(1, 1)) ;
SetVertexTexCoords(surf, 3, Vec2(1, 1)) ;

ScaleMesh(Self.Sprite, vec3(Self.Size)) ;
Self.Sprite.SetPosition(Self.Position) ;

 

I'm using about 100 of these particles. A small loop adds around 10-20 of of different sizes to the tail-pipe of a rocket which moves so fast, blink and you'd miss it. If all the quads shared the same surface it should be as fast as you can probably make it.

 

Updating is done ia pretty small loop in the manager. Particles is a linked list (TList).

 

Method Update()
	For Local p:TParticle = eachin self.Particles
		if p.IsDead
			p.Free() ;
			Self.Particles.Remove(p) ;
		Else
			' UPDATE METHOD FOR EACH PARTICLE '
			p.Update() ;
		End If
	Next
End Method

 

And the update in the TParticle object checks for death and alpha fade....

 

Method Update()
	Local tim:Int = AppTime()
	If tim >= self.Timer Then
		IsDead = True
	Else
		if (tim >= (self.Timer - Self.LifeTime))
			Self.Sprite.SetColorf(self.Color.x, self.Color.y, self.Color.z, ((self.Timer - tim) / Self.LifeTime) * Self.Color.w) ;
		End if
	EndIf
End Method

[Smoke ribbons, when emitters are too slow]

It occurs to me, throw imposters into the mix and it's a good basis 3D cloud s. For imposters you just update them if the camera has changed more than a trigger amount.

[Smoke ribbons, when emitters are too slow]

One thing about the billboard shader vertex transformation, it doesn't work to well if you change the camera zoom level (fov).

 

vertexcameraposition = (gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix * mat[3]) + vec4(gl_Vertex.x,gl_Vertex.z*(buffersize.x/buffersize.y),0.0,0.0);

 

A narrow fov makes the billboards 'shrink', need to fix that. But yes, very helpful post, cheers Mack.

[Leadwerks Engine 2.43 Released]

It's eliminated the bulk of the pausing on our games firing range, when you are spraying lots of lead around it was pretty annoying.

 

And the AABB fix solved AOE damage testing too. Only thing I still have problems with are coronas, I'll look at those later.

 

Can the new DrawEach() be used to paint different skins on player vehicles you think?

[Leadwerks Editor SQL]

SQLlite has an R*Tree module for optimised spatial queries (http://www.sqlite.org/rtree.html ) which would be nice to have.

 

It would certainly add a lot more possibilities to making games with LE. All the issues you mention and more are ones I've had to resolve and find work-arounds for.

 

I don't have time to make an editor so what I was thinking to save time was adding an 'in-game' paintbox to stick objects (dynamic veg and ground clutter) into the database.

[Crytek planning to release UDK-like version of CryEngine 3]

I wonder how well it scales for flight simulation. The weather and sea effects lend themselves to Search and Rescue bad weather training.

[Fingers crossed for good weather on Tuesday]

lol I love you guys, I really do.

 

I recall the weather was totally **** and we had to process the wind and rain noises out of the engine recordings.

The irony is that I'm now mixing IN rain noises.

 

 

MY blog is supposed to get imported on a regular basis but hasn't done it in a while. Just as well as I tend to blog during coffee breaks when my brain is free-wheeling.

[The Zone: A final HD video tour]

"There are no people here, no PEOPLE" Just a constant flow of TV presenters and documentary makers.

 

Everytime I see your work I'm always wishing that the engine could stream in all that data instead of having to one-shot everything. It seriously curtails what you can do with it.

 

But stunning work, all the details you put in shows off the best of what the engine can do with a bit of hard work.

[iWerks]

Yes, first thing I did was to toss the mouse.

 

Those iMacs are expensive, this summer my kids went to do an animation workshop ran by the local city council. Their media room was like a modern class room, desks around the walls, each of which had a 27" iMac. My jaw fell when I thought how much all that stuff cost.

 

I remembered, one of my former clients used to be in charge of local education spending. He's now an Apple dealer, the swine. Our tax dollars at work.

 

Great machines though. Got to love a keyboard you can use for etching bathroom tiles. As hunks of metal go, it's almost as good as the long forgotten Memotech MTX 512. Almost solid alu chassis.

 

I'm quite eager to get to work on a Mac port of some games, I have Unity licenses for that and the iPhone but I'd much rather use LE tbh as I'm much more comfortable using it. If you want someone to help playing with Mac builds to iron things out then count me in. I'm happy to do some testing and trials for the sake of getting in some early familiarisation.

 

Can't stand iTunes though. How not to design a music library, it's a spreadsheet gone mad.

[Tuesday - map almost completed]

yes it's all flying and working, nothing posed in these shots.

[TSD started, avoiding work for a Split Second]

Thanks for the link, that was brilliantly LOL funny. Yes life WAS terrible in Thatchers Britain

Love the description of it being a cross between Nascar and Saving Private Ryan. Too funny.

[Virtual Waypoint Marker]

TrackIR is already supported and highly recommended. Joystick hat and mouse control also works but difficult to do that and fly hands-on.

[Not a good sign - drive IO failiure]

It's a fault on the motherboard al-right but odd that it's only directed at SATA HDDs and not SATA DVDs connected. It sees a 'mirror' of the HDD but can't access either and the HD access light will stay on from power up.

 

I was made redundant from my day job six months ago and now funds are so scarce I really can't afford to replace anything anymore. Really frustrating. But someone has kindly offered to help out with a new part so with any luck I might be able to get back to work in a week or so.

[Some sample LE3 code]

Since LE3 renders things in separate layers, worlds are not really needed for anything anymore. The only reason you would want one is if you had two different "simulations" running that you don't want mixed up. So let's say you had an editor, and in one of the windows you had a model preview, and you just wanted that model and camera by themselves in one world. Well, that's a good case for still using a world class.

 

We're using Portals use for walk-in vehicles and tents, interiors have their own world, including "inventory", hand carried objects to get around accuracy problems which layers wouldn't solve at all. Although if a streaming solution can overcome this problem then it wouldn't be necessary.

[ENG rebuilt]

I noticed it a while back when 2.32 was released. I used a corona for a sun glare effect and in 2.32 and I presume 2.40 still, you can still walk around it, and looks pretty weakly blended.

 

I'm a bit disappointed about that. I've now shelved the upgrade till that gets sorted. Will work on more systems till then.

[Move over, StarFox]

A red cube? That's like a red square, but in 3D? That's rad. We're all set to develop games for the awesome "Degenatron" system. Check out the amazing games it can play.

 

[ENG rebuilt]

Erm, bum.

 

Yes that's a bit of an issue isn't it? Use a lot of those for lights, sky objects etc. I take it those are still not working then?

[Combat-Helo to offer a special 2D mode]

Well, I do predict that 2D gaming on 2D monitors will be much bigger than that old 3D glasses stuff. And 2D gaming has got a lot of 'traction' in the industry already.