Flexman
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Posts posted by Flexman
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To be clear, it's not a war between users or conflict at all, it's a number of users and unpaid technical support jumping ship because they don't understand the gulf between the price point and what's being offered. A demo would have to be better than existing engines and I ain't seeing it, nice as it is (COMPARED TO LE2). Time is money and (for some) incurred savings of Leadwerks 3s workflow might pay back three-fold. We don't know.
To be fair, development is not a democracy nor do I think it should be. People should be allowed to make risky choices. But equally a community should be allowed to say 'hang on, what about us?'. Some folks see communities as baggage. Developers don't need groupies, they need clients.
Arrrgh, PowerRender flashbacks!
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So what is the correct amount of emotion? In your opinion?
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The black box included in the price had better contain a PS4 dev kit.
There's a lot going on here. Not least of which is that the existing community dearly loves Leadwerks engine, otherwise it wouldn't be so passionate about it. Some of us have been around years, helping, support new users, each other. Spreading the word through tweets, creating demos, posting videos, writing tutorials. We've seen members pass away (Gimpy) and we all feel that in some way, we are shareholders. As a community we have intrinsic value. In a real sense, our collective continuity helped bring Leadwerks as an entity to this place.
And yesterday, to quote one commentator, we were given the proverbial "**** off" from the very top.
After investing time in taking part in Q&As, lengthy and occasionally heated debates about Leadwerks 3, including stupid things such as its name, some feel a sense of betrayal. By turning ones back on a community that brought you to where you are, it sets a poor tone for anyone looking into a business to perhaps invest.
Overall the general feeling I'm hearing is befuddlement over not just the cost, but the structure. Leadwerks can have its cake AND eat it, but it needs to be flexible and not shaft its core market.
I urge Josh to rethink the pricing and how modules can be added. There are many sound, tried and tested ways to tease money out of its users. Once you have users 'buy in', it is easier to sell them upgrades over time. By gating your customers at the door they will soon find they can spend their money elsewhere.
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And the bottom of the web page, on the right, the toolbar thingy.
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Can we import geometry used for "Brushes"? In the editor?
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I figure they will release on 13/13/13
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It's like someone booked the room but the cake didn't show up.
Consoles have basically become EA, Activision and UBISoft delivery systems. Nobody else need apply as the production costs have once again gone through the roof.
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Ah yes, XFORM reset. Yup, remembered we had to do that pretty much on every export.
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What was the solution btw?
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Can't see the screenshot for some reason?
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Blimey Pixel, sorry to see you go. I hope it's only temporary, I know how much pressure there is as a family man. If you want to exercise your creative musical talents instead for a helicopter combat type game then keep in touch.
Big man hug.
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It sounds like...(I might be misunderstanding) you want to update a texture of an entity in your scene with the content of some buffer, onto which you can draw with whatever you want. This is actually pretty easy to do in Leadwerks. You might want to look into Buffers and binding textures. Someone can probably post an example of this for guidance.
You could do worse than take a look at the Theora video plugin in the Asset store. It's a bit technical but it attaches a Theora video buffer to a surface in a LUA entity.
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I don't often say this, but what a ****. Just shut up and make something.
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Two weeks
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IS OUYA Tuio compatible (http://www.tuio.org/)?
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A book on LE programming would likely cover general principles of putting a project together using mostly language agnostic techniques but specific LE3 implementation. I'm sure it will happen when the release has matured a bit. I only mention it as it was something I wanted to do a little while after my current book is released (any time now). But there's a lot of cool contributors out there and big questions over LE3, how well it will work in the wild and the roadmap.
I'm pretty sure you can take many mobile projects and give them the LE3 treatment, seems it's not going to be that big a departure from how LE2 worked on the outside. I already got an RPAG project (rapidly playable adventure game) lined up to test how well LE3 and programmer can implement a cross platform project. I already wrote it for Unity and AGK so it's a known quantity. Should fill in about 150 easily, 200 pages if one wanted to cover a lot of ground but that's would be a harder sell to a publisher.
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I think the point is,it's not the engine 'faking' so much as the talent and technical skills using assets in a way to create lush visuals to fool the eye. The black art of visual game development. Some of these guys keep their secrets close to their chest. Sometime the engine adds a button to do it, "Generate lightmaps" in Unity comes to mind. One-click scene improvement.
And now everyone and their dog are doing stuff like baked ambient occlusion to create extra depth.
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I've certainly had my fair share of performance issues with LE2. But experience proved (and a big thanks to my pal DaveH for putting in many hours of experimentation) that you need to be strategic with how you use the engine. In that sense it's no different from many other engines.
By default most scenes, even near empty ones will chew the hell out of the fill rate because of all the buffers for the different worlds it's creating and updating in the framework. It's all too easy to use models that suck the performance out. Create minimal physics hull shapes. Tweak the LOD ranges and don't have shadows active on everything. Also improper use of shaders in materials, using texture channels that are not initialised, so on and so on.
Spraying grass and trees everywhere isn't going to win any performance awards. If you look at vegetation coverage in some games, take Apache Air Assault for example, bushes and grass can share the same scale as a house.
Games cheat like crazy for performance, performance testing during development is designed to focus on that, it's not something your average tinker developer will think about much unless they have to.
For what you get with Leadwerks 2, it's pretty OK for bangs per buck but you have to work at it to tweak performance. Some of the stuff we did just for the helicopter cockpit in our game required *several* re-organisations of the model hierarchy so that it worked in favour of how the engine culled objects. This is what games do.
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A smart chap implemented it in a Unity webplayer demo here http://www.inear.se/city/demo1/
And his blog is here so you can read up on some the the optimisations he did, as well as download the shader code. http://www.inear.se/2011/02/interior-mapping-in-unity3d/
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Cheers, got it working now. All I need now is a work free weekend to exploit the cool possibilities your extensions have opened up. Thanks .
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It could be time for a remake of BMX Ninja
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i also toyed with the prospect of making a space travel game a while back...
the idea of journeying to another planet and landing on it has always fascinated me...
--Mike
Would this have included Sub-Space? :-)
As for the original posters query. Many useful answers, I'll just add to this the following...
You can have multiple "Worlds" (TWorld objects) and switch between them as you switch between the different play modes, Or use one and swap all the necessary settings as required. I'd be tempted to go for multiple words because later it's possible to have your space station interior with windows that look out into the space world (that takes some fiddling with the scene renderer but I've done "portalisation" with Leadwerks 2.x)..
So many different ways you can achieve what you want.
The sky sphere would work well too. Although if it was a skybox you can do advanced things like render a cubemap to it The source could be another TWorld populated by tiny nebulae and galaxies, then when you warp to a new sector you can slowly move the camera in the "nebulae" world and use the camera to update the local player skybox. This is mixing scales to layer a scene. Someone posted a CreateCubemap function somewhere a while back that takes views from a camera and rendered it to six buffers that can be painted onto each side of a box.
So many cool things you can do with a bit of work.
Hope that's not too much info. It's hard to explain clearly without a set if diagrams.
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How up to date is the ENGINE.BMX for making the DLL? Is it required for fixes made to the TEntity hierarchy?
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Bloody hell, he's serious.
Ken, FWIW you've done great things and all props to you. As always, right tool for the right job. Because time is money. Don't be a stranger.
Just a suggestion, but in the meantime why don't you write up your experiences in a book. Or some Leadwerks magic. A lot of assembly is required to get this engine to do anything beyond the trivial but it's worth it.
I'm reminded of something a rep for EPIC said once at GDC, "You can make kind of game you want, so long as it's our game". Meaning the engine was really good for one kind of game.
Don't be a stranger.
LE3 Pricing Strategy
in General Discussion
Posted
I used to pay regular maintenance fees for BLIDE, I had no problem with that. When your time tuns out, pay a small fee to continue to download updates. It was more continuity insurance.