Swampdonkey

I wrote xpatcher2 about 6 months ago, it's became very popular for the exact needs you just mentioned.. Just thought i'd toss it in. Xpatcher2

My bad, just completely misunderstand how the scene and world commands handle stuff.. I was thinking scene loading was the world but it's not.. All is good. ty for the advice.

Hi Aggror, Considered doing that but how will this effect the outcome of loading a new world scene into memory? Continuing my search but just off hand is there way to return the worldID of a given entity?

A question about Freeworld(world). My apps starts up code consists of making several pivots for the cameras and what not.. Does calling freeworld() remove all these helper entities I created outside of the actual scene node being loaded? For example if i create a camerapivot then call myWorld=loadscene() then later on freeworld(myWorld) does my camerapivots or any other help entites i created get wiped as well? Also does manually freeing entities as a map is running effect the freeworld() command at all? Im getting a flury of crashes when calling freeworld()

Thanks for the links, although I had previously sifted through those articles.. I eventually came to the realization the problem lay within the model and the way I had constructed it.. Further tinkering with the model I was able to achieve proper picking. Thanks for the help.

Seems the problem i was having with Camerapick lay within the model itself, to many subobjects attached to it. Appears to be wroking now after optimizing the mesh!. Although i've now constructed a better way to handle these picks by hiding the world pivot and placing cubes within the meshes bounding box parameters and just simply checking against those cubes for fast picking.

Ah ha, thanks for that info - i was thinking entitypick was prefromed per entity not as a global sweep. That'll do it then. BTW is it possible that camerapick is returning the collision body to the picked.entity holder? Just curious but i think i'll go with entitypick for now. Thanks.

Thanks Lumooja, most helpful information there. On a side note - have you a clue what Camerapick is returning to the pick.entity class? At first i thought it was the entity handle but clearly it isnt, then i tried the surface handle; still not, last i tried the material handle again not. For optmization purposes I would like to use Camerapick over Entitypick since I'll have many diffrent structures to determine a mouse click and preforming a seperate Entitypick per structure per loop dosen't seem logical to me.

Thanks for the comments guys, Lumooja Entitypick may work, does entity pick use callbacks? Havent looked into Entitypicks much yet as I figured camerapick would be the best choice but ..

Well my eval period is just about over.. It's been a blast playing with the LE engine. I'd like to thank Leadwerks for the opertunity to try out the engine and I'd like to thank its community for help when I initality got started. During my month I've tried out a few projects but most recently I started working on some Tower Defense ideas using the sandbox and lua scripting. While I ran into many problems, some mine, some not; I felt that LE was all around ready to take on a major project. However some things held me back from 'jumping on board', camerapicks seemed flawed and differentiated from the documentation way to much - so much in fact i was forced to try a diffrent approach which ultimately failed, I never got Decals to work even though I followed the docs to the tee - later reading the older forums I found out they been broke since sometime from 2.0 to 2.27 but was never mentioned in any documentation or offical post by the LE team. This lead to many many wasted hours on my part. Overall I would like to keep LE in the back of mind for future projects, maybe once I feel i can trust it more. Granted I was bound to lua whereas normally I'd use a more optimized compiler but my over experience was very positive and I look forward to checking out this engine again in the future. And to those wondering about tower defense in LE, I can only say "HELL YES". In 3 weeks time we almost had a prototype working in pure lua script... thats gotta' count for something aye? Anyways, enough babbling from me.. I leave you all with a screenshot from my test pad Tower defense attempt under the Leadwerks label.. Fully working AI and Camera Railing.

Tower Defense in LD? that would be something along the lines of Defense Grid or something.. hmmm played around with it some but just don't know if LE is the way to go with my TD ideas.. Could be though!

Hi guys, thanks for the comments. The Tower Defense game we were working on, which BTW was nearly 90% complete, was terminated when windows 7 was released - the combo of dlls and effects we were using within b3d just wasnt happening under win7, it crashed and ran very poorly so we terminated the project, which was a shame . Anyways were looking for a new engine to start porting over some of the code to - I don't really want to use LE for a tower defense but I may just. I more greater plans in mind for a project in LE other than tower defense.

Hi, after recently posting in the forums regarding model conversions - I had recieved a few emails asking if I was going to make the house models avaiable. I've decided to do so at a super low price.. All proceedes go towards my 'leadwerks 2.3 license ... // Suburbs Model Pack 1 \\

Thanks, I got that book around here somewhere. Going to spend the day working on a shader to handle this job.

Ah yes I am pointing the smaller prong billboards tot he camera ala Speedtree - was just sitting here thinking of some optimizations. I Had wrote a shader for treeparty GDK that rotated the billboards to the camera. I'll see if I can salvage any of that shader code - if I recall it took quite awhile to make that shader so I hope some of it is reuseable. I see no other way to adjust the trunk bones but to use the script but usually theres only 5 to 8 bones to sway so it should hurt to much there.. Im hoping. Thanks for the pointer.

Well I found two problems when going back through my script, globalizing and just some bad referencing on my part but all fixed.. screenie shows numerous trees all behaving to the script now. http://gothasoft.com/temp/atree2.jpg Now to work on some grass/foliage and terrain textures.. Thanks for the support. I'm going to have to buy a license now just for all the help I've been recieving - rather I choose to use LE or not heh. PS: spec alpha layer is a bit hard on those prong textures - causing some see through holes but easily fixed.

Thanks for the replies, yah day 3 evaluating and so far LE is very very promising, have got some great results thus far. Wasnt really worried about compiling for speed more for the protection of the script but I suppose at this point thats irrelevant. Maybe some more info on what I'm attmepting will be helpful - I decided to make a custom boned tree trunk and apply mini prongs to it ala Speed-tree, wrote a script to manually animate the trunk and branches based off a given wind value. Prongs attached to the trunk joints act independant of the tree but update their location based on the tree branch swaying factor so they appear to be 100% attached. All working great so far but I still think I'm missing something with the scripting language as the script runs fine on one tree but as soon as I add a 2nd tree of the same kind to the scene the script seems to only run on the last tree I insert into the scene. Prongs are forced to face the camera per render so its obvisious the script is running a single instance only? One tree working fine, although a screenshot hardly shows the problem here - http://gothasoft.com/temp/atree1.jpg Not the prettiest tree but tosed together rather quickly for testing the scripts.

Thanks, seem to have fully caught onto the lua tie-ends with LE now.. Its nice to have this control. One last question for today - are Lua scripts attached to models compilable outside of adding all my media to a zip file and password protecting it?

Come on Lumooja thats to easy.. I dare not try that So am I understanding correctly that theres a base.lua script being called and this base script is setting all the globals that other scripts can use? I must admit globals throughtout a scripting language is a new one to mean, I can definitely see the benefits of having such capabilites. If I was to build a set of models and included scripts for some of the functionality would referencing this 'fw.main.camera' remain true for others loading the model into their LE sandbox? Thanks mate.

I'm attempting to explore the Lua scripting capabalites of the engine, interesting to say the least! My question is - how do I access things like the camera and such from a Update function inside a loaded model? In my models script I have this function function Update(world) Just to keep this question simple - say the model is a plain and I want to rotate it to face the camera each world update? I'm following the structure of the scripting system just fine - just not sure how to reference the camera in the model script since im not running a base game script for the map. The camera pointer should be set as a global i understand but if theres no game script in my setup where does the camera pointer get created so that I may access it via the models Update script? Thanks again guys, I never relaized the capablities LE had until trying out this Eval, it's qute an amazing language!

Hi, thanks for the comments and suggestions.. Just applied your suggestions Josh and it does look better. http://gothasoft.com/temp/housepic2.jpg As for the terrain and foliage, and trees.. just really tossed them in there to fill the scene, i plan on creating my own trees and foliage and terrain skins.. Most of the ground cover in that pic will be cement as I plan to add roads, sidewalks and fence sections ( suburb like ). This is really only my 2nd day playing with leadwerks engine, i predict a few more months to find its inner tweaks and subtle adjustments that will suit the scene just right. I've always wanted to try my hand at a game project based something off the Hunter Reckoning series on the xbox.. 1 - 4 player lan/internet 3rd person shooter/city/dungeon crawler with perhaps some mild cyber-punk overtones. After spending the better of the past 3 years on an arcade game and a tower defense title I'm ready to try something a little more graphically advanced, just need to convience my team of it now.. > I do plan on getting a license but it'll be towards the end of the month when income tax checks rolling in. For now I'm having fun with this excellent rendering quality and mild effort needed to do it.. That scene in any other engine would had took weeks if not longer to get looking near that good. Leadwerks has really grown up over the years.

OKay after tweaking the normals a bit more and playing with the spec maps to get until i figured out what LE likes most - i was able to complete the first two houses in my conversion attempt. Have a look below. And thanks Josh and others whom helped me sort out the shadowing mayhem. http://www.gothasoft.com/temp/housepic1.jpg I'm going to break from converting any more of the houses for a little bit while i construct some roads, mailboxes, sidewalks and street-signs. Then I'll return to convert the remainder of the houses.

Great news guys, i started looking at the mat files a little closer and removed a few of the defaulted settings and it just worked. In particular i removed these two lines and the artifacts went away: overlay=0 zsort=0 .. I'll post back a few shots when i get the normals and spec maps back in.. Thanks for the suggestions ..

Decided to leave that model alone and try another conversion. This model also produces the same effect as the first one: http://www.gothasoft.com/temp/prob3.jpg I'm at a loss here as the media included in the eval works fine.

Yah nothing wrong with the rendering quality, top notch there. I just installed the eval on my 2nd computer with a 8080gtx in it, getting identical results.