Darkworth

Afraid you are not understanding what I am saying completely Josh. We do not "have anything now". We have an outdated 2D CAD engine and the 2D drawing functionality we are wanting to add in, is choppy on the old engine. We want to switch to a DirectX or OpenGl base for rendering, both 2D and eventually very simple 3D... ie. no advanced lighting or effects of any kind.... 3D visualization of the 2D floorplans... thats it. But right now the main concern is a faster, smoother drawing engine for the 2D (IE no flickering when dragging the lines out etc). I was simply looking at Leadwerks due to it being contained within a dll and the out of the box capability to draw 2D on the screen, render 3D and create 3D meshes and texture them on the fly programatically. (amazing how many engines seem to be 100%, totaly reliant on pre-created geometery) However the point is moot since it has already been verified that the current release will not run on the older hardware that I have to support. (Not by choice mind you.) Thanks for the replies everyone, the results are what I assumed but now I at least know for sure.

Agreed, and if our intentions had anything to do with gameing or even a younger, less stubborn user base, I would not even be worrying about this... but 50-60 yr old men who have been using the same machine for 12 years to do thier work, and don't know how to use that computer for anything other then email and sketching, are not going to go buy new hardware to run their suddenly more advanced sketching application. lol As for "how much time will it take to develop the project" - we have just under 2 months to find and implement a suitable replacement for our current CAD based drawing engine. I am thinking that the best bet might be to just replace the CAD engine with directX use D2D for the 2D drawing to meet this next feature dev time frame, and when time allows, build our own 3D renderer using D3D. I was just hopeful of Leadwerks due to its "out of the box capabilities" and the fact that the engine was encompassed in a dll that could potentially be utilyzed by another application, making it a fairly striaght forward deal to replace our rendering surface with it.

on modern hardware yes... i think anything back as far as nvidia's 7800 class will support SM3.0 (might be off on the card version but think that was the first?) However unfortunately a large percentile of the people who use our software do not even come close to that for system specs. The company I work for creates a 2D sketching application that is used to draw floorplans and calculate building area. One of the "visions" they had in mind when hiring me was to give their application 3D visualization capability, however that project never actually made it onto the "TO DO List". They have found themselves in a position where, in order to add the newest functionality they want, they need to upgrade their drawing engine as the original is too slow for the new functionality's performance requirement. Since they have always wanted 3D capability in the application they have taksed me to research the pheasability of using game engine technology to replace the "rendering surface" and provide both 2d drawing capability and very light weight 3D rendering capability without high sys requirements and better rendering performance then the old CAD engine they are currently using for drawing. One thing that made leadwerks absolutely shine was that not only does it have both 2d drawing and 3d rendering methods exposed out of the box, but it also has the ability to create and texture 3D geometry on the fly programatically. Having that capability "out of the box" put Leadwerks miles ahead of any other package I have looked at so far as every other one I've seen up until now would require source code changes to have that ability. However due to the age range and computer literacy of a large portion of our customer base we cannot replace our drawing surface with any rendering technology that "Requires" advanced hardware to run. Normally this would not be an issue with most engines since our actual use of the 3D rendering will be so basic that it will not use any advanced feauters whatsoever and therefore even engines with higher specs have shown to run it at our usage levels adequately on the lower end machines we need to support. The killer for leadworks is that it doesnt seem to have the capability to use anything other then SM3.0, which I believe you just confirmed. Which is a sad day for us, because Leadwerks is the only engine I have found so far that supports all of our drawing / rendering needs "out of the box". It would have made a perfect candidate for using a game engine as a base rendering replacement.

Hello, we were evaluating Leadwerks Engine for a work project and it was looking to be the perfect find, when we realized that it did not seem to support any kind of backwards scaling for video requirements. Is there any way to get leadwerks to run on a system with a shader model 1.0 - 2.0 card? Or does perhaps, an older version of the engine have lesser requirements? Regardless of how well suited the engine seems to be for our needs, a shader model 3.0 requirement is a no questions asked deal breaker. We simply cannot impose that kind of system requirements for our project. If there is an older version that will run on lesser cards or a way to "fall back" to lower shader models then I think Leadwerks would be at the top of our choice list... others wise, I am afraid it will fall comletely off of that list. :/ Thanks in advance for any info.

Thanks ZioRed, soon as I copied the newton.dll into the build folder it started working.

Thanks. Ok I got that setup in a new C# project and am runnin ginto an error right off the bat. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Leadwerks; namespace LW_23_Test1 { public class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { // Initialize the graphics. Graphics.Initialize(800, 600); // Create a world. A world must be created before anything else. new World(); // Create a camera. } } } The new world call, new World(); is throwing an AccessViolationException saying: Here is the stack trace if it helps: " at Leadwerks.Core.CreateWorld()\r\n at Leadwerks.World..ctor()\r\n at LW_23_Test1.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\\Users\\TJames\\Documents\\Visual Studio 2008\\Projects\\LW_23_Test1\\LW_23_Test1\\Program.cs:line 17\r\n at System.AppDomain._nExecuteAssembly(Assembly assembly, String[] args)\r\n at System.AppDomain.ExecuteAssembly(String assemblyFile, Evidence assemblySecurity, String[] args)\r\n at Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.HostProc.RunUsersAssembly()\r\n at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state)\r\n at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)\r\n at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart()" Any ideas on this one?

Hello, I just bought the 2.3 upgrade and had a quick question. The advertisements for 2.3 state that it now officially supports C#, yet I see no evidence of that in the SDK download anywhere. Is the "official" C# support for 2.3 still done via Ubu's header dll or is it something new? Thanks in advance.