[LOD system questions]

I don't really see how you would use tessellation for a LOD system - it's not just about the amount of triangles but also where they are placed/how they are oriented.

 

eg: a character viewed from 10m away could make do with a face made 100 polys or less the same character when viewed up close may have 1000s of polygons in the face to convey expressions and personality - tessellation would have no way of creating that detail

[Real Time GPU monitoring tools]

It's been a while since I used windows but I seem to recall that there was a "speed dial" showing how hard the GFX card was working in the catalyst control panel ( might have been an XFX thing tho )

[Leadwerks 3 FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions]

@Guppy

Are ya a lawyer or something?

 

Heaven forbid - I am married to one tho

[Leadwerks 3 FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions]

How many games can I publisch with 1 Leadwerks license?

 

"publish"

 

Which platforms does the Leadwerks engine support?

3.1 currently only works for Windows. Linux, MacOS, iOS and Android will follow.

3.0 works on Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS

 

Should mention OUYA, while it's "just" another android machine it differs by having a controller rather than touch based interface.

 

 

Which version of OpenGL does the engine use?

The current version uses OpenGL 2.0. OpenGL 4.0 will be supported as of 3.1

 

 

Should be

The current version uses OpenGL 2.0. OpenGL 4.0 will be required as of 3.1

 

 

 

 

Is there a free to use version for Leadwerks.1 3?

 

"3.1" ~

 

What media formats are supported?

 

Here should properly be a mention of the (yet to be) made blender integration

 

 

And finally a few words on upgrades as that seems to be a popular question

[Instance state/DNA in shader?]

[...]

1) A custom shader (I created one with the help of shamdar for 3.0) that allows basically a table of textures inside 1 texture and it uses the SetColor() function to decide on which one to pick. I think this is the most efficient way to do it.

[...]

 

This was pretty much what I had planed on - I had hoped to be able to pass a larger genome than 4 floats tho

[Instance state/DNA in shader?]

It's a bit strange tho that http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/documentation/_/command-reference/entity/entityinstance-r173 is undocumented

 

What exactly is the relationship between entity and instance - I mean I assume that :instance() returns a entity (because the command reference does not have a instance class) that is an instance of the entity ( as opposed to a full fledged copy ) - but what variables are instanced what is private/copied? - IE would calling :setColor(...) affect just the instance or all entities?

[Could someone please explain parent space & matrix?]

@shadmar - surely you have that backwards?

[Instance state/DNA in shader?]

It's a bit more complex than that as the idea involves a texture atlas, but that function would allow me to set up to 8 floats of information.

 

Not crazy about it being floats but I suppose that can be worked with, thanks.

 

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/documentation/_/command-reference/entity/entitysetcolor-r162

[Instance state/DNA in shader?]

Say I have a "orc" model from this model I wish to create 100 instances.

In order to give the illusion of diversity these would be slightly differently scaled on x,y,z axis ( I believe this is possible with LE, correct me if I am wrong ) - but In order to further create diversion it would be nice if I could alter their hues slightly since the shader applies the texture it would need to know something about this model - namely it's state or DNA - is it possible to make this information available to the shader on a per instance basis?

 

I suspect it is possible given that each instance already tracks it own animation state, but I'd like to know for sure.

[Another small contribution]

super usefull for any type of game, but please state license. ( I imagnie it's CC-BY )

[Animated shaders and workflow]

.

[Animated shaders and workflow]

Ah your talking about the skinning shader

 

Rich source of confusion that skinning and animation means differenting to shaders than to modelers ^^

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation

 

"In most state-of-the-art graphical engines, the skinning process is done on the GPU thanks to a shader program"

 

Basically its done on a shader because due to parallelization it's much, much faster than doing it on cpu - or as Josh likes to claim it's free, that is not entirely true but it's close enough

 

 

 

Edited to fix wikipedia quote screwing up the post

[Animated shaders and workflow]

you seem to be continuing a conversation here - only the only post made so far is yours?

[Small contribution]

The shadow of this guy seems to always be of him with his gun out. Any idea what's up with that? It's like the shadow isn't animating with the model.

 

The shadow is generated by the engine so if it's not animating then it's a bug with the gpu skinning

[Free resources]

Made one of those days ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/Leadwerks/comments/1wokdx/free_models_textures_sounds/

 

I'll dig through them and add them to the list this weekend when I can find the time - do beware tho that some of them ( like the Ryzom link ) use questionable/unsafe/cancerous licensing terms.

 

I should properly also explain the licenses a bit.

[Move character in direction of mouse cursor]

arccos(a dot b / |a||b| )

[Free resources]

Thats a nice list. Do you mind if I add this to the User guide?

 

Not at all

[Free resources]

This gets asked often enough that we should properly dedicate a thread to it:

 

 

Each site on this list has their own license terms - be sure to read them

 

Textures:

http://cgtextures.com/

http://texturemate.com/

http://textures.thefree3dmodels.com/

 

Models:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/

http://tf3dm.com/3d-models/ [uses copy righted textures and materials]

http://opengameart.org/

http://www.katorlegaz.com/3d_models/index.php

http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/3D-Models?max_price=0&min_price=0

 

 

2D / Ui:

http://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/

http://opengameart.org/

http://www.lostgarden.com/search/label/free%20game%20graphics

http://www.reinerstilesets.de/

http://openfontlibrary.org/

 

 

Music:

http://www.freesound.org/

http://naturesoundsfor.me/

http://freemusicarchive.org/

http://soundimage.org/

 

 

Animation / Motion capture:

http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/

http://www.mocapdata.com/index.cgi?category_id=19053

 

Theory/Books

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_part01.html

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_part01.html

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch01.html

http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/ (for all the mincraft cloners )

 

"Safe" licenses include ( but not limited to )

CC-0

CC-BY

MIT

Apache

BSD

 

"Unsafe" licenses include ( again not limited to )

GPL

CC-BY-SA

CC-BY-SA-NC

 

 

 

I'll add descriptions and license tags to the links later, in the mean time feel free to contribute your own links

[I need help finding resources for my game. Also looking for interested people to work with.]

There should be a sticky with this tbh.

 

 

Each site on this list has their own license terms - be sure to read them

 

Textures:

http://cgtextures.com/

http://texturemate.com/

http://textures.thefree3dmodels.com/

 

Models:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/

tf3dm.com/3d-models/

http://opengameart.org/

http://www.katorlegaz.com/3d_models/index.php

 

2D / Ui:

http://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/

http://opengameart.org/

http://www.lostgarden.com/search/label/free%20game%20graphics

http://www.reinerstilesets.de/

http://openfontlibrary.org/

 

 

Music:

http://www.freesound.org/

http://naturesoundsfor.me/

http://freemusicarchive.org/

 

 

Animation / Motion capture:

http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/

http://www.mocapdata.com/index.cgi?category_id=19053

 

 

"Safe" licenses include ( but not limited to )

CC-0

CC-BY

MIT

Apache

BSD

 

"Unsafe" licenses include ( again not limited to )

GPL

CC-BY-SA

CC-BY-SA-NC

[.fbx files containing more than 1 model, is there a way to use the single parts in Leadwerks 3.1?]

@Guppy :

Objects number is performance problem for 3D engines.

For trees, better use engine tree painting system, if your game is not terrain based, keeping trees as one model is lot more fast for the engine than have 5 individual trees.

We are going off topic here but that's a really weird way to look at it - I mean it would properly also be faster if I replaced every single model with a cube, but as they say diversity is the spice of life. And if I decide to build my forest out of 5 different base trees where instances can then be randomly rotated and scaled then I don't see why any modern day engine should struggle with that

[.fbx files containing more than 1 model, is there a way to use the single parts in Leadwerks 3.1?]

. I'd like to see a way to extract those sub objects to use them individually, as it is possible in Unity3d for e.g. The problem is: Several finished model files you can buy actually are (!) multiobject .fbx files.

 

A common example of this is for instance a tree pack with say 5 trees that all share the same leaf/bark textures.

 

It stands to reason that you'd be able to import the fbx file containing all 5 trees and then use them as individual objects/prefabs/models ( not sure what term LE uses in the editor )

[Level of Detail support?]

Nope instancing is instancing and don't really need LOD if you don't want to put it.

 

I think you misunderstood me - I mean that even if you tried solving the scenario I put forth with instancing you would have to use LOD in addition that that anyway because instancing in it self isn't enough. I did not mean that instancing requires LOD, hope that clears it up

 

As for the shader in g3ch16 I dont see any reason why you couldn't put that in your LE3 project

[Level of Detail support?]

If it's an antiquated idea then please do elaborate on how you would solve this scenario with out heavy use of LOD;

 

God sim type game where you may have in the 1000s of units on screen at any one time but still have possibility to zoom in on a few (or even one) - without LOD support you would have to use low poly models even when up close.

 

even with instancing you need different LOD models:

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch02.html

 

or maybe I'm missing something here?

[Setting up SVN on Ubuntu 12.04]

Good job think I'll write on up for mercurial

[Level of Detail support?]

Was searching the forums for how to include lower level of detail models for leadworks, when to my surprise I learned that the current incarnation of the engine doesn't support it.

 

Is this something that is planned for 3.1? I'm not talking about automatic lod or anything fancy like that, just plain old swapping hi poly models for lower poly versions based on viewing distance of the instance