Christian Clavet

I've seen some tools that can carve caves in terrain, but they use Voxels, then smooth out the result. They have to add stuff then to adjust the smoothness.

Looking at this comments and that you want to individually add/remove instances. How about using a texture mask on the terrain to define the area of coverage? You could use it to paint tree and vegetation... The texture mask could surely be used directly by the shader. I'm not able to do this myself but I think that could be possible.

Lol, I've build recently a Linux Mint development machine based on Elite 120 case! I just need to add a dedicated GPU for starting there with Leadwerk.

Really nice Josh! Is there a specific size for the preview picture?

Hi, Josh as implemented CSG exporting to meshes that you could load in Blender as reference and build over them in more details there. It's best to start with CSG first to test your ideas in gameplay and see if it's fun, then export that as reference to make it pretty when you think the design of the house is adequate for your need. That's a good idea that you created the house in parts, since you will be able to exchanges some parts and create variations. You could keep some of the CSG and use them only for collision. (make them invisible and don't put collision on the blender meshes). Perhaps you won't need them after, seen that Josh added Convex Decomposition that should create a optimized collision models from a mesh automatically. (Not tested it yet)

I think the documentation is more than adequate for some with programming skills.. But perhaps (Think I've already seen 1 or 2 like that) do some video tutorial, about creating a single SIMPLE game from A to Z using Leadwerk.

Cool. But for the inventory, you could assign a weight limit to your character (or backpacks) and add weight info on each items. You would need a "page" button on the inventory if it use all the visible slots. 15 slots seem ok, but it would feel strange if for example your character got 15 paperclips and could not carry more... Grimrock use this mechanic and it work really well. (They even add strength increase properties over time so the character could carry even more)

Cool! Happy to see that we will have better water! Is vegetation painting is still on the dev list? I'm just still wondering how they can achieve the wave effect on the beach... Perhaps some generated planes that blend with the ocean. That seem the hardest thing to do!

Hi, This open source project has managed to get a way to bake the global illumination into "light sampler" in their environment lighting. I think they use a deffered rendering system and their source is MIT so you can check if it's possible to have that in Leadwerks and you will not need to publish back the code. I don't know how they proceed, but the result is really impressive!! Check here.

That is a good thing that this happened. Perhaps in future versions, Leadwerk would split in multiple archives when it's more than 2Gb. I've just buyed "Shadow of Mordor" on steam and it's 37Gb!!

Hi, Tjheldna! The clothing look absolutely incredible! Can you show a close-up of the face? It seem to me the eyes are a little bit off (position). Excellent work!

Nice improvement over the current one! Once the sequences are created, can we for example, rename and/or change the frames in the named sequence or have delete and recreate it?

If the recording is fine and you have issues on your end, it might be probably a hardware issue with your GPU. Most of the time, this is due to the chip that overheated. If you can check the temperature.

Hi, I've done a small test with the new .VMF export and it seem to work well here. I used "Crafty" to then convert this into a .OBJ that I was able to load in Max and see it. The only thing that is required is that your BSP geometry have a material, because it's needed by "Crafty". (Here is the link to the convertion tool if you need it: http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=46) So now I'm really happy with this, since I can now have level references, that I can re-use inside a modeling application to make it pretty. Will also be useful so I can create a "box" around a character export the box, then have a relative size reference for a character in my modeling application. I don't know if you can export everything but it work well with brushes, and for me that's mostly all that I was needing to design levels. Thanks Josh!

Wow! Good work! Is the update available on 3.1 non-steam?

You are not required to code in multi-threading to do streamed loading. (Could perhaps increase the performance, that all). I think what BES want to achieve is loading progressively most the time but continue the execution of the application. Most frameworks (not sure for LE, but been asking for this in Irrlicht for years and they are not ready for it), do their loading once and then resume the application. What is needed is a method to check if the application is loading (like IsLoading()) if true then update some kind of loader manager, at in the main loop of the application, so you can do other stuff in your application while you are loading. The loader manager then will load pictures, and objects not entirely but build their buffers by steps at each update and they will have also a flag to be monitored like: MyModel->IsLoaded() to check if this model is completely loaded then be used in the scene. If the model have some textures, the same rules applies, until they are fully loaded it can't be displayed. (pointer will not be available to the renderer) What this does, is that it allow to load progressively assets in your game. As BES was talking, loading models as the player is getting near of it then unload them when the player is far. If you take the standard approach, you need to load the entire level AT ONCE (So wait for the whole level to load), also you need to calculate a proper size for your level (for the memory you can use). Steamed loading of a level, is different as you can define for about any size for your level, then you define manually a proper distance to load/unload the assets. So you could define a bigger distance if your user have more ram in his system. As I said multithreading can perhaps increase the performance (complicate also) but is not a requirement. As for this kind of implementation being native of LE would require extensive modifications. If it's not done, Josh would have a lot of work to make this happen. Another thing to note, is that using streamed loaders will only work well with relatively small objects. For example, a terrain would require a tiled/streamed loader. With thoses big objects, it get more complicated. Sometime, it's so big that you need to add LOD to the tiling system. (Planet rendering, very big terrains, etc)

Great post Josh! Really like this! Too bad that I am forced to use Intel hardware. For now; for me Leadwerk will be staying on windows. (Need intel linux driver for debugging GLSL shaders on Linux and right now it's GL compliant to 3.3) Unless I find another solution to debug shaders that would work on Intel. I can't put a graphic card in there and lose compatibility with their hardware (Their compiler syntax is the most strict of all, and I need it for my other project: IRB) EDIT: Found good news. The driver provided by intel is open source and is used primilary on the MESA project. And from what I searched they could be able to make it GL4.0 compatible by the end of the year. I now understand why we need "proprietary" drivers to run this. Open source is not there yet. Updated as far as I could and the driver now is compliant Gl3.3 I really feel, that the time is good, in not that far, the Open Source drivers will be able support GL4.0 and Leadwerk will be there.

Thanks! The new script installed the missing stuff. The Leadwerks_updater started and is installing the application now. Uh oh! I will need to get a better video card in there. The intel HD4600 was good but only support Gl3.3 on Linux. (Strangely, their driver support GL4.0 on Windows) But now the application install and launch.

Hi, Just got 14.04 64bit (first install on a new rig). The install will fail because the ia32-libs-multiarchs is no longer available. How can I get it? The updater won't lauch without it. Checked with google and seen it had been removed in 13.10 (supposedly because they considered this a huge hack)

Shadmar, can you post a test with and without the shadows? YouGroove got a point that the scene is really too simplistic to really see the difference. Shadow calculations in a scene like that would be really fast. Perhaps adding some walls? I'm about sure, that if rendering optimization were made there in shadow rendering first, we could gain more FPS than in other areas. With proper lightmapping, on a "static" scene, shadowing could be faked, and we would get high FPS and simulate high quality. Putting shadowing everywhere at the moment I think, kill the performance. I see that Josh give the option on the editor to decide to calculate shadows with models. And from what I see so far, I would only try to cast shadows from moving models everything else would be "baked" in the scene. From what I've learned so far, it's not alway the tools that give good results but on how we use them. And in this area, it a game of illusions. (I take for example "God of war" that achieved incredible results on the PS3). Trying to get "realtime" rendering that would match this is unrealistic with a single or small team in my opinion.

Hi, YouGroove. I'm not totally sure the lightning system would need much optimization, for me its performance is decent. Can you test again by putting all shadow off? I think it's the shadow rendering that eat the more ms per frame. For the lightmapping, if we can do it externally (meshes + brushes), and bring it back (using a material shader), would be fine. For lighting, would be nice if we could have shaders that use "spherical harmonics" and that we could render "samplers"(like an environment cube map) to light the models. I don't know much how this work, but seen results and it's seem to really mimic global illumination.

Hi, If you plan on doing this, if we could also have the option export the lights as a reference so we can "match" the base lighting in LE back in the 3D Software that would also really nice! (could be a simple cube named "light"). That could allow us to define a base lighting in LE and export it to a 3D software to create and bake lightmaps to static models of environments. If that is done, is there a way to tell a model to not take any lights, or selected lights (like self illuminated)? It would receive the shadows, but the lights already there will not shade the model. Selected lights would be better, in case there is something dynamic in the environment like a campfire.

Hi, YouGroove! Yes, asked for this. And got answered that the lightmapping will never come back. Then I learned that the old way of doing the lightmaps (light baking) was about of the same quality of the current lights. So I perfectly understand now why it's not coming back. As for improvement in lighting to mimic the effects of Global Illumination, Josh said he was thinking of something. Seeing really impressive stuff made by UBI in their latest games using some kind of "sampler spheres" they seem to use to light the level. For doing "quality/realistic" rendering of environment, using this version of the engine, I hope the editor will be able to export the CSG models we create, so we could "lightmap" ourself in a 3D application then import and replace the current "reference" we have with one that has better overall quality (if we can export the mesh, we can also improve the details). When I was modding with the "source engine" we used to create the level using the CSG tools to have a fast prototype, define the gameplay, then export the models to artists to improve the model, then import it and use the CSG for collision only. I hope to be able to do the same. If I need to create a "realistic" level, right now, it's still possible, but the level would have to be created outside LE from the start.

Since we have the post-process system, It's only a matter of creating the shader now. Perhaps someone that's good with shader could take that information for creating one for LE

Ha! Thanks. I now fully understand why Josh did not want to incorporate the lightmap system. Unity use BEAST, that is a middleware, acquired by Autodesk now, so they've not done it themselve and used another product to do it, since it require lot of work. I was hoping to get better lighting effects on CSG (I used that a lot when I was modding with SourceSDK). Now, I'll hope that Josh would implement a way to allow the editor to export the CSG to external applications so we can use the level design we've done with the editor using the CSG and have a reference on the geometry for modeling assets that have baked global illumination.