[Terrain in Leadwerks 5]

2 hours ago, Josh said:

@martyj Currently there is a bug that randomly makes the whole terrain black. Probably texture data not being sent correctly to the GPU. I need to fix that, and I might implement directional light shadows before an update, if they don't take too much time.

Try running it on an AMD card.

Back when I was working on OpenGL I had a bug where a uniform was set to zero by default on Nvidia, yet it was randomized on AMD.

If the terrain flashes random colors, you know that's your issue.

[Terrain in Leadwerks 5]

Wonderful blog post!

When can we get a new "beta" for this?

Vegetation is the only feature missing to complete everything I need for where I am going with my game. I will be hiring a full time content creator on Oct 1st, so this is exciting.
 

[Three improvements I made to Leadwerks Game Engine 5 today]

I would like to see Terrain and Vegetation.

I'd rather see these before lighting tbh. If I could get a "playable" version of World Factions, that doesn't require a $500 graphics card, it would allow me to hire content developers to develop content until LE5 can deliver the visuals.

*Is planning on hiring a full-time content developer in 2 months*

From a marketing standpoint, I could see how lighting would be preferred though.
 

[Coroutine Sequences]

Very similar to how I did my cutscenes.

It would be nice if Leadwerks supported this as well, but allowed the user-interface to add co-routines. 

For my cutscenes, I have things like

Start Animation,
Go to position,

Go to rotation.

You could even have a "Execute Lua Function".


I like it!

[The Asset Loader Class]

This will help tremendously!
 

[Fun with JSON]

11 hours ago, reepblue said:

If the loading speed is long enough to make a sandwich and come back on something like The Zone, then you have a problem. Other than that, I'm looking forward to text formatted maps.?

You'll spend more time loading assets than you ever would parsing a JSON file.
 

[Fun with JSON]

I love the idea of having JSON for scene data.

This would allow for multiple people to make map changes using version control.

For data like heightmap, you could even store it as a base64 encoded text. By storing as base64 text, it could also allow to users to modify different parts of the heightmap at the same time without issues

[Plugins Expanded]

@reepblue You can compile with Visual Studio compiler using Makefiles.

Have a look at CMake.

[Umbra Sucks. Check out our Easy No-Bake Occlusion Culling]

That's really awesome!

[Clustered Forward Rendering]

Will there be an option to have Turbo out sooner for C++ folk?

[What Makes a Good Brand Name?]

Can we upgrade turbo with NOS?

Turbo = Lua
Nos = C++?

 

[Three improvements I made to Leadwerks Game Engine 5 today]

When will we see textured models in the LE5 demos?

[Animation Tweening]

On 5/13/2018 at 2:22 AM, Josh said:

Mind you, this is onscreen characters, not total characters in the world. Anything more than this and we would probably want to use a sprite sheet with pre-rendered frames to draw far away characters.

I found that in my game it doesn't make sense to render animations far away. A player can't notice it, and it saves CPU load. In fact, I even ignore my whole update loop if the entity is too far. Npcs don't need to be walking around, ect when they are far either.

Maybe if entities had a similar dropdown of ViewRange for animations, Near, Far, Infinite, ect, Leadwerks engine as a whole can do this logic. I'd even love an option for UpdateRange.

For example: Animating an NPC in my game doesn't make sense at 30 meters, but animating my Dragon makes sense to about 100 meters.

For updating, NPCs don't need to walk around unless they are within 50 meters of a player, my dragon will need to update across the whole map.

This would help with the bottleknecks of the PCI express bus as we won't be sending constant animation updates for every entity.

[Animation Tweening]

I totally can't wait to run my game with LE5.
 

[Building a Zero-Overhead Renderer]

Will this feature be released in Leadwerks 4.X or just in 5.0?

If it's just in 5.0, will we get a Linux build soon?

[Plugins in Leadwerks Game Engine 5]

5 hours ago, Josh said:

I am also considering the Squirrel script language. It's like a cross between Lua and C++:
http://www.squirrel-lang.org/

Valve is using it for a lot of their games.

Why not python?

• Large library set.
• Used in physics (Sells of Leadwerks Enterprise)
• Easy to learn
• Supports OOP or static methods.
• Easy integration with existing C++ library. http://www.swig.org/tutorial.html
• Ability to pre-compile scripting code.

[Plugins in Leadwerks Game Engine 5]

Will this allow us to draw 3D elements on the 3rd view? Or save data to an entity in the GetKeyValue/SetKeyValue functions?

It would be nice to automatically re-skin NPCs in my game based upon my backend game data.

[TeamSpeak]

1 hour ago, Josh said:

This really has nothing to do with the application called “TeamSpeak”.

Maybe I misunderstood.

Is this just Teamspeak client bindings, so the user will have to install Teamspeak, or is Leadwerks shipping with a Teamspeak client to support in-game communication?

[TeamSpeak]

Will we have the option to use our own teamspeak server?

[How CLion saved 2 months of work]

@Ma-Shell I have a sync ignore on source code so that other developers can work on development at the same time. So I use ownCloud to only sync resources.

[How CLion saved 2 months of work]

I'm using GIT for source control and ownCloud for syncing assets.

I don't version any assets unfortunately.

[How infinite terrain can be implemented in Leadwerks Engine 5]

Would that be modifying VegiationLayer::filtermap?

I assume vegetation is defined by an image with the same size as the Terrain's height map. If colored it would show that vegetation. 0 = no possible vegetation?

Updating the vegetation texture would update the vegetation on the GPU? (Haven't looked at any shaders yet)

[How infinite terrain can be implemented in Leadwerks Engine 5]

4 minutes ago, Josh said:

The vegetation can easily be infinite.  Of course you will only have cities and towns here and there, and not everywhere.

So I am pretty sure we can either have infinite or very very large terrains.

So one thing I would like, if not impossible, is the ability to hide a specific item in the vegetation layer.

For example:

A player walks up and cuts down a tree.

We could hide that instance of the tree and replace it with an instanced object to perform, say a dropping animation.

Is this currently possible? Would be really useful for infinite based content to have all the vegetation intractable.
 

[How infinite terrain can be implemented in Leadwerks Engine 5]

Infinite terrain would be really cool, but how do you add infinite content to infinite terrain?

It would be wonderful for a sandbox type of game

[Making Leadwerks.com More Scalable]

If you hosted with AWS as well, you could clone the whole server image with the click of a button.

AWS is expensive though IMO.

I have my stuff hosted with Linode. 2 VMs. 1 for the websites, the other for the game server.


If you really wanted to get crazy, you could setup hosting in two different data centers having your database replicated between them. Then if something goes down you can just switch DNS over to the 2nd data center.