paramecij

Well I think i figured it out.. I need to do a couple tests more to be sure, but it seems if I leave windows running for too long there's some weird time related issue, i know timeGetTime() wraps around after 49 days, but I didn't have it running for so long.. there's also known issues with QueryPerformanceCounter and laptops, which throttle down the CPU to save battery power, which can give inaccurate readings.. I remember running into similar problems in the past (not with LE), but this is on a different laptop almost on a fresh windows install, the only thing in common I think is that I had windows running for a few days and things went bonkers (in a similar fashion) and after a restart, all was back to normal...

I figured it out, it's a timing issue with windows and LE, ..don't let your windows run for too long

Oh, you can make those expensive glasses yourself, even turn regular LCD into 3DTV with the right kind of cellophane for like 10$... i've experimented with this stuff a lot.. and other "VR" methods, I even written my own webcam lights/eyes tracker.. if you're lucky enough to own a projector, you must try build yourself one of these: I haven't looked at your shader yet, but there's some things that can be done to make red/cyan anaglyph more pleasing and minimize eye strain. The biggest offender is the red channel, so it's best to tone it down, usually they put in the red channel just the grayscale version of the image and in cyan only the green and blue, or use a specialized weighted grayscale for the red channel.. I can't find the website right now which had great articles about optimizing red/cyan colors.. another thing is the separation of the left and right images, if it's too big, it causes a LOT of strain on the eye and if it's too little the 3d effect diminishes leaving only dull colors.. From the looks of it you made this as a post filter only? Going from single rendered frame? ... i've never thought you can get as much out of it.. the way i've done it was with 2 seperate renders of my scene (with dynamic offset depending on where the view focus was), but it halved my frame rate this way ... will try your method out

It's not media or code related, the files which worked before haven't changed a bit, I even tested it with the crawler.gmf that came with one of the official tutorials.. I think it's either hardware/driver or OS in relation to LE that's causing this.. as I said nothing changed, everything worked .. I just came back a couple of hours and everything animated blows up all of the sudden, ... I remember Josh saying something about some issues with skinning, that's why I asked here first, .. if everything fails I'll try to restore my system to a previous image I made or a fresh OS install. (laptop running vista 64, nvidia 8800) Yeah, I have bought the dexsoft elite soldier, when I asked dexsoft for assistance converting it to GMF(seeing that they have some models already converted) they pointed me to UU3D, when I asked on the forum everyone and their cat (even Josh) told me to get UU3D - maybe UU3D should come bundled with the engine license then .. of course I tried first converting with the supplied converters, but there's always a problem or two..

I'm still trying to convert most of my bought models to GMF (with little luck thanks to stupid UU3D policy to sell only to specific countries .. i've bought Milkshape3D but it doesn't export animated models to gmf and if I export to fbx from milkshape there's even more problems) .. so much money wasted !! Now i'm doing my own modelling and animating and everything seemed to work fine (but it will set me back A LOT) .. but i've run into another strange problem, suddenly skinning doesn't work for me in LE, for no apparent reason, I haven't installed or changed anything (drivers or other software related).. the mesh just explodes randomly in different directions when I try to Animate() it .. At first I thought it must be some issue while exporting, but it happens to all the models (tested it with crawler.gmf) on all recent versions of the engine .. and as I said, I havent updated my graphics drivers or anything recently.. has anyone experienced something like this, or would have an idea as to what may be the cause? I guess I can try updating my drivers, but why would it suddenly stop working? Thanks in advance...

Not really, a 300$/month subscription where you collect credits so you can buy with discounts.. with the pro plan you get 12 animations/month.. if you're in a hurry you just have to buy any additional ones at the regular price?

Sometimes it's good to take a break to let things sink in a little .. also good song selection the past two blogs!!

Not sure I understand your problem correctly, but I think you should check out FindChild(), if you have your head/tail lights modeled seperately, you can target the sub-mesh and paint that only

You create one temp copy of the mesh, from which you re-construct the body, which you parent to the INSTANCED mesh.. because ScaleMesh breaks instancing but you need a scaled mesh to get the proper body (not scaled entity matrix) .. so you can have MESH instances with different bodies, .. how would 1 phy file represent one SCALED model anyway? , .. True, you can't have dynamic scaling (of the physics), but at least you don't have to have a bunch of pre-scaled GMF files, which you would need to load seperately anyway and that would take even more time, plus you can preserve instancing this way

You make a copy of the MESH, scale it with ScaleMesh(), and then recreate the BODY with CreateBodyHull (for each surface of the copied mesh), and parent it all back to the MODEL instance you scaled with ScaleEntity(), and get rid of the original body

Will there be an RunScript( script )/LoadScript( filename ) functionality also ?

Why not write a base script and scale it from there (you can also easily recreate the physics body), if you need scaling in the LE editor so badly ? .. I needed to write my own editor anyway, so this wasn't as big issue for me, but I still have to rely on LE editor for vegetation

I would recommend poppler, .. implementing it isn't impossible, but if you're new to cpp or programming you might have a hard time. The first step is to build the library from source or finding a compatible compiled library online (i even might have win32 .dll somewhere) , for this you can download cmake and create a makefile for your platform, but you might also need some other dependencies first ( not sure which ones exactly from memory) .. once you have the appropriate compiled libraries (and dependencies), it's relatively simple (2 lines of code) to load a pdf and render it to an image , which you then upload to a leadwerks texture, with an opengl call (glTexImage2D) .. I remember there are 2 (or 3) ways to go about rendering the image with poppler, one is by using a Splash 'framework' (theres also a qt4 backend) which implements an SplashImage class to which you can render and then obtain the pixels from .. so here's where you start: - get cmake and familiarize yourself with it - search the forums for theora video, to see how to upload custom pixels to a texture - try to compile or obtain poppler libs - ..

Awesome, lots of great stuff, ... those are your models and concept art ? Or dou you have a team?

I was looking forward to try and do something just like in the screenshot when I saw vegetation raycast were added.. So what can you do currently with the vegetation entity returned from picks? .. And are there any real specific advantages to vegatation layers insted of just regular ol' instanced geometry placed around the scene?

the asset pipeline is really shoddy in LE, everybody tell's you to buy UU3D, even Josh.. but that's not what the front page advertises.. so frustrated..

My thoughts exactly! Looking very professional and promising, I didn't know I could get this excited over a WIP menu Kudos!

The model looks good - much better than I can do ATM.. but I'm sure you can do better with animations, maybe look at some reference walk cycles or if you're using MAX there's a free .bip motion package floating around the net that's worth a try.. Myself, I'm stuck coming up with animated FPS hands, I would even buy them if I found something appropriate - but no luck so far. So in the mean time I'm brushing up my modelling skills, in the hopes I can produce something half decent... My biggest problem is - I can't really visualize how I would go about animating the hands, maybe if I do it your way of animating first on a full character than taking them off would be easier for me i think.. Anyway nice work so far, and please let us know how you progress!

What about Physx or Havok? (formerly from Ageia now Nvidia) A few years back I evaluated different physics middleware (bullet, tokamak, newton,..) for my engine and PhysX SDK was the best choice by far (excluding Havok) .. and isn't Havok free now? ..from http://www.havok.com/index.php?page=middleware

+1 I have been patiently waiting for a more fleshed out vehicle implementation since the day I've bought the SDK, meanwhile working on my game thinking it would be implemented in some future update.. (was poking around the headers and saw the commented out functions ) ..

I don't think windows can printscreen openGL/directX/overlay-video contexes .. or do you refer to SaveBuffer() command?

If I understand you correctly you're trying to implement toon shader as a post-processing effect - in that case it's probably because the vertex shader is fed 4 vertices from the DrawImage quad and they all have the same normal orientation. You would need to look-up the normal and do the dot3 in the pixel shader (add BUFFER_NORMAL flag when you create the buffer), .. that's my guess anyway

Looking great! What animations are included? Would it be possible get an video sample?

This is pretty much how I go about things also .. In CG - If it looks right, it is right

What program are you using? Also, try to use bloom and see if it adds any glow (you have to use framework or turn it on in the editor) Sorry for the crappy attempt at adding glow to your texture, I just did it quickly for illustration purposes.