Thinking about buying

[kmgilbert]

Hello I am thinking about buying the game engine. Although why is it better than say T3D or Unity or even UDK? Also I do not see much of a documentation or a lot of tutorials. My plan is to join a team for 30 days and collab while i have the trial to learn the ropes and see if i like it or not. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[cassius]

There are plenty of tutorials on the wiki and the asset store and in the forum threads.This engine is used by some very experienced programmers who have tried all those other engines you mention yet they have stayed with le. The engine has deferred lighting dynamic shadows and built in physics all at a great price.The licencing terms are genorous and all but the largest updates are free. The free versions of other engines are all lacking in features that only come with the expensive pro versions. With le there is only one version and it is exellent.

[Road Kill Kenny]

You'll probably find that LE gives you more freedom to code whatever you want without having to jump through hoops.

 

Thats personally why I like it, I have the freedom to pretty much make my own tools for it.

[Naughty Alien]

Although why is it better than say T3D or Unity or even UDK?

 

..i dont know what is T3D so i cant say..as for Unity or UDK, its very subjective..if your aim is PC only, then LE beats out badly Unity, as for UDK, it can go visuals wise pretty much same, while price and offered license is more than ridiculous(means GOOOOOOD) compared to UDK.

 

However, if your intention is cross platform, LE is no way to go (not in its current form). Simple as it is, far as i can tell.

[DigitalHax]

I find it useful of how easy the coding is. If you want to code a simple part to your game, you don't have to go through 20 files and add masses of code. You can start from absolute scratch if you want. Another good thing is that its small, in a good way. You want an answer to a question, you can get a rensponse from the CEO. Direct problem solving. And the asset store is very helpful. Most things people make on here are small, but may contain something you might want in your project. If you ask nicely and don't annoy people, your gonna get help.

 

It all just depends on what you want to do. But I personally think LE is just as good, (maybe better) than all the other big game engines.

[AggrorJorn]

@Naughty Alien: I think he means Torque 3D.

 

C++

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/Documentation/le2/_/tutorials/

 

LUA

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC272E30DD2883EC3&feature=view_all

 

BMAX and C++ video and pdf's

http://www.leadwerks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

 

Editor documentation

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/Documentation/le2/_/user-guide/

 

Ofcourse the forum and youtube have lots of information.

[Manuel]

T3D is a great game engine, and one of the best, the problem is the documentation, now the API documentation is complete, but it's more difficult to find some good videotutorials, or good posted tutorials, another thing are the collisions, I have several problems with it this days, I posted it in the forum but anybody answer me... The price it's very cheap and you get with it the source code. It's multiplatform, the normal version support: PC, Mac, Web browser

 

Unity, now it's one of the best game engines (really no, but the company has a lot of marketing, and it's really easy to use). You can found in it the deferred lighting, deferred rendering, interesting tools... the price it's high, 1500$, the free version it's very limited. It's multiplatform, the normal version support: PC, Mac, Web browser. Now you can get the other versions for free at the 8 or 18 April (android and iPhone, but just the basic version and not the pro).

 

UDK, it's maybe the best option if you want to make games por PC or iPhone, it's Unreal Engine 3 without the source code like in the full version, a lot of tools for development, integrated geometry editor, a lot of post-processing, shaders, a great optimization for all and it's really simple to use. The price it's 99$ or 2500$, it's depend, you can read the license in the web of UDK.

 

Leadwerks, easy to use, cheap and powerful game engine, it only does work on Windows. You can use Lua, C++ or both in your game. This community will answer almost always, you can found good people here. Leadwerks have a problem with the physics, and for it, you can't scale the objects (it's correct?). The API it's really really simple to use, it's like Blitz3D (more or less), you need a good hardware for use Leadwerks with good frame rate.

 

That's my opinion!

[cassius]

I agree about physics and scaling in le but its not a big problem. You can scale objects in your 3d app.

[Matthew Nicholls]

The Leadwerks editor only works in windows, but the games you make work in Linux using wine. I've had no problem getting a game.exe to work in ubuntu You can even use Lua with the engine.exe. I have tried Unity, UDK and T3D and I still find Leadwerks the most easy to use. The others have great tools for all sorts of things but I find programming quicker and easy to learn in leadwerks.

[Brent Taylor]

I agree about physics and scaling in le but its not a big problem. You can scale objects in your 3d app.

 

While that is a "solution", it's a pretty crappy one. It's not at all uncommon to model things at 1.2-10x the size and scaled in the game engine. Makes tweaking and such much easier later. And no, scaling back up, tweaking and scaling back down isn't a solution once everything is all rigged. There can be a lot of complications in doing that.

 

LE is a great choice. I just hate that this issue is downplayed. There are few bugs with the engine, this one just being the most prominent. In general, bugs are fixed regularly and rather promptly. I've seen bugs go into the bug tracker to be fixed the same day and released. This is a good thing.

[Rick]

I seem to remember the scaling issue being more of a Newton issue than LE, but recall Josh saying he thinks he has a way to work around it. Of course anything that isn't run-time capable could still cause issues if you want to dynamically scale things at run-time and still have it work correctly physics wise. It's hard to say it's a bug more than a limitation of the physics library/engine.

 

But yes, I agree it sucks. When I have trees I would like to scale them in the editor to different sizes to give some variety.

 

 

I would recommend LE to any programmer as it's the easiest and most fun 3D API I've worked with!

[Brent Taylor]

It really doesn't matter if it's an issue with Newton or if it's an issue with LE. Either way, it's LE's problem as far as the consumer is concerned. Josh supposedly has a way around it, but it's not going to be fixed in LE2 if I remember correctly. Don't get me wrong, I believe Josh when he says he has a work around/fix for it, otherwise why in the world would he use it for LE3?

[Naughty Alien]

..from user standpoint, yes, it is an issue (non scalable physics objects)..however, soon as programmer who use LE, outgrowth it enough, such problem will dissapear as such person will easy plug in something much nicer, such as Bullet, and enjoy development..I say that simply because only thing I think is worth in LE is renderer..rigged with Bullet and Raknet, its a monster...problem is, of course, it require some time to work to reach that stage..but its worth. I really hope LE3 will have option to purchase renderer only..

[Pixel Perfect]

If you're the sort of person that wants complete control over your game engine and are prepared to work round the lack of tools then I'd definitely go with Leadwerks. It's going to take a lot of coding but it's beautifully constructed for programming, a joy to program with to be honest. The renderer, as NA has already mentioned, is kind of special too. Things just seem to look that little bit better when rendered with Leadwerks.

 

If you are the type of person that wants an already existing game engine framework that you can simply work with and require lots of high level tools to aid the game design then LE2 is probably not for you and you might want to look at UDK or Unity. I have no experience of T3D so cannot comment on that.

[LordHippo]

LE2 just has some parts of the runtime side of a game engine.

It simply offers NO offline side.

 

So if you're ready to complete it and make your own game engine, use LE.

if not, go for Unity or UDK.

Or you can wait for LE3 and see if it has the offline side of an engine.

[Benton]

The editor-scale think is kinda stupid, I know there might be a reason, but still it should be fixed. Maybe switching to Bullet or PhysX for 3.0 might be good. Still, I will just get into the habit of making sure my models are the right scale in my modeling program, even building a rough draft of my scene (or parts of it) to make sure everything works. Leadwerks is easy enough that if you have done game programming before, Lua will be a breeze and C++ will just take a bit of time to learn