Hello everyone,
So with my business software released, i'm moving back into game design. I'm putting my castle game to the side for, what I feel, a easier game to execute. With the majority of mechanics planned out, I'll begin to design the first few levels. I think i'm also going to video record a developer diary to keep people informed on the status of the development of the game. I am looking for some artists, especially 3D modeling with animation skills as well as texturing artists.
I have recently been devoting increasing amounts of my free time prototyping things on Leadwerks. The one thing that i have constantly found sorely lacking is the absence of 3d assets that are ready to drop in and use. Lacking the funds at hand to go buy model packs. I thought I would try my hand at creating some.
Not bad if i do say so myself.
Modeling objects In my opinion is the easiest part of everything. Its the texturing that can be a [insert deity here] [insert expli
Following my previous update about correcting file path cases, I am now able to load all our maps in Leadwerks. The power of this tool running natively on Linux is starting to show:
The next step is to implement a file system watcher to detect file changes. Leadwerks automatically monitors the current project directory, and will reload assets whenever the file changes. This allows you to keep an image open in an image editor like GIMP, and any time you save your changes will be refle
At this point just a little WIP note to make sure Josh doesn't take over the blog space...
I am still tuning the tessellation procedure. Temporarily (?) I have switched from my beatifully crafted concentric mesh rings to a uniform grid structure - it is more difficult to get a smooth LOD transition for those rings than for a uniform mesh, and I have enough problems with that already. So, I'll first try to get things right with the simpler mesh structure and then see if things work as well w
Leadwerks Game Engine on Steam has been updated with bug fixes and a host of new features that are now out of beta.
Crowdsourcing Post-Processing Effects Although Leadwerks 2 featured an extensive set of post-processing effects, they were all hard-coded into the engine. This limited the ease with which new effects could be added, and caused all Leadwerks screenshots to look similar. In Leadwerks 3 we decided to implement a post-processing stack of shaders. You can attach post-processing ef
I've made two major improvements to the editor UI this week. The scene tree is now fully functional, and objects can be dragged around in the scene hierarchy:
Models and prefabs can now be dragged into the viewports from the asset browser, so the editor is near fully functional now.
The X11 windowing system cannot create an OpenGL rendering context on a hidden window. (The same happens on OSX.) On OSX I did a cheesy hack whereby the asset editor windows (the model, texture, material, etc. e
A new update is available on the beta branch on Steam. To avoid confusion with outdated projects, the project's status will now be displayed in the project manager. If the project is older than the template folder, a warning icon will be displayed. In addition, the script editor will now warn once about an out-of-date project before running.
The FBX converter has been updated to fix the following issues:
Second UV coordinate set was not always being saved.
Some FBX files exporte
After torturing you with a walk-through of my terrain vertex shader I will do the same harm again, this time using the fragment shader... Without further ado, here we go:
#version 400
//Uniforms
uniform sampler2D texture0;//diffuse map
uniform sampler2D texture1;//normal map
After the obligatory version information, this time two texture uniforms are declared, the (already used) diffuse map and an additional normal map.
//Inputs
in vec2 ex_texcoords0;
in vec4 ex_color;
in ma
I feel a bit like I'm spamming the community blog... but of course that won't stop me from doing it again! With the basic mesh generated it's now time for diving into shader programming. I will displace the vertices in the vertical using a heightmap, and then apply a global color and normal map to make the terrain look more... terrainy. I'll explain the shader line by line. All of this will actually be very basic (so, shadmar and klepto: Move along, nothing to see here... whew, we're amongst ou
A quick making of a 3Dcolumn made in 3D coat for my LE3 game.
Why struggles with modeler when you can make hard surface models using 3D coat super easy Voxel modeling?
1) Voxels : Some primitives than Tool : Add objects (with the great Tinker library)
2) Retopology (pretty low poly and fast)
3 ) Bake normal map To Low Poly
4) Paint damage , details, specular, dirt :
( lof of masks and alpha in 3D coat and more in the Web )
5) Once the model and textures has
As described in my last post, I'd like to create a homegrown system for rendering large terrains. The basic idea is to use a set of planar mesh patches that are displaced in the vertical using a heightmap in the shaders, and using OpenGL 4's tessellation features to create a more detailed and optimally structured mesh during run-time. Also mentioned before was the fact that this might be a bit of trial and error, so bear with me, and if you see me running in the wrong direction - please let me k
Leadwerks has a very nice terrain system that allows terrains of up to 4096x4096 units (in version 3.1, 3.0 goes up to 1024x1024) that performs very well and has a pretty unique texturing method. For most game applications, this is more than enough - filling such an area with objects and interesting gameplay is already quite a challenge. But some game ideas still require larger terrains. In my case, I am pondering something similar to a racing game, taking place in real-world areas, where a sing
After cluttering the regular Leadwerks forums with irregular posts and screenshots about terrains, tessellation and the like, I thought it might be better to collect those in a blog where I can happily mumble to myself without distracting anyone...
So what's this about? Well, from day one of my (not so long ago) foray into game development I have been interested in creating large outdoor scenes. Now, most game engines don't support the required features for that out of the box, and I guess f
Leadwerks has added new features that allow users to take advantage of Steam features.
Steamworks Integration Leadwerks now has native support for the Steamworks SDK. You can make your game ready to publish on Steam by calling Steamworks:Initialize(). This also enables the in-game overlay so you can take screenshots, chat with friends, and access the entire Steam community in-game.
Screenshot Publishing The new screenshot publishing window allows you to upload rendered images directly to
On Monday, Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition was finally launched on Steam. Before the Kickstarter campaign there was a Greenlight campaign to put Leadwerks on Steam, which it got through in just 27 days. Based on the success of the Kickstarter campaign, I decided to delay the Steam launch and try to get Linux done in time. However, there was one serious deadline I could not miss, and that was the Steam Dev Days conference next week. I knew we needed to have an actual product on Steam by then
After blasting through Greenlight in just 27 days, Leadwerks Software today announced the launch of Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition, exclusively available on the Steam distribution platform. The arrival of Leadwerks adds 3D game development software to Valve’s lineup of creative and productivity tools.
Leadwerks is designed to make game development easy for Steam’s 65 million users, with a royalty-free license for making commercial products. A new renderer built on OpenGL 4.0 provides h
Leadwerks 3.1 is nearly ready for release! In Leadwerks 3.0, we focused on making a solid cross-platform art pipeline and editor. In 3.1 we're adding graphics that go above and beyond the capabilities of Leadwerks 2.
New Features in 3.1
OpenGL 4.0 deferred renderer with up to 32x hardware MSAA.
Geometry and tessellation shaders.
Support for the Linux operating system, for both the engine AND editor.
Leadwerks 3.1 is now available for pre-ordering in the Leadwerks s
It's December, which means Leadwerks for Linux is nearly here! Last week I had to get into more depth with our tutorials. We're creating a series of maps that demonstrate simple game mechanics. The goal is to show how to set up game interactions by attaching scripts to objects and connecting them in the flowgraph editor, without getting into any actual programming. These lessons center around a first-person shooter, but are applicable to many types of games.
I had to get my hands dirty i
I like the idea of being able to add dynamic properties at run-time. The following code shows how you can set this up. Instead of declaring a hardcoded amount of variables in a class you could just give it 1 Properties class and it can be dynamic!
#include <string>
#include <map>
using namespace std;
class Prop
{
public:
virtual ~Prop()
{
}
};
template<typename T>
class Property : public Prop
{
private:
T data;
public:
virtual ~Property()
{
}
Property(T d)
{
data = d
There have been a lot of lessons learned now that I’m finishing my first large project. RTS games continually push the limit on unit and structure counts and with the latest OpenGL features I would argue it’s now possible to have hundreds of thousands of units.
The strategy is simple, the implementation can get tricky. Keep all movement and calculations on the GPU and use textures as data structures (optional). The concept borrows a similar idea of a lot of modern particle systems in that ea
How many simultaneous projects can you manage until your productivity begins to drop?
This has been inspired from my own decisions and mistakes of over dedicating myself to numerous projects ending up ultimately being very unproductive.
If I have 4 projects and I split my available time evenly across these 4 projects the productivity is not split evenly. Additional time is taken closing previous projects and opening and prepping other projects. Will power, state of mind, and vision for e
An update has been posted with the following fixes:
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/7847-undo-does-not-refresh-gizmos/
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/7842-bsp-mesh-export/
[EDIT]
Now with sound!
I'm making a game that revolves 100% around old school final fantasy battle style fighting. I thought about what often slows me down and kills my motivation in games I've tried to make in the past. My conclusion was that dealing with graphics (models, UI, animations, etc) often slows me down in various ways. So as an experiment for this game I'm going to first code the entire core gameplay in a console application with a basic text based interface first.
I'm ho
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