Development of Leadwerks 3 was (theoretically) completed today. We still have a lot of testing and bug hunting to do, but all features for release are written.
This is where it started:
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/blog/1/entry-500-day-1/
In this blog I'm going to explain the evolution of the entity and physics system in Leadwerks 3.
In Leadwerks Engine 2, physics bodies and character controllers are both separate entity classes. If you want a model to be physically interactive, you parent it to a body entity. If you want a model to walk around with physics, you parent it to a character controller body.
In Leadwerks 3 I decided to give physics properties to all entities. This means all entities can use commands like Ge
Today I added the visible guides in the editor for point and spot lights. I also tested out the new FBX converter, recompiled with the 2012 FBX SDK. It works. (There are no file format changes in the 2013 FBX SDK, so this will load everything.) Our character models still have to be rescaled, so I added a resize option in the model editor. That way models can be resized and the model file saved, so you don't have to rescale a model every single time you place it in the editor. Having models
Hello everyone,
First of all, a Happy New Year to you all, a good health, lots of game creation, and all the rest you might desire!
It seems that altering/perfectionizing is a human nature, which also happens to be mine.
S.C.O.T. has gone through more changes since last time, and I can happily say, that these changes have made it soo much better. Finally got the right atmosphere/mood settings for the way it loox on screen.
Roland has done a tremendous job getting the game mechanics and
I spent the day manually setting entry categories in the new documentation database. This was needed to make the docs actually use the nice breadcrumb bar in the website header. Our content management system doesn't exactly support hierarchical pages, so some clever PHP scripting was used to make it work. The whole point is simply to make navigation easier, and it works well. I also wrote some PHP code that does a search and replace with class names, so class names are always links to the pa
While I should be finishing my game and engine a notable epiphany has hit me like a ton of bricks, the kind of epiphany that's worth writing about so the next time you decide to dedicate 3 years of your life to a programming project you don't forget what you learned the time before.
My project has consisted of 3 sub projects - The Engine, the Level Editor, and the IDE.
I've been working on "RTS Creator" for awhile, and it's a full suite of tools to make your own Real Time Strategy game w
Here's something I've been thinking about. What do you think?
Apple
Locking down OSX.
No optical drive. The Mac software shelf at Fry's is now obsolete.
Mac App Store.
Gatekeeper only allows "signed" applications, by default.
[*]Miniaturization of computer hardware, at the cost of graphical performance.
[*]Move to non-upgradable hardware (glued-in memory).
[*]Moving away from file system access (iCloud).
[*]Hardware is expensive, and will always be a luxury item.
W
I hope everyone is having an awesome Christmas week. I'm taking a break from coding to show you our new office we moved into in November at the Sacramento Hacker Lab.
All decked out for Christmas:
Chris is pretending to work, but he's not fooling me:
So we changed the arrangement to make a reverse mullet. (Party in the front, business in the back):
The kitchen provides energy, both in the form of food and alcohol:
The common area:
The room-temperature beer flo
Here's my list of things left to do:
Documentation
Undo system
Get character models for Darkness Awaits
Prepare the super secret special surprise for deployment
Undo functionality is my absolute least favorite thing to program, and I also want to get some more real-world testing done before implementing it, so it comes last. This evening I will start on the docs, in earnest.
I hope everyone is having a good near-Christmas week.
I got tired of rescaling some models every time I created a new instance of them in the Leadwerks 3 editor, so I added an option to resize the model file itself to the proper dimensions. Double-click the model thumbnail in the asset browser to open it in the model editor. Then select the Tools > Resize menu item. The Resize Model dialog will appear with options to scale by a percentage, or fit to a specific size. For convenience, you can choose the units to use, including centimeters, met
We decided to make one last minute change to the material editor. The texture list is a bit easier to work with now:
Looking pretty nice on Mac, too:
We're also working on our character models for Darkness Awaits, as well as a super secret special surprise...
This is the final output of Leadwerks 3 on Windows.
When you choose "Windows" in the Publish dialog, a few options appear. Press OK and your game's installer is created.
The installer looks like this. You can replace the installer images with your own if you like:
I'm working on project creation, management, and publishing right now. This is necessary because it automates some steps that would otherwise be very time-consuming.
When you create a project, you can choose the language and the platforms you want it to run on:
You can switch between projects to reload all assets and change the working directory:
You can export a project into a zip file, give it to someone else, and they can easily import it back from the zip, and have it availa
NPCs, whether they be ally or enemy, are a very important component for many games and a large portion of a game's game play is highly dependant on the things that NPCs do, they way they behave and, if they are enemies, the way that they try to kill you. Therefore, it is vital that your NPCs, their associated behaviours and AI are done well so as to compliment game play rather than detract from it. If these factors are not 'fit for purpose' then the player will see right through the NPCs and the
Hello guys, I would like to show you a little progress in my main menu.
I added all components, like buttons,labels,panes,sliders and textsliders ( for example the resolution controller ).
I also added cameramovement with a non linear movement ( sinus ) and the display submenu for this sample here.
I hope you like it, the quality is very bad and the sound isn't at the right position :/
But....enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALLm0MOijME
Apple's problems in iOS 6 aren't limited to maps. Their OpenGL drivers in iOS 6 are absolutely non-functional.
First I was experiencing a BAD_EXC_ACCESS error when rendering certain surfaces. Feedback on the Apple dev forum suggests I am not alone in this. I took a guess and switched my position vertex buffers to use vec4s instead of vec3s, and it appears to have solved that problem (even though both should be fine).
Second, all 3D objects just stopped appearing, completely. I've deb
In my previous blog I talked about the Android file system and APK package system. The end result was I copied all the project assets into the res/raw folder. However, I learned two additional things that changed my plan a little:
Android files can only be lower-case.
Any folders in the res/raw folder will not get copied...it just packs in the files in that directory, with no sub-directories!
That's a big problem if we want Leadwerks to be able to load files the same on each operati
Today I am working out the file system for Android applications. In the past we just manually copied all our assets to a "/Leadwerks" folder on the device itself. This approach is okay for testing, but it won't work for distributing apps in the Google Play store.
Android uses APK files to store all applications in. An APK file is really just a ZIP file, and all your assets go in a /res/raw directory in the ZIP package.
To access the Android file system from C++, we had to take the fol
Here's my list, as it stands today:
Lua Interpreter project for iOS and Android (iOS is done, Aria is working on Android)
Improve flowgraph visual style (will finish today, probably)
Documentation (Chris is filling out the syntax, then I will go in and write descriptions)
Brush rendering batches (to make editor rendering faster)
Brush collapse on load (in engine only)
Undo system
Since you guys are my boss, in a way, I wanted to report to you what I spent the last few days doing.
Early on in the development of Leadwerks 3, I had to figure out a way to handle the management of assets that are shared across many objects. Materials, textures, shaders, and a few other things can be used by many different objects, but they consume resources, so its important for the engine to clean them up when they are no longer needed.
I decided to implement an "Asset" and "AssetRe
I figured I would finally write up an update. The plan was to juggle between my main project, which has been in development for three years now, and this Leadwerks project I had started. The idea was simply for the fun and experimentation of game development and programming. Which is great, was going great, as Leadwerks automatically gives that overall creative freedom; designing/programming everything from the ground up if you so desire. That is after all one of the reasons we all love LE.
I am in the middle of implementing a tweener in lua. However this tweener needs millisecond accuracy and lua doesn't have the mojo cross platform to do this. So I braved a little c++, which is way out of my comfort zone.
#include <boost/chrono/chrono.hpp>
#include <boost/chrono/chrono_io.hpp>
#include <boost/chrono/process_cpu_clocks.hpp>
#include <boost/chrono/thread_clock.hpp>
#include <boost/chrono/ceil.hpp>
#include <boost/chrono/floor.hpp>
#inclu
I am going to share my tips on how to be a great programmer, or anything else for that matter.
The first thing you need to do every day is eat properly. I recommend the following:
Breakfast
2 pieces of toast (whole wheat bread, the heavier the better).
One banana or orange.
Finally, eat pure egg whites until you can't eat anything more. They have no cholesterol, no fat, they are pure protein, and they will give you tons of energy.
Lunch
Get a deli sandwich. Chicken, tur
