Leadwerks.com now features a video gallery where our members can post movies of their games made with Leadwerks Engine. Instead of slowly uploading a huge video file, you can simply enter a YouTube video ID to submit movies. Check out some of the cool videos like Legos falling over to a techno soundtrack, fly through floating islands in Aerora, and of course there's Dave Lee's excellent Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
We've also created a random rotating banner image in our website header. Lead
I have developed my own forum software for Domino for some time, because I was always shocked with the basic lacks of functionality of conventional forum softwares like phpBB, vnboards, Invision Power Boards, SMF, etc.... For them it seems normal that all messages are lost when the forum software is updated, and they just eat it with a bitter taste in their mouth. They also take happily backups every day, but most of the backups fail because of some misconfigured ftp accounts.
For someone who h
A few weeks ago, I was getting pretty nervous about all the known unknowns in going cross-platform with the Leadwerks Engine 3 code. All my libraries and languages are platform-agnostic, but there's always going to be small issues, and I wanted to get those worked out while the code was still malleable. Here's a few things I found.
-OSX file paths don't have a drive letter, so the only way to specify a relative path is to add ".\" to the beginning. This had some significant implications f
Hi Folks,
another small progress update I would like to share with you.
While working on extending the exported functionality of the dll i have discussed with some people here in the forum and I came to the conclusion that just extending the dll and program advanced parts in .Net is not really the best for the community. While some extensions will work only for .Net at first (eg Awesomium, full XBOX360 Controller support) most extension will be programmed fully in Blitzmax and exposed th
Just fresh out from the press: IBM will drop the Lotus part from the name, because it misleads many people who remember Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Smartsuite, and yes even Lotus Notes which is often thought as ancient and dead.
This is very cool, because it removes the long name nonsense and makes it clear that it's a real IBM product, and everyone knows that IBM is the leader in computer technology, mostly on the hardware side, but since the aquisition of Lotus also on the software side, and of course
Post 1: On 'Beyond Civilization'
Hey guys! After lurking around in the Leadwerks forums for quite a while now, I thought it was time to present what I am actually working on.
The team:
I am the lead programmer and teamleader of a group of people developing a video game (well, who isn't^^). Our team is called '
Clockwise Studios
' and currently consists of 8 people - 2 Programmers, 2 Leveldesigners, 1 concept artist, a modeller and two people doing web design, management and ga
Hi,
this is just a short blog to keep you informed. I have promised to upload a first version last weekend, but unfortunatly I wasn't able to do so.
I'm currently working on a solution to provide the extended functionality to both .Net Wrappers (LE.Net and Leadwerks.Net) which is more difficult than i thought.
I have already extended the engine.dll with some new functions which already work in both .Net Wrappers and i will hopefully be ready with a small package next week. So no worr
So after a lot of learning and mistakes, I finally have Leadwerks Engine 3 running on OSX Snow Leapord, Lion, and iOS. Rather than write out a detailed blog, I'll just throw a lot of random thoughts your way:
-OpenGLES2 is a nice blend of OpenGL 2 and OpenGL 3.3. I'm really surprised my OpenGL 3 shaders translate easily into OpenGLES2 shader code, with only a few changes. In fact, the iOS renderer looks exactly like the deferred OpenGL 3 renderer, except for shadows and some post-effects.
I was looking at some old programming languages like COBOL (a business oriented language, and the second oldest language: founded in 1959), Ada, Fortran, Prolog, and few others. My interest was only to see how programming worked in the old days, and if they had any good ideas which I could reuse for the upcoming symbolic visual language.
When I stumbled upon Fortran, I remembered that some people had said that it's faster than C++, and I remember the funny fact that Intel has the fastest C++ co
Hi folks,
here is a new relatively short entry to my blog introducing my current side project (which will be the base of my bigger secret project) which I will make public to the community.
I'm calling this project "Leadwerks.Extensions". In detail it is a project which will extend the current LE.Net headers with a set of setalite assemblies which will contain and provide some additional functions to the .Net community. My goal is to release a first set of dlls this weekend containing a
Today I was explaining what the problem with all programming languages today is, that they have all failed, because they are not intented to make results (except Prolog maybe), but rather to aid the programmer to tell the computer what to do. This is a fundamental mistake, since computers should serve humans, including programmers. So the base for a better programming language is to focus on what the programmer wants as result, and let the computer optimize and decide what method is best to impl
Particle engines are commonly used for fire and smoke effects adding a lot of eye-candy for little effort. Every frame an emitter creates a number of billboard sprites along a vector. Normally this is not an issue when movement along this vector between frames is quite small.
But what if you're talking about something that moves really fast between frames? Such as a rocket launcher or space-ship? Fellow Brit and indy developer Cliff Harris of Gratuitous Space Battles fame ran into the same p
Leadwerks Engine 2.43 is now available. This version features improved raycast performance, a new DRAWEACH entity callback, and a few small bug fixes. Registered developers can download the update by running the Leadwerks Updater.
Leadwerks Engine 2.43
...will be released tomorrow, along with a new source distro. I've fixed a number of bugs, but I don't like compiling releases when I am tired because there's a lot of little steps to mess up, so I will do it in the morning.
Leadwerks Engine 3
Optics was always my favorite subject in physics, and I've been getting some amazing results lately by modeling computer graphics after real lighting phenomena.
Once I decided to make the materials system like 3ds max, ever
Last September I mused about the concept of what I call Ambient NPC populations, I spent a lot of time researching (read playing) certain games that have what I call an ambient NPC population. This is specifically those NPC's that reside in the background and generally have no real or very limited interaction with the player, but may have some limited interaction with each other or the surroundings.
I felt a new approach would be needed to sort through what was and was not required to achiev
The C++ object debugger for Lua is working now. It was a little tricky, but I implemented a method to view all members of C++ objects. The debugger does handle dynamic object fetching, so if you expand a node in the debug tree representing a C++ object, the contents of that object will be loaded and displayed. Let's say you have an entity parented to another entity. This allows you to expand the parent member of the child, then find the child in the parent's child list, and so on, ad infinit
The script editor and Lua implementation is very close to being a usable programming environment. You can actually see the pointers to the C++ objects you create, and step through code. It's still missing features, but the parts I was worried about are working.
I am adding Lua commands like crazy, and it's easy to keep track of them because they all reside in one header file. The function overloading is great, as you can see in my example here, where I use a single float value to set the
Hi folks,
while working on my other projects I have started to research why the cubemapping doesn't seem to work in Leadwerks in Realtime.
I have debugged through the code ( I was using Blitzmax to have access to the full debug output and fields of textures and buffers) and found out that
it seems you can't create a real Leadwerks buffer for Cubemaps, I have also investigated TylerH' s early approach after the CreateCubemap command was added and from my experience with miniB3D extended I
While working with zlib, I implemented the package system, and it turned out really cool. Here's some stuff you can do
First, let's load the package and register it in the file system:
Package* pak = ReadPackage("mystuff.pak"); //Read the package
RegisterPackage(pak); //Register package into file system
Read a file from a package, just as if it were on the hard drive:
Stream* stream = ReadFile("mystuff/new document.txt"); //Read a file straight out of the package!
Write a file t
Two issues in the art pipeline were giving me some doubt. I stopped working on them a couple weeks ago, and I'm glad I did because the solutions became clear to me.
Shader Files First, there is the matter of shaders. A shader can actually consist of half a dozen files:bumpmapped.opengl3.vert
bumpmapped.opengl3.frag
bumpmapped.opengl4.vert
bumpmapped.opengl4.vert
bumpmapped.opengles.vert
bumpmapped.opengles.vert
I originally thought the .shd extension would be good for shaders, i
This blog is going to actually be about business rather than technology. Here's what's going to happen this summer:
First, we need to get this ATI driver bug fixed ASAP. Nothing else can happen until that gets fixed:
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/tracker/issue-165-terrain-textures-bug-radeon-hd-5850
The official documentation is coming along well, and I am really pleased with how this has turned out. (Thanks, Aggror!)
An updated evaluation kit with some limited programming w
With Luabind, it turns out we don't even need a table associated with an entity. We can just add values and functions straight to Lua's representation of that entity in the virtual machine! So instead of this:
object.health=100
object.entity:SetPosition(1,2,3)
You can just do this, which is much nicer!:
entity.health=100
entity:SetPosition(1,2,3)
So there's no object/actor nonsense, you just work directly with the entity itself.
Entity Keys The Get/SetKey convention from Lea
Well I have been able to work a couple more hours this week on my characters. I seem to be all over the board when it comes to work flow. A little here a little there. The base mesh for the body is done and with hair weighs in at 4,620 triangles. I am happy with the detail with the normal maps although the one on the mesh right now can be unwrapped better to get rid of the bad pixelation around the eyes and mouth. I just threw it together to test. The high poly character is around 55,000 triangl
.thumb.png.930e14f6185274fc318c83d22a72a188.png)
