Work has been continuing on my ongoing scifi materials/media pack. I have since updated my desk and workstation setup to support dual 1440p monitors on adjustable arms, which has made making progress on this much easier and less straining on my eyes. The amount of screen real estate I have now is so much better than before and my workspace is not cramped anymore, which has been great.
Enjoy a small snippet of what I have been working on today, much more to come soon...
We now accept popular cryptocurrencies in our store and Marketplace through Coinbase Commerce. That's right, you can now buy software like Ultra App Kit using Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dai, or Bitcoin Cash (if you can figure it out!). Right now it's a novelty, but it's worth trying. Maybe by 2022 it will be your only option?
Sadly, Dogecoin is not one of the currently supported coins. Soon?
I do not pretend that this tutorial is an absolute truth, it is just how I have learned to do things, very possibly I am wrong, but always willing to learn.
When programming, it is extremely necessary to plan what you want to do, a coding project should be divided into blocks, function files.
It is like writing a book, by pages, by chapters, I speak of a book of modern times, those books that you can touch and pass its pages with a finger wet in saliva, of course because of the pande
Note: This article contains some referral links for affiliate systems that I added after writing it. My purpose for including them is so that I can learn how these systems work by participating in them, because I am interested in possibly implementing one of our own in the future. The article was written because these are all things I am using and recommend and I am very bored with the same old things.
Except for VR, the last decade of technology has been pretty yawn-inducing. I think Silic
I'm finalizing the Ultra App Kit API, which is going to be the basis of the new engine's API. Naming commands themselves is always a bit of an art unto itself. Some things are named a certain way because it is common convention, like Stream::Seek() instead of Stream::SetPosition() and ACos() instead of ArcCosine().
Other times we have holdovers from old APIs or BASIC syntax like Stream::EOF() or String::Mid().
Should a class that has no SetSize() method use GetSize() or Size() for a me
There are three new features in the upcoming Ultra Engine (Leadwerks 5) that will make game input better than ever before.
High Precision Mouse Input
Raw mouse input measures the actual movement of the mouse device, and has nothing to do with a cursor on the screen. Windows provides an interface to capture the raw mouse input so your game can use mouse movement with greater precision than the screen pixels. The code to implement this is rather complicated, but in the end it just boils
January 2021, work progression showcase random generated world vegetation, FPS=30
[I] - THE TERRAIN; VEGETATION AND WATER:
The map is 4096*4096
The landscape is randomly cast: Painting & vegetation.
At the end of the video, is a demo of the waves shader I could write using the leaves.shader on the water.shader.
The shader is in the workshop for free to use. It is far not perfect but it adds a good animation for ocean wate
More edits I made over the course of today.
Last little bits of work to do include adding any last final touches, and then cleaning up the layer stack to ensure that all height/metallic/roughness layers are interacting correctly. Then I can start procedurally generating each different texture based on this single material. I hope to start that process sometime this week so I can put a scene together.
2K resolution
An update for Ultra App Kit beta on Steam is now available. This finishes the user interface scaling to support HD, 4K, 8K, and other resolutions. My original plan was to force an application restart if the scale setting was changed, but I found a way to dynamically resize the interface in a manner that gives natural results, so it now supports dynamic rescaling. That is, if the user changes the Windows DPI setting, or if a window is dragged to a monitor with a different DPI setting, the applica
Completely reworked much of the master material and it has really transformed into something much better than before. Added new detail to lights and completely revamped the original metal, rust, and paint materials to have better surface properties. Things are much less busier and do not have odd height details. Overall I am very happy with these results, and I do not envision much more work being needed at this point other than some cleanup and checking each material channel to ensure that the
An update is available for the Ultra App Kit beta on Steam.
Menu open / close behavior is finished and is now working bug-free.
Fixed problem where list boxes were only showing the first item.
A submenu item is demonstrated in the example program.
A progress bar widget is added in the example program.
A label widget is added in the example program.
A second radio button is added in the example program.
Still to do:
Work out some scaling i
2020 was the most intellectually challenging year in my career. Many major advancements were invented, and 2021 will see those items refined, polished, and turned into a usable software product. Here is a partial list of things I created:
Streaming hierarchal planet-scale terrain system with user-defined deformation and texture projection.
Vulkan post-processing stack and transparency with refraction.
Vulkan render-to-texture.
Major progress on voxel ray tracing.
The beta testers and I are are discussing game programming in the new engine. I want to see C++, Lua, and C# all take a near-identical approach that steals the best aspects of modern game programming and ditches the worst, to create something new and unique. To that end, we are developing the same simple game several times, with several different methodologies, to determine what really works best. One thing I realized quickly was we really need a way to load prefabs from files.
I started im
The Seventh World
Lately I have been hard at work implementing all the basic classes in Leadwerks 5. My aim is to get the game playable by the end of the year. Once I've achieved that I'll slowly hack away at bugs and visual quality before release. These are what are planned for the first release;
Menus
Main
Pause
Gravity
Multiple Sources
Edge of the World
Foliage
Pine Tree
Light is made up of individual particles called photons. A photon is a discrete quantum of electromagnetic energy. Photons are special because they have properties of both a particle and a wave. Photons have mass and can interact with physical matter. The phenomenon of "solar pressure" is caused by photons bombarding a surface and exerting force. (This force actually has to be accounted for in orbital mechanics.) However, light also has a wavelength and frequency, similar to sound or other wave
While I am preparing the different parts of the blog i will show you a small summary about the ocean rendering i am using:
GPU-based FFT waves using Phillipsspectrum
Foam rendering (shore and whitecaps)
Refraction and Reflection (realtime, ssr compatible)
Fast due to Projected grid concept
Teaser images:
Reactor wall I worked on today. This texture has lots of small details like pipes, vents and hoses which I used as a basis for expanding the master material set I am using.
Thought I would post this, because it looked very cool with all of the different surfaces applied to it. Every day I am impressed by substance painter and its capabilities.
Quick update on what is happening so far. Lately I have not had as much time to work in substance painter because I have been busy, however in my spare time I have been working on refining the base material which I will use to apply to the numerous textures I have created as part of the scifi collection. Little tweaks here and there mainly to make the results a little more pleasing and less noisy.
Above I have tweaked a majority of the masks for rust as well as surface detail variatio
The foundation of our new game development tools is here, with a close-to-the-metal framework for building desktop applications.
Close-to-the-Metal Framework for Desktop Applications
We're approaching the end of a loooooooooong cycle of research and development...several years, in fact, have been spent building the fastest game engine in the world. A great game engine needs a great user interface, and Ultra App Kit provides exactly what we need. This will provide the backbone of o
Our new editor is being designed to support user-created extensions written in Lua. I want Lua to work in our new editor the way MaxScript works in 3ds Max, to allow an endless assortment of new tools you can create and use.
Now that the editor GUI system is well underway, I want to start thinking about how user-created extensions will work with our new editor. I'm going to lay out some theoretical code for how a road creation tool might integrate into the editor.
First we declare a st