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Source art files now supported in Workshop

You might not have noticed this, but Workshop items can now include the following file formats: "bmp","jpg","jpeg","png","tga","dds","psd","blend","fbx","obj","3ds","x","dae"   When Leadwerks installs Workshop items, the source art files are unzipped first, then the final files are unzipped, in order to avoid triggering a reconversion of the file. If you import an FBX and makes some changes to it, you can safely include the FBX in your Workshop package and it will install without reconvertin
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Games, games, games

Looking back at a recent blog, I talked briefly about my plans for 2016: My goals were the following: Paid Workshop items Release Game Launcher on Steam proper. More features.   These goals are actually linked together. Let's focus on the amount and quality of games being released for the game launcher. Right now, we have a lot of variety of simple games, and some that are very fun, but we don't have any must-play hits yet. As long as the reviews look like this, the game launc
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Building the Soldier AI

I recently added a new "SoldierAI" script to handle enemies that can shoot back and coordinate with one another. This was developed for the new Mercenary Action Figure. In this blog I will explain how I designed the behaviors to work.   Just like the MonsterAI script, the soldier AI script includes a "teamid" value. This has three possible values, "good", "bad", and "neutral". Good guys and bad guys will attack each other, but not their own team or neutral characters.     At its simpl
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Sell your 3D content in the Workshop Store

I am now accepting additional paid content from select authors to publish their Workshop content. Valve will take their standard 30% cut, you will receive 50% of each sale, and Leadwerks will take just 20%. If you are interested in reaching a new audience with the Workshop store, please contact me. You must be a seller with 3D models or textures in an existing marketplace for 3D content, or have a website showing your work.     More information on publishing here: http://www.leadwerks.c
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Josh

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Workshop Spam

It appears that items that were released within a certain time period, right when the Workshop was made public, received a lot of "spam" comments like below, from people who don't even own Leadwerks:     I have nothing against TJHeldna's cola can, but I don't believe it is the top-rated item in the Workshop through genuine votes: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=251810&browsesort=toprated&section=readytouseitems&actualsort=toprated&p=1   It's very obvious
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Finished character model

I've received our finished "Merc" character, made exclusively for Leadwerks! Say hello:     He still needs a simple rifle weapon and some scripting to make him actually shoot and not just punch people with the butt of his gun. When that happens, watch out, he is going to be one mean enemy (or perhaps a valuable ally against the mutant hordes?)
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Beta update available

An update is available on the beta branch. This adds an optional recursive parameter to the Entity::SetCollisionType command and updates the MonsterAI script so that not so many special settings need to be adjusted to make enemies work.
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Cleaning up physics shapes

Before Leadwerks 3 existed, Leadwerks 2 used a little tool called "Phygen" to generate collision shape files for 3D models:     The user would input the parameters and then save that file with the same name as the model it was to be associated with, with the PHY file extension. This was not a very good system, but the idea of storing a physics shape in a PHY file that was automatically loaded along with the model was a good one.   In Leadwerks 3 we implemented prefabs to make it easier t
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Slight Rebrand

Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition on Steam is now just "Leadwerks Game Engine".   Leadwerks Game Engine: Standard Edition on Steam is now "Leadwerks Game Engine: Professional Edition".   When I first put Leadwerks on Steam, it was just an experiment. Separating out the Lua version was something I had not done before. In fact originally, Leadwerks was a C++ library only, and Lua support was added later. After the last two years on Steam, it makes sense to consider the Lua version our ma
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Workshop Expansion

You've probably noticed a lot of new content and changes in the Workshop this week. Monday I plan to launch "paid items" in the Workshop. This is something I've wanted to do for several years, and it benefits everyone: More content will be available for you, ready to use with Leadwerks. I think content authors will make a lot more sales through Steam than they would through their own websites and even other stores. The top items will even get prime real estate and be shown right on the L
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Building a Steam Purchase Server

One of my main goals in 2016 is to build a built-in store for Leadwerks users to buy and sell 3D models and other items through Steam. It took me a while to understand how this works: The client (Leadwerks Editor) sends a message to the Leadwerks.com server requesting that a purchase be made. The Leadwerks.com server sends a message to the Steam server requesting that a purchase be initialized. Steam displays a dialog to confirm the transaction in Leadwerks Editor. The Steam server r
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Winter Sale recap and biz plans

With the Winter Sale wrapping up, I now have enough information to decide how to go forward with the business of Leadwerks.   Sales on a day-to-day basis were remarkably consistent, and comparable to last year's data, within 5-10% either way. This is good because it indicates that Leadwerks will continue to sell well at a predictable level, which makes planning a lot easier.   We did not get featured this year on the front page of Steam. Very few products did. The whole sale basically jus
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Calling on the Leadwerks Community

Christmas is the season for giving, and it also happens to be my biggest sales time of the year. The Steam Winter Sale just kicked off and I need help getting us up on the first page of top sellers: http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Game%20Development/#p=0&tab=TopSellers   How do we do that? We drive web traffic to the Leadwerks Steam Store page. Here's a simple way to do it. If you could "Share" this Facebook post with your Facebook account, I would appreciate it: https://www.fac
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2016 Plans

Leadwerks is about making games, first and foremost. Therefore, you can expect me to focus on the following in the next year: More and better AAA first-party content. We're working out the process right now. It's a lot harder to produce top-quality content, but the results are worth it. I figure once we get the process down it will be easier to go back and produce more. Easy to use networking will open up a lot more gameplay possibilities and give us some fun games we can jump in and o
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Vegetation Update

An update is available on the beta branch which adds the new vegetation system. You can open the attached map in the editor to see the system in action. Be sure to create a new project, or update your existing one, in order to get the new shaders and models. vegetationsample.zip   To get this update early you must opt in to the beta branch on Steam.   The new vegetation system is special because it does not use persistent objects stored in memory. Rendering and physics are executed accor
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Game Launcher beta support for SteamOS

Leadwerks Game Launcher now works with SteamOS, with some caveats.   First, you must set the application to use the "Official Bindings" controller configuration by Leadwerks Software.   When you start Leadwerks Game Launcher on SteamOS, a page of available games will be shown. Click on the game you want to play. The game will be shown on a new page, and a blue button will appear on the bottom left of the screen. You can press the B button on your controller to go back to the main page, or
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Vegetation Interaction

This video shows the player interacting with vegetation objects. Vegetation objects are special because they aren't stored in memory at all, but instead are dynamically generated in real-time according to a special algorithm! You can have infinitely dense forests without using any memory.  
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Steam Machines are Here

I went into GameStop and purchased a new Alienware Steam Machine for testing. They had a nice display showing all the new Steam stuff you can buy in stores.  
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Vegetation Demo

I'm really happy to see all the great and scary games coming out for the Halloween Game Tournament. I have something of my own to share with you.   The Leadwerks 3 vegetation system is a groundbreaking new technology. All vegetation instances are procedural and dynamically placed, so that physics and rendering of any amount of instances can occur with zero memory usage. This demo proves that the idea actually works!   This demo shows the new Leadwerks Game Engine 3 vegetation system in ac
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Building the game launcher user base

We've now got 40 games in Leadwerks Game Launcher and I am giving serious thought to the final launch. The application is presently in early release mode with about 2500 users. We want that number to be 100,000 users. Leadwerks Game Launcher is a really unique application; it's distributed exclusively through Steam, it's a standalone app, and it's free. This is not really like anything else out there, so how do you most effectively promote it?   I am running an experiment with Facebook ads
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Vegetation Part 3

Billboards, transitions, and rendering are now done, and as you can see in the screenshot below, the idea works great. In Leadwerks 2, this application would have used hundreds of megabytes of data to store all the individual 4x4 matrices of each object. In Leadwerks 3, the instances are generated on the fly, so the application uses no more memory than a map with a blank terrain:     Still to do: Fade out billboards as they approach max view distance. Add rows to break up generated
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Official Steam Controller Bindings

A default Steam controller configuration has been created for Leadwerks Game Engine and Leadwerks Game Launcher. It is recommended that you use the keys listed here for controlling your games. This will ensure that your game can be played seamlessly with either a keyboard or Steam controller.   WASD: Movement Left shift: Run C: crouch Tab: Map, inventory, etc. Escape: exit game or main menu Mouse wheel down: next weapon Mouse wheel up: previous weapon R: Reload Left mouse button: sho
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Vegetation Physics

I just had a breakthrough with the physics. There's a lot of optimization work left to do, but I can see at this point the idea works.   Newton Game Dynamics provides a mechanism for a user-defined collision shape. This accepts a bounding box and calls a user-defined callback any time an object intersects the bounding box. The callback builds a mesh dynamically for the area that the other object occupies. Internally, Newton uses this mechanism to process heightmap terrain without having to
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Beta Update Available

Leadwerks Editor has been updated to use version 1.35 of the Steamworks library. It also features Workshop improvements that eliminate the need for a local file cache in the app data folder, and should result in more reliable Workshop item downloads.   The update is available now on the beta branch, for Linux and Windows.
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Game Launcher Update

Steam Workshop was originally implemented with a different design than what it uses now. In fact, it was an entirely different API. After a while, Valve figured out all the things it would be used for, and introduced the SteamUGC API, which is the basis of the modern Workshop implementation. This provides much more reliable operations and more features than the original system. However, it was not backwards compatible with legacy items uploaded under the old system.   My approach to implem
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