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About this blog

A blog where I talk about anything relating to Leadwerks, and then some.

Entries in this blog

Code

6 Reasons You Should Use Ultra Game System

Back in July, I set out to create a base for creating a version of Cyclone with Ultra Engine. I've gotten a lot of feedback from the release and started to conceptualize ideas on how to prevent or limit on making the same mistakes. One major goal I had was to compartmentalize the system. This should just exist on it's own and game code should just lay on top of this. This was possible thanks to the event system which cuts down on the number of pointers that need to be passed. Components can
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Code

Going Forward With Cyclone And Ultra Engine

With the new engine coming along and me noticing limits with Cyclone's current architecture, it's time for me to start thinking about the mistakes I've made and how would avoid repeating them with the new engine. Luckly, Ultra Engine is far more flexible than Leadwerks thanks to smart pointers and the event system. I wish to share some of my plans going forward. Log, Log, Log Everything! I personally never look at my log files. I instead look at the CMD output and the debugger to see w
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Code

Where Input Has A Name

I've spent the last few months pressing buttons, clicking joysticks and shaking my computer mouse to solve the solution input for Cyclone. Back when it shipped in June, I've created a system that allowed users to assign keys to actions, in which the game would detect as input. My player code never knew what button was pressed; it just knew what action was caused. This is very similar to how Steam Input works. There were a few flaws with my original system. Some of which didn't surface until
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Cyclone

Cyclone Open For Mods

As a teenager, I've spent thousands of hours with the Source SDK. It was really cool how Valve gave people the real tools to develop and create maps and mods. Overtime I got to see and take apart games to see how they actually work. Overtime, the indie engine market took over, and making Source mods is now just a terrible experience. Hammer crashes more frequently and the SDK branch of the engine has old bugs that were never patched. I want the excitement I had of making maps and cool featu
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Cyclone

Cyclone is now available in Early Access on Steam!

After sixteen months of week-by-week development, I'm happy to announce that the anticipated spiritual successor of the Portal mod, Blue Portals is now available for sale as an Early Access title on Steam!   I want to take a moment to thank [b]everyone[/b] who has played the demo and gave feedback. There's still work to be done! Being an Early Access title allows Cyclone to continue keep players involved in the development process to help it evolve into the best it can be!  I hope
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Cyclone

The Cyclone Demo is now live!

From its initial concept in 2017 through the last sixteen months of development, I am ecstatic to announce that the free demo of Cyclone is now available in preparation for the June Steam Next Fest!  This demo includes three maps from the main game showcasing the functionalities of Cyclone and various puzzle elements.   The demo is available right on the Steam Store page! Cyclone on Steam (steampowered.com) While this is both an exciting and a scary time. I can't stress enough tha
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Cyclone

Cyclone Participating in Steam Next Fest 2022

I'm excited to announce that Cyclone will be participating in Steam Next Fest 2022! While I'll not be live streaming, a playable demo will be available during the festival. The demo will act like an even softer release than the Early Access release, which should roll into the planned release date of June 23rd, 2022!   Add it to your wish list on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1803590/Cyclone/ Check out the itch.io Page: https://reepblue.itch.io/cyclone Join my publ
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Cyclone

Cyclone's New Menu

The time finally came to revamp the main menu for Cyclone. Doing menu work for me is really hard to get into but once I'm knee deep into it, it's all I want to do. I decided now is the time to work on a semi-final menu system due to the following. I just finished Steam Input and the menu wasn't compatible. The white text on a bright background was hard to make out. I only had a "New Game" option. There was no way to jump to a map you wanted to play without the console enabl
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Cyclone

Cyclone Is Coming Soon to Steam!

It's been roughly over a year since active development started on this project. Today, I'm excited to announce that Cyclone now has a "Coming Soon" page on the Steam Store! This marks a huge milestone for the project and I'm looking forward to getting this out as soon as possible.  Cyclone is planned on being released as an Early Access title. Releasing into Early Access will grant a layer of feedback, bug reports, and ideas that can help build the remainder features, as well as additional
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Code

Leadwerks + FMOD Studio

Cyclone was shaping up visually, but I was getting feedback about the sound implementation not being so good. I previously created a script system that defined all my sounds under profiles. This was a step in the right direction and made it easier to tweak sounds without recompiling code. However, no matter how much I played with variables, I never was able to satisfy the complaints.  After I showcased my first gameplay trailer, I decided to finally sit down and really understand FMOD. I wa
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Cyclone

Six Months With Cyclone

Back in the summer of 2017, I started experimenting with the idea of a puzzle game by placing launch pads on surfaces. The first build was very sloppy, and there wasn't any wall launching at this time. This build however was the first step of the experimenting process. Only one map was ever made and I just reused old Vectronic assets.    I shelved this concept until Winter of 2020 asI developed an itch to work on something and I wanted to get familiar with GIMP. This build again
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Code

Level Transitions

Level transitions are the old school way of getting your player from one map to another. Here I implemented a system much like HL2. Not much else to say, but I should be ready to talk more soon. (Hopefully!)   
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Code

Creating a Stable Foundation - 5 Years In The Making!

In late 2014, I made the bold decision to focus less with Source Engine mods and pick up an actual engine I could use without legal conflicts or worrying about knowing the right people. At the time, it was like all other options were telling me to forget everything I've picked up through the years of making popular maps and mods and learn something that's completely unique to their software. CSG tools were declared too uncool, and any engine that was nice enough to support it enforced that any a
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How to attach C++ Actors in Leadwerks 4

For some reason, I've been seeing a lot of questions on how to add actors created into C++ recently. My first attempt on this was in 2016 with Crawler's Den; A modern remake of the SDK example level. That was on a version of Leadwerks in which there was no official Actor system in place. Today, the engine has an Actor class which can be attached to any entity, but besides some loose examples, it's not well documented. Also there is no official way on linking your entities in the editor with your
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Parsing, Saving, Window Creation

Before we were all locked in our homes, I was working on a lot of code for Leadwerks 4 for a reboot of concept I've made back in 2017. While I decided to shelf it again to wait for the new engine (Because the game will run faster, look better, VR, etc) I'm going to share you some of my core code which is cross compatible between the new and old engine. I'm sharing this as I see most people just using stock example code for window creation and setting saving without knowing how it all works. This
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Leadwerks and Premake

Premake is multiplication project maker.Unlike CMake, it simply generates a project file for the given IDE giving you a clean result. You only need the one light weight executable and a lua script for this to work.  I've spent today setting it up with Leadwerks. I haven't tested Linux yet, but it should work. My premake5.lua file: g_LeadwerksHeaderPath = "./Engine/Include" g_LeadwerksLibPath = "./Engine/Libs" function GlobalSettings() -- Include Directories includedirs { "%{prj.na
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Window->KeyDown/Hit() Gone For Good!

I think I've finally finished my approach in input for my project. This is the final result. //========= Copyright Reep Softworks, All rights reserved. ============// // // Purpose: // //=====================================================================// #include "stdafx.h" #include "gamewindow.h" #include "gameworld.h" int main(int argc, const char* argv[]) { App::ParseCommandLine(argc, argv); auto window = CreateGameWindow("GameTemplate"); auto world = CreateGameWorld(window); i
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Input with Action Sets!

As you may have known, I've been dabbling with input methods for a while now using SDL2. Since then, I've learned how to do similar functions using the Leadwerks API. The goal was to make a inout system that's easily re-bindable, and allows for controllers to "just work". My first research of a goof system comes from a talk at Steam DevDays 2016 as they discuss how to allow integration with the Steam Controller.    My thought was: "If I can create my own Action System, I can
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Custom Shapes for MDLs in Leadwerks 4

There has been some discussion regarding on how to set collision shapes for your models. For 95% of models, you should be building shapes with the Model Viewer as described here. In some cases, the model artist might want a custom shape to be made. In this post, I'll be going over how I import models into Leadwerks, and building custom shapes. A few notes first. I use Blender; Blender 2.79b to be exact. I haven't get got the hang of 2.80 and until the new engine's art pipeline is fully onli
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Loading Sounds with JSON

Loading sounds in Leadwerks has always been straight forward. A sound file is loaded from the disk, and with the Source class emits the sound in 3D space. The sound entity also has a play function, but it's only really good for UI sounds. There is also Entity::EmitSound() which will play the sound at the entity's location. (You can also throw in a Source, but it'll auto release the object when it's done.) While this is OK for small games, larger games in which sounds may change might mean y
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Compatibility Wrapper

While we have Leadwerks today to make our apps, Turbo is currently in development. To make my projects more long term, I decided to take a step back from my VR project and create a wrapper class that apps can use to more easily transfer to the new engine.  Keep in-mind, this doesn't cover everything and I'm used the last beta from November for testing so things can change. Regardless, as long as that bridge is made, I can always go back and edit the Turbo stuff as more things come online. The go
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Luawerks Updated

Luawerks has been updated to 1.2.8, making some small adjustments and fixes to the system. If you have previously purchased Luawerks, this update is available for free on the Leadwerks Marketplace. Following changes include: Fixed GUI code for Leadwerks Game Engine 4.6 Removed the feature "allowfullscreenfromeditor" as it was causing conflicts with fullscreen. Added ignoreeditorwinsettings bool setting to force the game to ignore editor launch settings. (Sorry f
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More Control On Controllers

The Leadwerks API has standard Boolean functions that detect when the end user has pressed a key. While this is very simple and easy to understand, the issue comes when you wish to support binding of actions. Instead calling functions when a certain key was pressed or held, a better way to detect key events is to assign a key to an action. (e.g: Is the Jump key pressed). In Luawerks, I've written an action script in which returns the window call if the key defined in the user's settings is hit.
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Luawerks Updated

Luawerks has been updated to 1.2.7, making some small adjustments and fixes to the system. If you have previously purchased Luawerks, this update is available for free on the Leadwerks Marketplace. Please note: Luawerks is not ready for Leadwerks 4.6 and it's recommended to use Luawerks with Leadwerks 4.5. Following changes include: Added an optional Map selection menu. "New Game" will default call a panel in which all the maps in your Maps directory will be listed, Note: This will
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Luawerks Updated

Luawerks has been updated to 1.2.6, making some small adjustments and fixes to the system. If you have previously purchased Luawerks, this update is available for free on the Leadwerks Marketplace. Following changes include: Fixed flag typo correcting LUAWORKS to LUAWERKS Moved error.mat/tex to the Materials/Common folder Added a useuisystem boolean to disable the menu, Adjusted VR mode not to call any UI elements. At this time, this update is only exclus
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