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About this blog

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

Entries in this blog

Luawerks Updated

Luawerks has been updated to easily transform any game into a Seated VR compatible one. All what's needed is the application to be launched with "-vr". All what has been added is the tweak discussed here.  While Luawerks isn't really ideal for Room scale VR, seated on the other hand works better. The center tracking call gets called every time the game gets unpaused. At this time, the UI doesn't work with VR. Keep in-mind that there might be some tweaking to your game to make it 100% VR com
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Back Again For A Bit

It's been quite a while since I posted here. All is well, and I now have some time to talk to you on where I've been and what I wish to do in the future. I started a job back in August and my enormous amount of free time dwindled to a few hours a day. However, I now have an income to support myself and buy new toys. I wanted to get into the Linux ecosystem and further distance myself from the Windows world. So for about $300, I've built a PC with an i3-6100, 4GB of DDR4 Ram, put it in a Min
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Luawerks Update

Luawerks has been updated this morning, making the console more responsive and a new tab for the Options Menu for user's to bind keys to actions. Actions have always been part of Luawerks, but until now, there wasn't really a motive to use them. Now, the Action class look in the config to check what key the user binded to that action. You can read more on how this works here. Like the console, this may be improved more in the future.    About Luawerks Luawerks is a Lua framew
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Luawerks For 4.4

Luawerks has been updated for Leadwerks 4.4, taking advantage of the new GUI system while adding new features and commands that allow you to develop your game better.   Developer Console Refresh The Developer Console is the stable of the framework. Thanks to the GUI, you can now scroll through your history, highlight, and move the cursor around! Page through your history using the Page Up and Page Down keys! Having a console is vital for development as it allows developers to chan
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Reorganizing and Defragmenting

After I've returned from Steam Dev Days, I caught a terrible cold, so my first week home was unproductive when it came to LEX or Blue Portals. But besides that, I had a great time! I mentioned briefly in my last blog post before I went that I was giving LEX some reorganizing and defragmenting. This blog post, I'm going to go more into detail.   LEX2 has a lot of things going for it. The developer console is really handy, the AssetManager prevents crashes and has the ability to pre-loads things
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Quick Update

Very happy on how everything is coming along. Blue Portals: Anniversary Edition development is going a tad slower than I wanted it too, but it's coming along nicely. We've finally shipped that in late August, and the mod made even more progress since. We just got some unknowns to work out like voice acting and music. I got some puzzles in the pipeline, and the mod right now has 11 playable maps.   LEX2 is getting re-organized. I went back to the CMD window based dev console as I plan on add
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Reflections on Crawler's Den.

Crawler's Den is a demo I made for the Summer Games Tournament this year. You can grab it here. This blog I'd like to share my reflections on developing the project on LEX2 and Leadwerks in general.   When I started the project, my template had no animation manger, and the puppeteer system was just coming online. The goal was to recreate the AI and Events map and write the entire thing in C++. Not only to test the puppeteer system and my ideas on how to link said puppeteers to the flowgraph,
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From C++, To Lua, to C++ Again!

I've started on my quest to make a full C++ has started today. I've noticed that LEX2 via the project manager didn't copy over as clean as it should, so I had to make the project from scratch which wasn't a big deal (for me). I should look into a way of getting that fixed.   After setting the project up, I noticed a few errors I was getting after I commented out the LUA_GAME preprocessor. It was a quick fix, and development went under way after that.   For this project, I'll need things tha
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Status Report

I wanted to give you an update since this blog post and let you know how well (or not) I'm following those plans.   Blue Portals: Anniversary Edition (Skip this if you don't care..)   Sunday I pushed a long over due push to Steam for beta testers to play and give feedback. I don't like to push to Steam often as my connection isn't that strong so any uploads bigger then a few megabytes causes an upload failure, I usually split updates into multiple pushes to prevent such problems but sometime
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Lua or C++?

Through out the Leadwerks community you'll find two types of users. You'll find a large portion of the community using lua, and a small dosage of them using C++. This makes sense as people are more often going to purchase Leadwerks without any DLCs (including the Professional Edition), and get into developing. From experience, Leadwerks at the moment puts it's primary focus on Lua scripts with it's script editor and debugger, flowgraph editor, and the script property system. Everything is pretty
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Battle Plans For 2016!

It's been over a year ago since I've released the Vectronic Demo using Leadwerks. The demo was composed of assets I've made ported from the Source Engine and my lack of understanding of the API and lua scripting at the time. (I'm used to coding everything in C++) As of writing, it has 1,221 subscribers on the Steam Workshop, 25 out of 26 positive ratings, and is the second most subscribed item! So there is sigh that this as a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was a success. And again, the Game Launch
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LEX2 Evaluation Demo

For the past few months, (on top of working on my greenlit mod) I've been developing a new foundation for Vectronic that will take care of all the 'internal yucky bits' such as window/context/world management, and other features and functions. I really wasn't happy how the first implementation came out as I felt like I was taking too much from the developer, and it was messy and confusing to do something simple like adding a loading screen.   LEX2 is more lua friendly, not bloated with scripts
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New Icons on Beta Branch

If you join the beta branch and updated your projects, you'd probably noticed that the low res Leadwerks 2 icons have now been replaced with high resolution ones that match the rest of the user interface. Decals, Particles Emitters, Cameras, and Probes now have their own icon, and you can tell all entities apart just by looking at them.   I've originally made these a while ago when I noticed that each entity had it's own material and texture, but most of them just recycled the pivot icon. I've
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Building Cubemaps In Leadwerks.

With the recent popular substance shader by Shadmar, more talk and focus has been about cubemap reflections surfaced in the community. Reflections in Leadwerks were done in the past with the SSLR post process shader which made all surfaces reflect the world in real time.         However, it had the following problems: It was applied to ALL materials in the scene. If you had a material that wouldn't normally reflect such as concrete or wood, the shader would still effect those materials. B
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Vectronic: Week 7

Sorry for the whole week of silence, I ran into quite into a number of issues the previous weeks, but I'm ready to talk about them more, and how I it got resolved.   Newton Physics (Or how Leadwerks uses this physics engine) has a problem when a non-physics object collides with a physics object. You expect that if a entity using the Move() function would use it's own shape to push anything out of the way. What actually happens is that since the entity has no mass, the entity pretends the physi
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Experimentation

I almost let a whole week go by without writing a blog, ahh! I've been doing a lot of thinking and experimenting over the last few days, and talking to other people about Vectronic.   Last week, I talked about improving functionalities of the pickup system and the platforms. Although the pickup system is near done, the platform system, well they need work. I made a topic about them here, and kind of left me on a stand still on the project because I see them as a vital piece of the game, and th
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Adjustments & Fixing Little Things

Besides fixing the UV's for the VecDispenser, Adding in the box model, and some added sounds thanks to ThirstyPanther, most of the work this week was done with adjusting scripts so that the game as a whole plays better.     Picking Up Objects   Last week, I mention that I adjusted the pickup system so that it will auto center the object when it's picked up. While the stock code for the pickup system is good for occasionally picking up objects, in Vectronic, you're gonna be picking up boxes
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First Test, VecBall Design

Another week, another weekly report. Vectronic is going more smoothly then ever before taking things one at a time, and just shelling out maps and ideas quickly. Last week, I did a few improvements with how the player picks up objects, and fixing the issue of shooting projectiles through objects. I did not shell any more maps because I thought it would be better to focus on a small amount of puzzles at a time, perfecting them before making more maps. For this, I needed help.   As of this week,
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Shelling It Out

As I mentioned in my previous post, throughout my time of developing Vectronic on the Source Engine, the project never had more than four maps because so much time and worry was focused on the concern of how it's going to look. While the overall art style, and the balance of visual noise is importation for a project like this, I was spending more time on this than making more maps and puzzles.   I decided to once again start from scratch and only focus on the maps and gameplay for the time bei
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Back On Track!

After a whole summer of working on the LEX template, and learning new things about the engine, I'm happy to say that Vectronic will soon be back on track in full development!   Before I go into full detail, I wish to mention that the Vectronic Demo has been updated with Josh's optimization edits, and the VecBall has a new effect I've made during the development of LEX. If you had sluggish performance before, I recommend you check out the update!   Now that I've got a nice foundation with a m
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A Quick Update For LEX

I recently updated the Leadwerks Extended Executable with more shaders, and hot fixes. Fetch and pull this update in git. I wanted to post this yesterday, but I was having issues.   Fix 1: No more crashing upon Alt+Tabbing This fix is eventually gonna be made engine side, but I was not sure if Josh plans on that being pushed to the default branch, or the beta branch. While the beta and default branch are synced, I jumped the gun and fixed it.   //---------------------------------------
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Protecting Your Early/Pre-Release Builds

Leaks of games happen, and they still happen. You can spend months and months working on your game, only for a server attack or the wrong person to share it with their buddies; which then goes public accidentally, (or intentional). Having an unintended work in progress build out there can give people the wrong idea about your game because there are people out there who think the development process is pretty straight forward.   Let's take a look at the Half-Life 2 leak. The game, and the entir
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More About Stand-Alone, Menu, and UI

After the release of the Vectronic Demo, I started to seek out how to make the game to be able to stand-alone without any additional launchers, batches, or required installations. Shortly after my last blog post, Josh informed me about Inno Setup, and it answered my questions about providing OpenAL if the user did not already have it installed. More about that here. I haven't played with it yet, but it gave me insurance about packaging it up for the final release down the road. Alternatively, St
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Vectronic: What Now?

Over 2 weeks ago, I released a small demo showcasing my project's core gameplay on the Leadwerks Engine. Although I'm happy with the demo; it's a good landmark for the project, but it can be better visually and functionality. I learned a lot of new information about the engine on how to better optimize it, multiplatform diffrences, and I grew a slight hatred to a certain brand of GPUs. But the demo on the Game Launcher to me was a success.   The stand-alone version in my opinion was a bit sha
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Vectronic: Demo Release!

Note: This is pretty much a copy and paste from this post here with a few tweaks. After 3 years of planning, modeling, texturing, and a lot of engine hopping, I was able to create a playable demo in the Leadwerks Engine for Windows and Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint). You can download the demo from this page. A small demo was created not only to test the basic elements of the game in the new engine, but to also give back to those who have been supporting this project since I started talking a
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