I have been using Visual Studio Code for a couple of years now and it is my defacto text editor next to Notepadd++. I mainly use it however to write Lua scripts.
Opensource
Lightweight
Cross platform
Completely adjustable hotkeys (or automatically map from Visual Studio: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.vs-keybindings)
Fully customisable theming (with standard themes included)
Supports all major languages. Lua is supported
I recently was introduced to a bug in my game. I had 20 AI units and only 19 of them were actively doing something. Number 20 was just standing there. The problem eventually lied in using '#enemies' to get the amount of enemies.
Here is what happened:
A lua table index by default starts on index 1. This in contrary to many other languages where it starts at 0. However, you can assign a value to index '0' if you want. Since I use C# on a daily basis, I am more comfortable using the 0 in
I have been working on some new features for the SplineTools package for Leadwerks. In the video below I demonstrate 2 new features
Reverse spline followers: Reverse any spline follower at any given time on the spline. Just call the Reverse() function on a spline follower and enjoy the ride.
Closest point on the spline: helper functions that can check what the closest point on a spline is based on given position.
Now that the steam updating works again, the Spline Tools 1.04 package has been uploaded on Steam.
Update 1.04
This version contains some updated maps for Leadwerks 4.5. The moving platforms map unfortunately is not working properly and will have to be sorted out.
Wire splines added.
Wire splines can be used for creating wires, cables or rope. By default, wires have no physics.
Physics can be added as static shapes by selecting the wire type
Quite some time ago I was playing Rainbow Six Vegas with a coworker (not during work time). We were doing terrorist hunt on this construction site map and we were having a great time enjoying this classic game. At some point I wanted to throw a grenade quite far away. Of course with my pro-fps skills I managed to hit the electric pole standing right in front of me. After I was done facepalming, something caught my eye: the wires on the electric pole were swinging, probably by the grenade's shock
In a previous developer blog I showed how I use spline paths inside the Leadwerks editor. The cool thing about splines as that they are extremely multipurpose. I started working on generating meshes based on the splines. Think about ropes, wires, rivers, rollercoasters and of course roads
Ropes and wires are in progress because I find them the coolest. Especially rope bridges are awesome to make and see in play. They require a lot of finetuning so I have put that on halt for now. In the me
Paid scripts
I am looking in to publishing paid scripts to the workshop. There are 2 script collections that others might find interesting:
Advanced Third Person Controller
Many tweakable options: from double jumping, to camera offset, camera snapping, smoothing, speed controls etc
Spline paths
Not just useful for camera paths, but also for instance factory belts, vehicular movement (static cars, trains etc), airial paths (birds, planes), VR on rails.
The easiest, but none the less effective, way to optimize a large outdoor scene is setting a view range for an entity. Here are some basic rules that I used during the rebuild of the Return to the Zone project.
Max: Here you can think of essential buildings and large structures. Think about distant buildings, powerlines, bridges and entities that stick out above the vegetation or water plane.
Far: Here we have the larger props: containers, trains, vehicles, walls, statues. This als
Back in 2010 Josh, creator of the Leadwerks Engine, asked Dave Lee to create a part of the exclusion zone. 7 years later, this project has been revisited and rebuild.
Original footage from Leadwerks 2.3
With Leadwerks 3 I asked Josh if I could convert the assets to the new engine. Most assets were uploaded to the workshop, but they lacked proper physics, materials etc. Back then the Leadwerks 3 engine didn't have the vegatation editor and no deferred renderer. So build
I started out 7 months ago with splines and it turned in to one of those annoying projects you start but then fail to finish even to it is in the back of your head the entire time. The reason this time was that I managed to delete my online repository and my local files, leaving me with nothing of the work I had created. I finally had the spirit to sit down and start rebuilding.
I am currently looking into some 2d basic/arcade game tutorials which might follow up on the OLED project once all the lua basics tutorials are done.
Think about games like:
Minesweeper
Tetris
Pong
Bejeweld (match 3)
Asteroids
Snake
Arkanoid (breakout)
Minesweeper is already finished:
Replicating all these games myself gives a great indication on their complexity, even for arcade games. Grid based games like minesweeper, bejeweled and tetris are the easi
We have seen a lot of statistics on the forum recently. I thought I'd share some from my Youtube account.
The stats below are from the past 365 days, including only videos that are relative to Leadwerks.
Geo stats
Something that has always been a time consuming process is getting the audio right in my recordings. Although I have a very decent headset, recordings allways contained a lot of static noise and voice 'pops'. To get an acceptablequality I required a finetuned microphone placement for every recording. 1cm to the left could make a big difference. The recording software that I use has some build in noice reduction filters, but they do not always guarantee a smooth audio track.
Since there are g
This is the final blog post for my game entry this tournament.
GUI
I am really happy the way the GUI came together in the end. UI really isn't my strongpoint so being able to produce something doable is a great reward.
Car physics
Although most car tracks can be finished with a car, it is not an easy task. The car tumbles over far to quickly. There is also a bug left were loading a new car level causes the car to glitch. Since I am reusing the same car here, I have no idea what is furt
I have uploaded a new version containing save games and some improvements regarding restarting a level, going to back menus etc.
Saves
Every time you finish a level, a property is set to keep track of the levels you finished. Only downside when using the launcher is that this will only get set, when the game is closed. So when you finish 4 levels, it will not become clear you finished these levels until after you have restarted the game. But still a pretty nice feature to have.
Track
Instead of spending more time on getting the car to work properly, I added in a simple ball real quick and to be honest: I like the faster gameplay a lot more. What do you guys think? I do miss the ghost cars, so those will definitely come back.
I have updated the game in the launcher. http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/viewitem?fileid=821020417
Here I thought that I would be done with my entry in no time. Finetuning everything turned out to be a pain to be honest. Luckily the GUI was set up rather quickly and most of the game state switching worked almost instantly.
Tired of the tires
The real time consumers came when suddenly my tires wouldn't update with the vehicle. Spend a good time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, but eventually just decided to leave it until the very end.
Analytics
I added Josh's ne
Finally done moving to my new house and today I got my computer setup again. And as a start, I thought, lets give it a go for the winter games tournament.
It is a little racing game where the tracks gets randomly generated on the given seed. I think I will call it "On the road again", named after the song and because of the fact that the level generation allows you to skip parts of the track if you simple fall down on the track below you.
The past 30 days have been very hectic but fun none the less. While it all started with the thought that I would have some time to spare, it became one of the busiest months of the year. It started with a non-Leadwerks project, where I am currently working on with 2 artists. I was done with the coding for the current sprint (we are using scrum). This meant simply waiting for the artists to do their part. The sprint ends December 14th, so that would mean time for a new project.
Back to Leadwe
I downloaded the Saturn tutorial project yesterday to see how the project was holding up after all this time. After some bug fixing and adjusting some of the scenery ingame, I came to the conclusion I really liked the parcours part of the scene. So I thought lets just turn it in to a run and jump game real quick and add it to the winter games tournament.
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/viewitem?fileid=616857680
Terrain tutorials
There are 2 new video tutorials on how to use the terrain editor.
Sculpting terrain:
Terrain painting:
Tutorials: Project Saturn
It has been a while since I made a tutorial for Project Saturn, but that will change in the near future. Since there are so many new members using Leadwerks I am going to make some free time for some new tutorials. In the past 3 months there were only a handful of viewers and that didn't quite way up to time spend on making th
If you don't know that the blog title exists out of game names, you are probably a little confused . My upcoming job interviews are almost 2 weeks away, which gives me plenty of space to do some development stuff on the side from my main project. Besides my main project I have been working on the tutorial project Saturn as well as reviving the the Tunnels demo from Leadwerks 2.
Project Saturn
I didn't think I would have so much fun making project Saturn. It proves that making gameplay can b
So school time is over. I graduated from the Hogeschool of Amsterdam as a Game Developer which means I can officially put 'ing' (from engineer) in front of my applicant name. Now that the 'study' period of my life is over (although it isn't really, right? I mean when do you ever stop learning!) it is time to get a job and start earning some money.
Guerrilla Games
For the past 6 months I did my thesis internship at Guerrilla Games. Which was awesome. I was surprised at first that they offere
The last year of my Game Development study has already started. With only one year to go it is time so look ahead and view the possibilities that are available.
Focus
The coming 20 weeks I am following a minor in advanced software engineering and Game Technology itself will be put in the background. Game development will mostly be something I will do in my spare time. I thought that this year would be really busy one but so far it has been very quiet. The focus of the minor lies on Java, t
So now that game week is over lets have a look back at how things went.
Game play
Gameplay itself was done really quickly. The idea for Lenga is basically Jenga with a twist of colors. I thought of creating an AI that would remove blocks based on a calculation. However I though it would become really boring. So instead I let the player remove a block of a specific color.
Scripts on the wrong entity
At some point during testing I came across a script error. I lost a good hour trying to
